The presidency has embraced a new approach to escalating insecurity in the land. The Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, announced in Akure that the Federal Government plans to deploy soldiers to highways that are considered to have flash points: “The President has very recently met not only with the Service Chiefs but also the Inspector-General (IG) and he has laid out a new policy of community policing…This is to hasten the search for these killers and also to ensure that there is adequate presence to deter this kind of terrible situation from reoccurring.”
The promised interventions are welcome even though overdue, given the time that kidnapping became a weekly event along highways, not only on Ore-Ijebu-Ode Road but also in many parts of Ondo, Osun, Ekiti, Edo, Kaduna, and other parts of the country. It is also heartening that the Federal Government is working in collaboration with states, to find the killers of Funke Olakunrin and to prevent such criminal acts from destabilising innocent citizens across the land.
But involving soldiers in law enforcement in a democracy should be a temporary measure. Soldiers on the highways ought to be for the period that the governments are able to redesign the current police system for efficiency and effectiveness. Given the cries across the land by citizens for protection of life and property, kidnapping must have acquired the status of an emergency, a situation which the presidency seems to have acknowledged by deploying soldiers to roads that have become dens for killers—armed robbers and kidnappers.
The presidential promise that the government is “looking at the whole security architecture and trying to ensure that we are able to scale up and ensure that we are able to protect the lives and properties of Nigerians” is reassuring, more so that it has come at a time that kidnapping seems to have eroded substantially the confidence of citizens in the capacity of the government to protect them.
The rise in the number of kidnappings in the last few months demands that government at all levels look closely at the roots of sudden rise in kidnapping and other heinous crimes, as well as address the defects in the architecture of security in the country. It is a good thing that the Federal Government has started to formulate a community police initiative. But it is not politic to include drafting of soldiers to highways as part of community policing. Deployment of the military to carry out such duties should be viewed as part of a short-term response to an emergency, which sudden rise in threats to lives and properties of citizens currently manifests.
The Vice President was apt in saying: “Security in a big country, like Nigeria …is dynamic and we also have to be consistently dynamic to ensure that we are able to beat the challenges as they appear.” It is also encouraging that the presidency is interested in dealing with some of such challenges. One of such challenges is the ratio of the national police force (the only police system in the country) of about 400,000 to about 195 million people, barring the many visitors from ECOWAS countries that enter the country daily. Even increasing the number of police to 650,000 under plan may not be effective enough in the context of the country’s diverse languages and cultures and rising population.
The global best practice for policing a country with cultural diversity and large population is multilevel policing that subsumes the police system under the government of each level—municipal, local government, provincial/state, and national. The tragedies fomented by kidnappers and other violent criminals in the last few months point at the need for a new police architecture that recognises cultural competence of police officers to the immediate contexts in which crimes are committed. It is time for the country to create a police system that does not privilege homogenising cultures of law enforcement over recognition of the relevance of cultural nuances to maintenance of public order. The highest percentage of Nigerians with fluency in English or Pidgin live largely in urban areas.
Apart from establishing linkage between law enforcement and cultural practice, there ought to be commitment to enhancing prevention and detention of crimes through technology. For example, the use of GPS and drones to provide useful information about criminals in any part of the country is more cost-effective and less intrusive than noisy helicopters. Further, collecting intelligence about crime and criminals ought to be facilitated by extending the whistleblower policy on corruption to kidnapping and other violent crimes. The saying that prevention is better than cure is also valid for crime prevention. Providing moderate incentives for successful whistleblowers at the community level can be more cost-effective than scouting the bush for kidnappers with uniformed and plain clothes police. It is not only health that transforms to wealth; security of life and property nurtures democracy and the economy.
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