INSECURITY: POINTING ACCUSING FINGERS AT THE ‘WRONG’ MEN AND THE CASE FOR STATE POLICE
Samuel Enyi Otsapa
Samuelotsapa@gmail.com
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080547886
To say that insecurity in Nigeria is rising and getting scarier by the day is to state the obvious, except if one is both stupid and primitively sycophantic. The security of lives and property and welfare of citizens is the first objective of government but the current government under President Muhammadu Buhari is failing to deliver on this. Banditry, kidnapping, terrorism, armed robbery, ritual killing, attacks on police stations, brutal rape, etc are now the lived reality of Nigerians affecting both the elites and the common citizens. These days, no day passes by without one hearing of not one, not two, not three, not even four – but tens of reports of insecurity and crime across Nigeria. The situation is so bad that these days, gun shots are now like doorbells. It used to be a mainly northern problem but as some of us had warned, insecurity is spreading like wildfire to southeastern states: Ebonyi, Imo, Anambra, Abia and Enugu.
Last week in Anambra State, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Professor Chukwuma Soludo was attacked during a town hall meeting and three of his armed police orderlies were killed. And days ago in Owerri, the Imo State capital, the state police headquarters and state correctional service headquarters were attacked by vicious gunmen. In that Owerri attack, 1,844 prison inmates, including daredevil criminals, were released and are now at large – and their presence in society has worrying security implications for the southern states in particular and Nigeria in general. Ask yourself this question: if a prominent man with police orderlies attached to him and a police headquarters and correctional service, both located close to the Imo State Government House, can be attacked and destroyed, what is the lot of the ordinary hapless Nigerian? Last year, Chief Audu Ogbe; the Chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) was quoted as saying: “78% of Nigerian land mass is in the north and we are faced with the problems of killings day and night which are greater than ever, except during the civil war”.
In August last year and following a petition against the Governor of Kaduna State; Mallam Nasir El-rufai by 3,000 individuals, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) withdrew an invitation for the man to speak at its 2020 national conference. The petition against the governor blames him for the continuing and rising killings in Kaduna State – and the recent kidnapping of over 39 students from a federal government institution in the state by bandits is a case in point. And to make this accusation dicey, Mallam Nasir El-rufai says the state government would not negotiate with bandit nor pay ransom. While negotiating with bandits and paying ransom is not a tradition we encourage, Mallam Nasir El-rufai must be diplomatic with his utterances because although the USA says it does not negotiate with terrorists, we know that it does through the back door – but from a position of strength. But in the entire insecurity crisis in Kaduna State and Nigeria, and as it concerns the ability of the nation’s security agencies to prevent these attacks, is Governor El-rufai and other state governors to blame? I do not think so.
While the action by Mallam El-rufai’s petitioners and the NBA is commendable insofar as it makes individuals in authority sit up and become responsible as they know that their actions and inactions are been monitored (and questioned) today more than in the past, they must be reminded that Governor Nasir El-rufai is not the person directly responsible for rising levels of insecurity in Kaduna State because beyond the official tag of “chief security officer” and the monthly security vote, the man, like his other 35 counterparts in the country, does not command or control Nigeria’s armed forces.
Of course state governors in Nigeria have important roles to play in the protection of lives and property in their states because every insecurity breach is local but their roles are largely ceremonial and motivational as the police, the military, the DSS, the Civil Defense and the other 23 security agencies in Nigeria are not under their direct command and control. As Nigeria’s current president and by the provisions of the 1999 Constitution, President Muhammadu Buhari is the man who directly commands and controls security in Nigeria across the 36 states, the federal capital and 774 local government areas. This is so because the activities and operations of the Inspector General of Police (IGP), the four Service Chiefs (Army, Navy, Airforce and the Chief of Defense Staff) and their officers and men are directly controlled and supervised by the president through the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA).
In a recent interview on Channels Television’s NewsNight, the National President of the Middle Belt Forum (MBF), Dr. Bitrus Pogu accused Mallam El-rufai of supporting the Fulani against the Southern Kaduna people by grabbing lands in southern Kaduna for Fulani takeover, while the southern Kaduna people are left in IDP camps. Governor El-rufai, during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics explained that the annual security report in the state shows that there are more attacks in central and western Kaduna than in southern Kaduna but that people of southern Kaduna wants the world to believe that southern Kaduna is the worst hit. While these accusations and counter accusations continues, and since the jury is not yet out on who is telling the truth, some of us are staunch believers that the best way for Nigeria to reduce the rising insecurity in the country is by restructuring her internal security architecture; a restructuring that ushers in a decentralized state policing system where each state runs its own police.
In theory and on paper, Nigeria is a federation and it must now begin to act like one in practice, beginning with security and the way the country is policed. The reality is that the country is too large and the population too big to be kept safe by a centralized police where officers and men are periodically posted to states and local government areas they know nothing about. What the country now need is for each state to set up its own police to operate side by side with the current federal one as other countries have done. The state police system is not new because many countries are already practicing it so Nigeria has ready-made examples to model its own after – but of course with local contents that fits our peculiar environment and sociopolitical realities.
As with everything else, the state police security system has its disadvantages one of which is the tendency by state governors to use state police officers against real and imagined political opposition but the advantages outweighs. Moreover, this tendency of abuse can be checked by strong state legislature and judiciary. One of the advantages of the state police system is that it decentralizes security thus bringing it closer to the people. Under the state police system, there would not be an Inspector General of Police for the whole country who sits in his office in Abuja dishing out commands to police officers in the states. Also, a state police system would make for a better and broader local security since officers and men of each state police department would be indigenes and residents of the states; men and women who know the nooks and crannies of the state. This is as opposed to the current situation where police officers are posted to states they know nothing about where they spend months trying to understand their new work environment while crime and insecurity continues almost unchecked. Another very important case for state police is that officers would have emotional ties and attachments to their jobs because they are indigenes of the states and would typically not want crime and insecurity to persist knowing that it is their kith and kin and the development of their own state that is at stake.
In this current federal control centralized policing system, President Muhammadu Buhari must be told the truth: any life lost and property damaged to banditry, terrorism, kidnapping, armed robbery and militancy anywhere in Nigeria; from Birnin Gwari in Kaduna State to Talata Mafara in Zamfara State, from Ijebu Ode in Ogun State to Orlu in Imo State, from Igumale in Benue State to Gembu in Taraba State, it is he, and not the state governors, that is to blame because as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, he is responsible for the protection of lives and property across the length and breadth of the country. The responsibility is on each of us to rightly point that accusing finger, if we must, at the right government official – and that is President Muhammadu Buhari. And while doing this, we must add that a state police system where security and crime prevention becomes localized, the burden and blame of general insecurity in the country would be lifted off the president’s shoulders.
