Dele Adeoluwa
THE Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN), code-named Operation Amotekun, is a child of circumstance. A desperate pill for a desperate ailment. The entire Southwest geo-political zone suddenly came under the bust of a murderous orgy perpetrated by killer-herdsmen, bandits and other criminal elements.
For much of 2018 and most especially last year, these vile elements held the zone by the balls. They were holed up in thick forests from where they made targeted incursions into the major highways crisscrossing the zone. They robbed, kidnapped and raped at their fancy.
The heavily armed criminals seized portions of the major highways for hours, mostly in the evenings, picked their victims and bolted into their fortresses in the forest, where they subjected their ‘prey’ to the vilest savagery imaginable. At a point, the criminals made travelling on the major highways in Southwest a nightmarish experience.
Of course, the siege generated a lot of hoopla. There were strident outcries for an urgent intervention as the security agencies appeared to have been overwhelmed. Victims, who were lucky to escape or be released often after paying ransoms, told horrific tales of anguish about their experiences in captivity.
The height of the siege was the callous murder of the daughter of Chief Reuben Fasoranti, Afenifere leader, Mrs Funke Olakunrin, in July last year. The woman, who was travelling from Akure to Lagos with four others in her Toyota Land Cruiser, was gunned down by suspected herders at a stretch between Kajola and Ore on the Ondo-Ore road. The other four occupants were abducted but were later rescued by the police with the aid of local hunters.
This high profile killing, which generated serious obloquy, woke the zone’s leaders to a rude awakening of the clear danger of the activities of these vicious elements. It became clear that unless something urgent and drastic was done, the zone stood the risk of being overrun.
Governors of the zone had, before Mrs Olakunrin’s killing, begun making consultations and at a parley convened by the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN), in June, last year, they agreed to set up Operation Amotekun to tackle the security challenge head on.
However, as soon as the idea hit the headlines, surreptitious moves were made to scuttle the initiative. Some people were not comfortable with Southwest governors raising a security outfit with a regional bent. This is ostensibly because leaders of the zone have been quite vociferous in their clamour for the restructuring of the country to redress the noticeable imbalances in the federation, which they see as the only way to preserve the country’s indivisibility. So, some people saw the security outfit as part of the restructuring agenda. Some saw it as bringing state police through the back door.
However, the governors refused to be daunted by the unfair campaign and forged ahead with the inauguration of Amotekun on January 9, in Ibadan, Oyo State capital. It became crystal clear at this stage that some forces within the central government were not at ease with the special security initiative. The event was scantily attended and the Inspector General of Police, Muhammed Adamu, who had been celebrated to attend the event, did not; neither did he send a representative. But the Southwest people were exultant about the security idea, embraced it whole-heartedly and praised their governors for the bold move.
The Ekiti State governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, who is the chairman of the governors forum, used the inauguration to make clarifications about the governors’ intentions. Condemning the virulent campaign in the social media trying to sabotage what he called the historic initiative, Fayemi said, inter alia: “We are not creating a regional police force; neither are we oblivious of the steps to take in order to have state police. Yes, some of us are apologetic advocates of state police but we are also law-abiding citizens of Nigeria. We know the process and procedure to undergo to get to that point.”
However, in spite of the assurances of their excellencies’ noble intentions, they were still arm-twisted to whittle down the Amotekun outfit and fragment it into a state structure as opposed to the regional arrangement-cum-cooperation that the governors had conceived the idea to be.
At a close-door meeting held by the IGP with the governors on February 12, about a month after Amotekun’s inauguration, the idea of the outfit as a state structure was sealed. The chairman of the Southwest Governors Forum, Rotimi Akeredolu, who is also the Ondo State governor, told newsmen after the meeting that the ‘grey areas’ about the outfit had been cleared, adding: “We have made things clear that when we said we are having Amotekun, it is not that we are creating a regional police. Amotekun is not a regional police; it is state-based…”
The IGP himself, feeling a tinge of satisfaction after the meeting, also hammered on the point: “We have concluded that Amotekun is not a regional security agency; whether it is vigilante or Neighbourhood Watch that are working with security agencies in the state to fight crime. It is not a regional structure; it is a state structure and it must be backed by law for it to be effective…”
The governors, however, did not allow the meddlesomeness to scuttle their initiative. A bill for a law to empower Amotekun in each of the South West states was put together. It has been passed and domesticated by all the states in the zone. A lot of progress has been made with Amotekun; the office infrastructure is in place; the heads of the outfit in most of the states have been appointed and the operatives that will run the outfit are being recruited. Amotekun is set to roar.
But it appears the central authorities are still not satisfied with whittling Amotekun into a state structure. It further seeks to integrate it into the new community policing arrangement, which President Muhammadu Buhari recently endorsed with a N13billion vote.
The mind of the government was conveyed recently by the Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Shehu Garba, who said that Amotekun would be integrated into the central structure of the community policing programme and that the IGP would have to determine the structure. The Southwest governors, through their chairman, Akeredolu, however, demurred. They made it clear that they will not subsume Amotekun under the community policing structure.
“We will not collapse Amotekun outfit into the community policing programme. Amotekun will stand on its own. It will operate under its own laws. There is no intimidation. We will not collapse it. There is no need to pretend. We will make them understand. We are not forcing the IGP to understand. We have our own laws. If anybody feels otherwise, he should go to court. Amotekun has come to stay,” Akeredolu said.
The governors deserve kudos for their stand. They should refuse to succumb under whatever guise. They should nurture Amotekun into fruition for the benefit of the people they are elected to serve.
Personally, I don’t see any reason why the central authorities should be fussy about the governors’ move. It is a mere derisory initiative to protect their people against some vicious marauders who have been on a killing binge. Nothing more. In the same vein, I don’t see any good coming from subsuming Amotekun, a wholly local initiative, under a new community policing arrangement, thus creating another centralised bottleneck that may not work.
Community policing is a fantastic idea whose time has come but the surest way to kill it is to bog it down with another centralised command structure. I think its command structure should be wholly local and independent of the regular police. That is the way it could work better.
The Southwest governors should be left alone to pursue Amotekun according to the laws backing it. They should be allowed to carry on and protect their people against marauding criminals. That was the oath they took. They and leaders of any other zone who want to toe the same legal line to ensure the security of their zone should rather be encouraged because what they are doing is complementary to the efforts of the central police force to enforce peace.
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