The challenges of insecurity posed by corruption, terrorism, communal clashes, herdsmen-farmers conflict, trafficking in drugs, arms and humans, kidnapping for ransom, armed banditry, proliferation of arms and light weapons, money laundering and other transnational organized crimes are some of the vices threatening the regional peace, progress, integration and development. President Mohammadu Buhari at the 16th Annual General Assembly meeting of West African Police Chiefs
We are determined to descend very hard on criminals. We recovered 37 AK47 rifles, 12 locally made guns, a revolver pistol, 60,000 fake US dollars, military uniforms, and a foreign made pistol….Farmers who farm along Kaduna-Abuja expressway, Birnin Gwari and other volatile areas can go back to their farms. They are now safe—Frank Mba, DCP on recent joint operations under the auspices of Operation Puff Adder in Kaduna, Niger and Katsina States.
The two quotations above, perhaps the most recent references to one of the greatest threats facing the average Nigerian, are selected for opening today’s column for many reasons. First, the statement by President Buhari delivered on his behalf by his Interior Minister underscores the latest thinking on the country’s governance about a problem that has formed the core of discussions in homes and on the roads across Nigeria in recent months: the matter of insecurity. The second is the quotation from the story of the capture of 93 kidnappers and bandits along Kaduna-Abuja axis and parade of some of those criminals and the illegal weapons found on them on the front page of The Nation two days ago. This full story puts through in perspective the sources of recurrent nightmares in many families in the southwestern region of Nigeria and other places since the kidnapping of a professor of surgery at the Obafemi Awolowo University and other persons along Akure-Ilesa, Ife-Ibadan, and Ore-Ondo roads in the last few months.
There is no better way to read these two quotations in relation to security for all citizens in a government of democracy. The two quotations may suggest sincere attempts to end the last four years of governance in a government of change or announcements that the focus on the incoming administration will put priority on mending Nigeria through focused and intense security measures, not only within the borders of the country but also in relation to countries that surround the continent’s most populous nation-state.
It is no exaggeration that the issue of security has been on everybody’s lips for many years. At the beginning, it was attributed to terrorism in the northeast of the country under the banner of Boko Haram. When security challenges started to spread beyond the northeast to other parts of the country, security men drew attention to security problems arising from the crisis in Libya after the killing of Ghadafi, particularly the belief that the flow of surplus arms from Libya would soon evaporate and restore peace to Nigeria. But this projection did not hold water as the situation got worse with time.
Later, citizens started to cry that they were becoming increasingly endangered even in places as far from Boko Haram as Ondo, Ekiti, and Osun States. Such observers claimed that Fulani herdsmen from Nigeria were killing and maiming innocent farmers. Official spokespersons for the federal government countered that most of such marauders were not necessarily herdsmen from Nigeria but predominantly from neighbouring countries. Nigerians advised the government to check in-flow of such foreign threats jealously at the country’s borders, as is expected in all modern societies.
Even believers in the concept of geography as fate or destiny theorized that insecurity in Nigeria results from the coming down of the Sahel that has created herdsmen-farmers conflict and violence. Fear-gripped citizens cried out lout that all countries in West Africa have a share in the Sahelian reality and that the government in Nigeria ought to face more frontally the dangers lurking around its own corners. But the problem of lack security continued unabated, to the extent that only a few days ago lorries filled with gun totting criminals blocked expressways in Osun State to rob and kidnap innocent citizens and to kidnap and rob motorists between Kaduna and Abuja.
It is remarkable that the Nigeria Police has chosen to launch Operation Puff Adder, which from the news in The Nation two days ago has started yielding major results: the capture of 93 violent criminals within weeks around Kaduna, Niger, and Katsina States. Without doubt, victims of violent crimes in other parts of Nigeria must be inching close to some measure of relief, as their own version of Operation Puff Adder kicks-in to nab criminals threatening peace and public order in such areas.
General Buhari’s recent identification of the multiple sources of the threat to security in Nigeria deserves serious attention from all security forces in the country. If all the sources of security threats are true, as this author believes they are, the job before the nation’s current security staff seems larger than what periodic launching of Operation Puff Adder can complete at the same time for a social cancer that comes up at the same time in various communities. Even with about half a million policemen and women in the country, it is unlikely that Operation Puff Adder can be launched for each cluster of local governments or states. If this were possible and given the recurrence of complaints in all parts of the country for months about the prevalence of violent crimes, the good harvest from the Kaduna-Abuja Operation Puff Adder would have been replicated in other zones almost simultaneously.
Special security operations, such as Operation Puff Adder, are rare even in more advanced democracies because they involve prohibitive costs that generally accompany emergency-type of response to serious problems. The police officers in charge of the Kaduna-Niger-Katsina special operations deserve to be congratulated for the feat that has made it possible for the police command to assure farmers in these states to return to their farms without fearing any evil. But in realistic terms, no country can protect all its citizens and their property from criminal encroachment via the mechanism of intervention by special forces. For law enforcement to be more like civilian (than military) operations and for maintenance of peace and public order to be cost-effective and available at all times, efforts should focus on pooling the diverse resources of all forms of security organisations for preventive work than curative peace keeping for millions of citizens speaking various tongues and upholding diverse cultural values. This is more so in the case of a country like Nigeria with attractions, despite its varied problems, to people from all directions in the ECOWAS region.
It is, therefore, encouraging that the Buhari government has also outgrown what has seemed to be an obsession with the philosophy and culture of a central police organization, under which insecurity has developed to the current nightmarish proportions. By embracing the concept and practice of subnational policing, now euphemistically referred to as community policing, the central government has started to think beyond the box. The central government should have enough to do with interstate criminality within the country and with inter-country criminal matters in the Chad Basin Community and the ECOWAS region, not to mention problems from neighbouring Cameroons, that it should be obvious to discerning leaders that the imperative of creating a new police system has become undeniable and irresistible.
As the country’s security policy wonks go to work on fashioning an efficient and cost-effective police system for hundreds of its communities, citizens acting in the capacity of partners for peace and progress for the country along with professional security agents need to continue to show in unmistakable terms all the cracks in the country’s security. Changes in the magnitude and complexity of internal and external criminality in and near the country is certainly calling for new ideas, which patriotic citizens can enrich with intelligent whistleblowing.
Furthermore, governors at the state levels, though basically symbolic heads of security in their states, are also called upon to garner the little information they can about the culture of crime in their respective jurisdictions and what they can sniff from their citizens about the way out of a life of terror spawned by proliferation of crimes. Governors cannot afford to push the challenge of creating and sustaining peace, order, and progress in their jurisdictions to the lap of the central government in the nonchalant manner that characterizes response to the phenomenon of federal roads, as the national government searches for a new way to maintain law and order.
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