Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution says the security and welfare of citizens shall be the primary purpose of the government. Quite unfortunately, successive administrations have failed to meet these requirements, and the current Bola Tinubu administration is equally failing. Right now, instead of people’s standard of living improving, it is depreciating and everybody is worried about the intolerable level of insecurity in this country.
This newspaper, in its editorial of Monday, March 11, 2024, chronicled the spate of mass abductions that have recently taken place in the country. It stated, “Within the past week, Boko Haram insurgents and bandits have successfully abducted over 404 Nigerians across three North-East and North-West states. This is unparalleled and ominous for the rest of the fragile country. For the President, it calls for a swift re-evaluation of the subsisting national security strategies, which appear ineffective against the hordes from hell perpetrating this criminality.”
It went further, “Indeed, it is the familiar Salafist modus operandi all over again: The predation on women, pupils, and other soft targets. Fifteen pupils of an Islamiya school in Sokoto State were kidnapped in the early hours of Saturday. This is less than 72 hours after 287 schoolchildren were abducted from the LEA Primary School in Kuriga, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State. A few days before the Kaduna incident, over 200 female internally displaced persons were forcefully taken away by terrorists in three IDP camps in Borno State. The women were kidnapped in Ngala, the headquarters of Gamboru Ngala, while fetching firewood in the bush to sell.” The PUNCH submitted that, “Data indicates that about 1,548 schoolchildren have been abducted in 11 separate incidents of mass abduction by terrorists and bandits in northern Nigeria between April 2014 and June 2021.”
What are the implications of insecurity in Nigeria? First, it hampers economic growth and development. Many businesses have shut down due to these ceaseless kidnappings, banditry and insurgencies. Many of those internally displaced have lost their means of livelihood and have become economically dependent on the government and charity organisations. Thus, rather than contributing to economic growth, they become liabilities. There is now low investor’ confidence in Nigeria, as no foreign investor will want to come and set up business in a volatile country like ours unless they are into the sales and marketing of security gadgets and bulletproof vehicles.
Insecurity is also one of the drivers of the ‘japa’ phenomenon, as many Nigerians besiege embassies of foreign countries to flee their fatherland. Many don’t even bother to go to embassies; they simply embark on a hazardous journey of being trafficked through the desert and the Mediterranean Sea, hoping to irregularly migrate to Europe for safety and a better life.
I saw a journalist friend of mine sometime in January after a long while. As we chatted, I asked how he was coping with the astronomic rise in the cost of living. He sighed and said it had not been easy. I then complimented him on living in his own house in Abuja when I, who had been in Abuja for over 20 years, still lived in a rented apartment. He corrected me and said he had fled his house in the Bwari area of Abuja due to the incessant raids of kidnappers in his community and is now living in a rented apartment like me. That’s how insecurity has also impacted family life. Imagine the pain of having to relocate from your home, not because of any natural disaster like an earthquake or flood but due to the activities of bandits.
Food inflation, which has risen above 35 percent, is also a result of food production shortages linked to the activities of bandits who not only demand access and harvest fees from farmers but routinely raid farm settlements to abduct, maim and kill the farmers who are feeding the nation. Health-wise, many Nigerians are suffering from panic attacks, paranoia, schizophrenia and trauma as a result of the scary news of abductions and acts of terrorism being daily reported in the media. Many of us could no longer sleep with our eyes closed. In many communities, people now live in fortresses and under self-imposed curfews. As described by the renowned English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book titled Leviathan “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
It is not as if the federal and state governments have been standing akimbo, watching helplessly. Funding for security and defence has increased exponentially. According to the earlier referenced editorial of this newspaper published on Monday, “The Federal Government, as part of efforts to keep the country secure, disbursed N231.27 billion to procure arms and ammunition for security agencies and officers between 2020 and 2024. This is beside the yearly budgets of the Ministry of Defence and eight other forces between 2020 and 2022, put at N11.72 billion, N10.78 billion, and N9.64 billion, respectively. More recently, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the government procured N5 trillion worth of tanks and armoured fighting vehicles for the security forces, per the NBS report ‘Foreign Trade in Goods Statistics.’ This is in addition to other security hardware.”
The Muhammadu Buhari administration established the Police Equipment Trust Fund just as a handful of states have similarly done. Many states have established vigilantes or state-owned security agencies, with the latest being Zamfara State, which early in the year established Community Protection Guards. Recall that the six south-west states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Ekiti, Ondo and Osun, on January 9, 2020, established Amotekun to fight insecurity. Consideration has been given to the establishment of state police, with a committee set up to come up with a framework.
With all these aforementioned initiatives, why is Nigeria still largely insecure? The answer to this can be found in the hardware solutions without a significant component of the software solutions. I daresay that even the hardware efforts have been largely ineffective due to a lack of sufficient well-trained and motivated security personnel. We have not also adopted technology-driven security solutions. There are several modern tech gadgets such as satellite orbiters, drones, CCTV, scanners, jammers, communication gadgets and forensic laboratories, that Nigerian security forces do not have or have in insufficient quantities.
On the software side, unless and until we frontally tackle the challenges of unemployment, poverty and hunger, whatever hardware equipment we acquire will not resolve our security challenge. These variables drive crimes and criminality. People will not blink an eyelid to commit crimes if they are starving. The popular adage is also that an idle hand is the devil’s workshop. If people are not gainfully employed and are poor, they will constitute a nuisance and danger to the rest of society.
I think the time has come for the Nigerian president to seek international assistance to bring the security challenge effectively under control. We should also mobilise our able-bodied retired security personnel to help combat the increasing insecurity. There is also a need to do something about our porous borders, where small arms and light weapons are indiscriminately smuggled into the country and used by bandits to terrorise innocent Nigerians.
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