WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com
Insecurity has become a known but an unassailable albatross to the nation and people of Nigeria since over a few decades. It has gotten to the point where we either resolve to act right and in the interest of Nigerians or we will finally become completely overwhelmed and overtaken by the dark forces of terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and what have you. The only thing that our somewhat inactions and politicisation of such a sensitive issue has brought upon us, is making the ‘ dark venture’ more of a palatable business for the criminal actors, and have continued to welcome more entrants to the point that it has become more and more difficult for us to address the issue. It may also be considered that understanding the gamut and dynamics of the strain of insecurity in the nation appear to be a difficult task. After all, as the saying goes, understanding a problem is half solved. Do we really understand the nature, character, gamut and dynamics of the decades-long insecurity in Nigeria?
Thirteen years ago, during the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, the menace came hard on us as we saw apparently regular abduction of innocent school children becoming a norm; and also suicide bombing across the country, all the way to the Federal Capital city and its environ and even more terrible, has been the hindering of farmers from their practice which is partly responsible for the present acute food inflation in Nigeria. We cried, we waited for serious government actions to permanently end the menace, but thirteen years later, here we are.
Food prices have gone up so unbelievably that Nigerians, especially the masses can no longer survive the unprecedented food inflation that has crept up on us, all thanks to both the unhandled and mishandled national insecurity challenges in the past decades. Across the North West, and the North Central, the predominant farming settlements have all become shadows of what they used to be. Bandits and kidnappers are making life unbearable for families, households and communities across the country. Nigerians are now scared of moving about without watching their backs.
And to imagine that in most of the thirteen years of the nation under siege apparently, all our defense, security intelligence and forces have been incapable of organising a workable, result-driven synergy to diminish and end the dark forces of the less than ten thousand populations of bandits and cohorts across the country. What a shame, and of course, a clear indication that the perceived fight against insecurity is more than what the physical eyes can see.
As good and great the Nigeria security system has been over the years and decades, the failure to find solution to the existence of a minute group of armed men lurking around our forests and bushes, has continued to constitute a blemish on their reputation, performance, and capacity to confront and end the menace; and this has brought upon us the need to ask pertinent questions about the operational modules of all the national security programs and frameworks and what more need to be done to get the pressing desired result.
Now, it is not about North West or Central, nowhere in the country is safe anymore. When we failed to act effectively and stopped the nonsense up north, we literally sent a message that it is a good business among an already pauperised nation. So kidnapping has now become a thriving business across the entire 36 states and FCT.
In the days of Jonathan, we heard the rumours that the military were not only ill-armed. There were rumours flying about of some ground officers receiving orders not to shoot at the Boko-haram insurgents, rumours of intentional absence of coordination that always saw the air forces missing in actions when they are needed to provide cover and aerial support for the ground forces, and of course, the men of the Nigeria army regularly walking into ambush, believed to be as a result of leaked information from the rank and file of the Nigeria security system.
Last week, I watched the Senate debating the reoccurring insecurity across the country. I listened particularly to the submission of Senator Oshiomole, accordingly, for decades, we have become experts at responding to the next attack on our people and their properties, the killings and maiming, with one minute silence, promised compensation and arranged visitation. We cannot continue like this, a minute silence or no magnitude of compensation would restore the losses our people are registering on a daily basis. We must think out of the box. We must emerge a working and permanent solution to the insecurity ravaging our land and our people, before we become a captured people.
I have wondered aloud and repeatedly, what do we have to do to finally end this problem? It is a fight for all Nigerians, but then, we look more at the established security apparatus to present a strong and effective first line of actions that would decimate the enemy forces as the bandits and others have become. The Police Force, the State Security Service, the Civil Defense, and the Nigeria Army constitute chiefly the security apparatus, but we have come to have severely unorganised, uncoordinated, non-conventional regional security outfits across the country, all in a bid to respond to the biting effects of insecurity. However, I am not in anyway denying the security function of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Nigeria Custom Service, National Drug Law Enforcement Agency and a few more which need not be mentioned without prejudice.
Yet, rather than seeing the problem at hand solved, the proliferation of outfits has only led us to a more deepened, disunited response front; we now apparently see the unconventional forces become terrors to the system, and instruments of oppression in the hands of the controlling administrators. We cannot afford to proceed, without organising our home front. It has now become imperative and bounding upon us to organise our home front and responses to a unified control. The federal and the state governments must agree to an operational synergy among all these outfits if we are to get the desired results. Our intelligence gathering unit, the NSA, the conventional and the unconventional forces, must work together under the supervision of the Chief of Defense Staff, the CDS.
Another basic way to get the result we want is to grow to a point where the service chiefs would know it is no longer business as usual. We should see the President mandating the NSA, and all his service chiefs at the point of appointments, with a timeline of acceptable performance as the only condition to keep the job beyond a particular time. If the service chiefs are aware that failure to achieve a set marching order would cost them their appointments and positions, we would not be here discussing our inability to end the menace of insecurity in the country.
While we are bringing the hammer on the security apparatus, we must also recognise that security is everyone’s business and we all have a part to play to ensure the safety of our lives and properties. The criminals live with us; they are our neighbours, brothers and sisters, members of our families and ethnic groups, if you permit me to stretch that. Yet, they are the terrorists, the bandits and the kidnappers terrorising our societies. What have we done about them? We must consolidate our grassroots engagement to organise a frontal response to suppress insecurity and root out the elements behind it from our villages and settlements. Accepting to provide timely intelligence to the appropriate quarters is a very significant contribution in the fight and war against the national menace.
The negative role already being played by the media is another major challenge constraining the nation in winning the war against insecurity. Over the decades, our media houses; the journalists altogether, have become both emotional, politically biased and also money-making minded in their approach to reportage. Rather than contributing to the fight against the perpetrators of the crimes against all of us, they have literally chosen the path of emotional reporting that appeals to a large section of their audience; we now see them enjoying and selling on the basis of beaming attacks on the national security system, while eulogising the operational capacities of the bandits, kidnappers and even the insurgents. In a saner system, the media role would be to take the position of making the criminals feel unworthy; constantly, damaging them emotionally and psychologically after every operation. Making, or rather projecting them as unfit and derailing humans, rather than boosting their ego, and propelling them to up their antics, which is apparently a disservice to the country and the people of Nigeria.
Local government autonomy is critical to winning the war against insecurity in the country; we must all accept that insecurity begins at the grassroots, the suburbs, before spreading to become a national problem. If we have a coordinated local government system that allows the administration to work with the security apparatus at the local government level, a lot of the insecurity and criminality would have been stemmed, via a very effective intelligence gathering and first hand responses. It is therefore important that the state governors and the National Assembly do the needful as far as the ongoing discussion on the autonomy of the local government is concerned.
Finally, we have gotten to the point where we must reject equating Nigerian life to a one-minute silence and organised condolence visits. We must design the best response to protect the lives and properties of our people. This might be the best time to convene a national dialogue on security; the time to organise professional and general public inputs to address and generate a feasible updated response to the menace of insecurity in Nigeria. We cannot afford to fold our hands and allow these killings, maiming and kidnapping to persist.
