As elections are an essential part of a democratic dispensation that paves way for a peaceful country and an orderly society, political competition requires a comprehensive security plan to curb any unrest. Failure to the tenants of security mechanisms can lead to a spark of violence in an election year as tensions are already high.
Elections that are supposed to be a means of selecting the people’s representative has abundantly become a source of disorder in other countries. Though election violence is characterised with multifaceted causes, it’s imperative for a sophisticated and well beefed up security systems for the assurance to safeguard the peace of Ghana before, during and after elections.
However, in about eight (8) to the 2016 elections president, John Dramani Mahama first set up the National Security Emergency command centre to identify and monitor hot spots in the country ahead of the elections. The setup facility housed monitoring devices for tracking CCTV footages from various part of the country. This facility was also a call centre for all the security agencies.
President John Dramani Mahama also provided the police who were on the field with handheld terminals that helped them in taking pictures and sending them back to the emergency command centre.
He again secured 200 vehicles for the Ghana prisons, B.N.I, Narcotic Control Board and the National security secretariat to aid their mobility and improve security visibility. These were John Mahama first initiatives to ensure a peaceful election year.
As we are almost a month and two weeks to the election all that president Nana Akuffo Addo has achieved is only a warm-up walk from the security agencies and rather an astronomical increase in armed robberies and killings of Ghanaians.