Insecurity: Scout Association seeks permission to occupy 1,000 hectares ‘forestland’

By Stanley Onyekwere

The Scout Association of Nigeria (TSAN) has sought for permission to convert 1,000 hectares of sprawling forest along the Abuja-Kaduna Road, where people are being kidnapped as its national headquarters.

Making this request known yesterday, TSAN’s Chief Scout Commissioner, Hon. Dave Padopads-Awunah, noted that the criminality bedeviling the country would have been put under check if the federal government had incorporated scouting into its security plan.

He spoke at a press conference on the planned induction and decoration of President Muhammadu Buhari as National Patron of TSAN and an Ambassador of Messenger of Peace.

Padopads-Awunah said: “The Nigerian scouts are requesting 1,000 hectares of land. We have seen the place where people are being kidnapped in the forest along Abuja Airport-Kaduna Road. We are asking government to allocate that land to us as we will be building our National Towers which will be our scout headquarters. 

“We shall also turn it into children amusement park and waterpark. We also want a wildlife park because as scouts, we don’t cage animals. Rather than a zoo, we believe in a wild-life for animals to exist”.

Also, TSAN, which presently boasts of three million members in Nigeria, decried the prevalence of drug addiction and organ harvesting among Nigerian youths.

The TSAN’s Chief Scout Commissioner, also lamented that the clear absence of the role of scouting in tailoring the minds of young people has caused inexplicable crisis of youth management including prostitution and human trafficking.  

Describing drug abuse as a major cankerworm sinking the country, he noted that the situation had degenerated to the extent that some Nigerian youths now smoke grey hair which is wrapped and mixed with lizard faeces.

Furthermore, he added that the association is sensitising children to the danger of drugs across the country by using one child who is a scout to influence other children.