Defence minister warns against last-minute deployments for election security

General Christopher Musa, the former Minister of Defence, has cautioned security agencies against conducting last-minute deployments for election security. He emphasized that lasting election security requires months of intelligence-led planning and coordination. During a seminar on security at the Blueprint newspaper, Musa highlighted the need for election security to be viewed as a continuous process rather than an event confined to election day.

He stressed that successful election security is built through months of planning, intelligence-driven operations, inter-agency coordination, effective communication, and continuous threat assessment. The changing nature of security threats has necessitated expanding election preparations beyond physical protection of polling units to encompass cyber threats, misinformation, economic hardship, and the manipulation of ethnic and religious divisions.

Musa proposed a six-pillar framework to strengthen election security, with the first pillar being Strategic Intelligence, which should serve as the foundation of election security planning. He called for a shift from incident-driven to intelligence-led approaches, emphasizing the importance of threat assessments, early warning systems, and real-time information sharing among security, intelligence, and electoral institutions.

The second pillar, Civil-Military Coordination, stressed the necessity of collaboration among security agencies without institutional rivalry, ensuring that the constitutional roles of all agencies are respected while strengthening coordination, interoperability, and joint planning. The third pillar, Unified Strategic Communication, aimed at countering misinformation, highlighted the critical role of timely, accurate, and coordinated public communication in sustaining public confidence before, during, and after elections.

The final two pillars, a Responsible Information Environment and Engaged Citizens, emphasized that government alone cannot defeat misinformation. The fight against misinformation is a shared national responsibility involving the media, technology companies, civil society organizations, educational institutions, and citizens who must promote fact-based public discourse and reject narratives designed to incite violence or undermine democratic institutions.