ODAHIEKWU OGUNDE, Yenagoa
Deputy Inspector-General of Police in Charge of Department of Research and Planning, Mr Moses Jitoboh has said that President Muhammadu Buhari is fully committed to restore peace in the South-East and other parts of the country breached by criminal elements recently.
Jitoboh said President Buhari in collaboration with the Inspector-General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, in their efforts to ensure the country remain one, had set up a Presidential Task Force tagged, ‘Operation Restore Peace’, to deepen community policing cross the country.
The DIG, who made this known on Friday during an interactive session with officers, rank and file of the Bayelsa State Police Command, said the phase whereby police personnel and infrastructures were attacked and destroyed was over in the country.
Jitoboh also rated Bayelsa State as the safest in the country in terms of attacks on police formations and killing of police personnel, saying that the state had the safest and had not recorded any case of secessionist agitations.
He stated: ”Police will ever remain the friend of the people. The Constitution guarantees the power of every Nigerian to be police and make arrest. As you witness a crime, you can make arrest. It confers on you the security privilege to make citizen arrest and call in the police.”
In his remarks, the state Commissioner of Police, Mike Okoli, attributed the peace existing in the state to the genuine partnership between the police formations and stakeholders in the state including the administration of Governor Douye Diri.
Okoli said the new slogan among the police is ‘Never Again’, stressing that never again would men and officers of the police be slaughtered like chickens.
The CP asserted: “Never again shall the police Infrastructures be destroyed. We are thankful that no police officer lost his life in Bayelsa even during the #EndSARS protests that rocked every part of the country. It came due to the efforts of the stakeholders with information dissemination.”
Okoli also commended the residents of the state for not allowing criminal elements infiltrate their midst to perpetuate the destruction of police formations.
“The people in the state stood their grounds in support of the police during the incessant attacks on police infrastructures.”
Also speaking, the representatives of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), Comrade Ojo Rapheal, the Ijaw Youths Council (IYC), Central Zone, Comrade Gabriel Agbakiri and the State Chairman of the Police Community Relations Committee(PCRC), HRH King Samuel Earnest, agreed that the robust relationship between the stakeholders and the state Police Command ensured that the secessionist moves are thwarted against the state.