An Appraisal of the Contributions of the Civil Defence Corps in Containing 2011 Post Election Violence in Nigeria

Abstract

The massive rigging of election results against the choice of the people and cross inability of the electoral commission to conduct free, fair and credible elections are the core issues that have been fuelling post-election violence in Nigeria since the occurrence of the first high-intensity post-election violence in 1965, code-named ‘Operation Wetie’in the defunct Western Region. These causative factors have served as early warning signals which security operatives used to monitor closely in the period of general elections. In the Second Republic, election results in the South-West zone of the country were massively rigged and these were violently rejected by the people. However, in the Aborted Third Republic, the June 12 Presidential election was not rigged but was unjustifiably annulled by the military junta; this consequently , led to series
of violent protests dubbed ‘June 12 Crises’. This paper takes a critical look at the conduct of the 2011 presidential election and submits that rigging was infinitesimal, hence did not override people’s choice and the conduct was generally acclaimed free, fair and credible both nationally and internationally. It case-studied the efforts of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, (NSCDC), in containing the spread of the violence and concludes that though the post-election violent protests caught the law enforcement agencies unaware as there were no early warning signals which would have been used in the preparation of the intelligence reports, that would have helped to checkmate the violence, they still perform efficiently in mitigating the spread of the violence.