The Police say they will not allow the Fulani herdsmen menace fester like Boko Haram.
They plan to keep monitoring the herdsmen and check their activities.
Police Inspector General Solomon Arase told reporters yesterday in Abuja that the police would “continue to monitor them, degrade them and continue to amputate them whenever they come up.”
He linked the indiscriminate killing by some herdsmen to the influx of arms and ammunition from such countries as Mali, Chad and Libya.
“I have repeatedly said that what is happening has to be placed against the background of what is happening in African sub-region. When you look at the period when these things started happening and the crisis with migrants and then the flow of arms across our borders, then you will understand what is happening,” he said.
“We have been living with our own indigenous herdsmen for many years, so why is it now that there are crisis in Mali, Libya, Chad and the proliferation of firearms that the herdsmen are becoming more prevalent in the system.
“We have to look at it against that background and maybe they have indigenous collaborators but we will not allow them and it will not degenerate into Boko Haram. We will continue to monitor them, degrade them and continue to amputate them whenever they come up”.
On the ongoing recruitment into the police, IGP Arase said the new intakes will be trained with stun guns to check the rate at which innocent Nigerian get killed by policemen.
A stun gun momentarily disables either a beast or a person with an electric shock.
He said: “We want to migrate from the use of firearms in patrols in main cities and we have ordered for stun guns. The people that will be recruited will be trained mostly with stun guns because that is what is prevalent internationally and stun guns are very effective because they can incapacitate temporarily without killing.”
But he could not say how much the project would cost.
“I cannot put a cost to it because they (guns) are not manufactured in Nigeria and you cannot pick them up on the shelves. So, it takes time and it is also susceptible to fluctuation in foreign currency.”
Speaking on the training facilities and the recruitment process, he said: “The 10,000 police officers will not be trained in one place. We have training schools scattered around and we are going to group them into the six geo-political zones.
“The training schools in a particular zone will cater for the people in that zone and by doing that, I think we have been able to intervene as it concerns training and the intervention is still ongoing but I think the facilities there are good enough to welcome them into school.
“The 10,000 that will be recruited are segmented. Some are going to be officers and it is clear that officers cannot train with recruits. “
We should also know that some are going to be medical doctors, some are going to be engineers while some are going to be pilots. So, there are different categories of officers and so, they will not be plunged together but the bulk of them are going to be constables because we have not recruited for the past five years.
On the criteria and ensuring a transparent process, he said: “their age, educational qualification, height will be used and we also have to be sure that where they claimed they are from is true.
He said: “some of those people uploading their credentials on the website now are 30 to 34 and they are too old. We will not take all those ones. They must adhere to the criteria given.
“Do not be bothered with over 700,000 that have applied, a lot of them will be knocked out when the system starts the sorting process and there will also be exams which will be done at state level.”
