Police Link Abuja Security Lockdown To Planned Protest

The Nigeria Police Force has linked the heavy deployment of security personnel and barricades across parts of Abuja’s city centre to a planned protest, assuring residents and visitors that the measures are aimed at maintaining law and order and that there is no cause for alarm.

The police said the operation is a routine security measure designed to safeguard lives and property amid an increase in protests within the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

The barricades, mounted at strategic locations across the city centre in recent days, have triggered severe traffic congestion and delayed thousands of motorists, civil servants and other commuters, particularly around the Federal Secretariat and adjoining districts.

Responding to concerns over the heightened security presence during a joint media briefing by security and intelligence agencies, the Force Public Relations Officer, CSP Anietie Iniedu, said the operation was being carried out jointly by relevant security agencies.

“It is a joint operation. There is no cause for alarm at the moment,” he said.

Iniedu explained that security agencies had observed an upsurge in protests within the city centre and had consequently intensified deployments to forestall any breakdown of law and order.

“We’ve noticed that there has been an upsurge of protests in the city centre, and we’re trying to maintain law and order as is our basic and primary responsibility. The deployments are basically deployments with movement from one location to the other to ensure that our city centre is safe,” he said.

The police spokesman stressed that the heightened security measures were necessary because Abuja serves as Nigeria’s seat of government and hosts diplomatic missions, key government institutions and foreign investors.

“Remember, we’re in the capital, and there’s a lot that has to be done to ensure confidence in those in the city centre and also for our foreign investors,” he added.

Iniedu also disclosed that the Nigeria Police Force had expanded its operational strategy from intelligence-led policing to what he described as “intelligence-led community collaborative policing.”

According to him, the new approach recognises that intelligence gathering alone is insufficient to tackle evolving security threats and therefore places greater emphasis on collaboration with communities.

“We’ve seen that intelligence alone won’t help us. We have gone far to create collaborative processes with our communities,” he said.

Also speaking at the briefing, Kingsley Amako of the National Coordination Office of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) said security agencies had continued to strengthen intelligence gathering and financial surveillance to disrupt terrorism financing and other criminal activities.

“We have very robust intelligence-gathering mechanisms. As they are evolving into new tricks and changing their tactics, we are also evolving with them,” Amako said.

He noted that although certain security operations could not be disclosed publicly for operational reasons, security and intelligence agencies were working closely to counter emerging threats and urged the media to engage relevant authorities whenever clarification was required.