The Nigeria Police Force will gather its senior commanders in Owerri, Imo State, from 21 to 23 September for a retreat devoted largely to how the country’s next elections will be policed, a signal that security planning for the 2027 general elections has begun in earnest more than a year before Nigerians return to the polls.
The event, the sixth Conference and Retreat for Senior Police Officers, known as CARSPO 2026, carries the theme “Developing a Nigeria Police Roadmap for Effective Management of Security During Elections.” According to the Force, the sessions will bring together senior officers, security experts, policymakers and other stakeholders to review existing arrangements and produce practical strategies for protecting voters, electoral officials, candidates, materials and the wider public before, during and after the vote. The conference is being organised in partnership with Lenders Consult International, which has said it has worked with the police on the programme since 2019. The gathering is hosted by Imo for the third time.
The Force Public Relations Officer, Chief Superintendent Ani Iniedu, told a briefing in Abuja that discussions would centre on intelligence led policing, police community partnerships, digital technologies and artificial intelligence, alongside more established questions of deployment and inter agency coordination. The Inspector General of Police, Olatunji Rilwan Disu, is expected to provide strategic direction. In earlier public remarks he described the police as the lead agency in internal security and said the stability of the electoral process depends heavily on the Force.
The timing is deliberate. Disu was appointed acting Inspector General on 24 February 2026 after the resignation of Kayode Egbetokun, and was confirmed as the substantive, and 23rd, holder of the office by the Police Council on 2 March. The 2027 elections will be the first general elections conducted under his leadership, and also the first under a new Independent National Electoral Commission chairman, Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan, who succeeded Professor Mahmood Yakubu in October 2025 after Yakubu completed the first two full terms served by any INEC chairman since 1999. Both institutions are therefore approaching the most demanding assignment in Nigeria’s democratic calendar with leadership that has not previously run a nationwide poll.
The record of previous cycles explains why election security draws such attention. INEC facilities have been repeatedly targeted in the years surrounding recent elections. The commission reported in 2022 that it had lost close to 100,000 smart card readers in more than 40 attacks on its offices over roughly three years, while separate tracking by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded at least 134 incidents involving INEC offices and staff between 2019 and 2022. A report by the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta found that at least 48 INEC offices were damaged or destroyed between January 2019 and October 2022, with the South East accounting for a disproportionate share. In one of the more serious incidents, four people were reported killed in an armed attack on the INEC headquarters in Owerri, the very city now hosting the retreat, in December 2022.
Violence around the 2023 elections extended beyond electoral offices. The Incident Centre for Election Atrocities recorded at least 89 politically motivated killings, including 30 security personnel, and 18 abductions between December 2022 and the eve of voting in February 2023. INEC and the Office of the National Security Adviser gave broadly similar counts of attacks on campaign activities during the same period, tracking about 50 to 52 incidents across more than 20 states within a single month of the campaign season. These figures came from separate bodies using different methods, and they capture the reported run up to the last election rather than a complete national tally, but together they establish that insecurity has been a persistent feature of Nigerian elections rather than an isolated concern.
Against that background, the shift in emphasis at CARSPO 2026 towards intelligence gathering, technology and community partnership reflects a recognition, stated by the organisers, that the environment around elections has changed. Criminal networks have grown more sophisticated, and social media now shapes how information, and misinformation, spreads and how crowds are mobilised. The Force has framed the retreat as part of a broader push towards institutional reform and operational readiness rather than a one off event, and has said the recommendations produced in Owerri will feed directly into its planning for 2027.
What the conference cannot resolve on its own is the wider security landscape in which the elections will take place. Banditry in the North West, insurgency in the North East, and separatist related violence in parts of the South East have continued to strain police and military resources, and the durability of any electoral security plan will depend on conditions across those theatres closer to the vote. The police have not published the roadmap itself, and its contents will only become clear after the retreat concludes.
For now, the significance of the gathering lies in what it indicates rather than what it delivers. It marks the formal opening of the security planning cycle for 2027, brings a new police leadership into direct engagement with the lessons of past elections, and places the question of how Nigeria protects its democratic process on the agenda well ahead of the campaign period. The measure of the exercise will be whether the strategies agreed in Owerri translate into fewer attacks, better coordination and greater public confidence when voting actually begins.