Thirty-six thousand security personnel drawn from the Police Service, the Prisons Service, the Ghana National Fire Service, the Immigration Service and the Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS) will be deployed to maintain law and order during the December 7 elections. They will be backed by 4,000 military personnel who will be on stand-by to quell any acts of violence during the elections. The National Security Co-ordinator, Dr Sam Amoo, who made this known at Elmina over the weekend, advised Ghanaians, particularly politicians, to avoid acts of violence, since "peace, in the final analysis, depends on all of us". He said ensuring security during the electioneering depended on what Ghanaians wanted and urged the people to make a preference for peace, instead of violence. Dr Amoo made the remark at the opening of a three-day capacity-building workshop for senior officers of the National Security Council (NSC) and the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) at Elrnina in the Centra1 Region. The workshop, which is being organised by the National Peace Council (NPC) and sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is aimed at equipping the security and disaster management officials with the requisite skills to deal with violence and conflicts that may arise during this year's electioneering. At the end of the Elmina retreat, the officials are expected to be better disposed to examine their conflict regulating mechanisms, assess their conflict management needs and design strategies to deal with alternative forms of resolving disputes. The workshop is informed by the recognition that some matters pertaining to the conduct of elections could result in violence, as witnessed in some African countries like Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe recently. Dr Amoo explained that the 36,000 security personnel would be deployed to all the 22,000 polling stations across the country. He said the NSC had also set up various sub-committees to ensure maximum security before, during and after the December elections, adding that one of the committees was on education and its mandate included educating security personnel to demonstrate neutrality and professionalism in the exercise of their functions. He indicated that the NPC had set up an Electoral Security Task Force whose members were drawn from the various security agencies and the Electoral Commission. He advised politicians to be circumspect in their utterances and refrain from threatening mayhem because anytime they did so, it incited the youth to violence. "Violence does not only mean holding guns; it involves threats," he said, pointing out that the country had come far in electoral conflict management and so there was the need to• maintain the peace. Making a presentation on: "Elections and national security: Opportunities and challenges", a lecturer at the Political Science Department of the University of Ghana, Dr Kumi Ansah-Koi, said elections were mainly about fund-raising, campaigning, voting day and the aftermath of it, all of which posed serious national security challenges which security professionals ought to deal with. To manage such situations, he stressed the need for security personnel to take their training and intelligence seriously, adding that there was also the need for the nation to vigorously implement laws and adhere to the ethics of democracy, such as accountability and transparency. Dr Ansah-Koi further underlined the need for circumspection by the media in their reportage and the use of religious groups to educate the people on the essence of promoting and fostering peace. Earlier in an opening address, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Cape Coast, His Eminence Peter Cardinal Turkson, who is also the Chairman of the NPC, urged Ghanaians to be vigilant for the maintenance of peace. That is because the presence of factional politics and ethnicity, which fuelled conflicts in other African countries, existed in Ghana at the moment. Cardinal Turkson underlined the important role of the security agencies in maintaining peace and expressed the hope that .the workshop would enhance their efficiency. The National Co-ordinator of NADMO, Mr Douglas Akrofi Asiedu, said NADMO was no longer an organisation that responded only to disasters and distributed relief items, expressing the hope that it would play a meaningful role in ensuring violence-free elections this year. A representative of the UNDP, Mr Francis Azumah, said, Ghana had chalked up a lot of successes over the years, adding that that should not be destroyed with violence. Source: Daily Graphic