It is no longer news that the issues of banditry and kidnappings in the Northern part of Nigeria have been matters of concern for a while.
Despite huge attention paid to these issues by the federal government, the issues have remained with us.
Different bodies have come up with literatures and recommendations on how to best fight these menaces but to no avail.
In this particular write- up, the Former Commissioner for Culture and Tourism in Kogi State, Hon. Ugbede Paul Ebije xrays the issues of banditry and kidnappings as well as the possible ways to fight these menaces.
Let us read his interesting write – up:
” Without beating around the bush, if we must fight these social menace, we must restructure or reorganise our system to be able to do so.
In this wise, we need to look at the models of other countries that are making head way.
Countries like USA, Denmark, UK, France, Germany, just to mention a few domesticate the issues of Security in such that members of the security outfit are recruited to man security affairs in an area where he or she has good knowledge of.
In this case, he or she can easily source for information in time of investigation without much stress.
Back here in Africa, many countries have adopted the same approach and is yeilding tremedous success.
Having said that, it is important to also point out that for any country to provide a roburst security, the ratio of security personnel must not be too far from each other.
For example, the Republic of Chad with an estimated population of 16 million is said to have a security population of about 2 million personnel aside its Military reserved of over 3 million men and women.
Though, not a comparative analysis but Nigeria with over 200 million population has less than 2 million security workforce.
If you ask me, aside agitation for state police, this ratio is not good enough!
In my view therefore, since the Federal Government, FG cannot employ more security personnel and improve on their welfare because of her lame resource, the State governments should be saddled with security responsibility or should partner with FG.
Again, community policing is a good idea, but I feel it’s not going to be effective because currently we have some level of community policing in place in which community members are supposed to support the security outfits with intelligence information but they mostly fail to show up.
In some cases, if the community members are not lucky, some bad eggs within the security outfits leak the information to the insurgents and that results to brutal invasion of the community.
In my thought, why don’t we introduce the National Guards concept instead?
I mean, the National Guards Concept that has comprehensive framework as follows:
1. The national guard can be recruited from every corner of the states of the Federation
2. They would have part-time Military service. Which means, they have 80% civilian service, 20% military service. They are ordinary civilians pursuing their civil service jobs or students.
3. They would have military trainings and weekly, monthly drills and re-training exercises.
4. They would be paid drills allowances since they are not full time military guys. This of course will help to reduce cost of having more security outfit.
5. State governors can have the powers to activate them unlike the full time / conventional Military.
6. Since, they are from all corners of the states of the Federation, that means for example : Katsina state Governor can activate his own state’s National guard members since they are Katsina state indigens.
7. If you tell me that there is no money, security votes given to state governments could be used for the funding of the national guards.
8. I tell you, Indigenous national guards would go in any dimension to bring an end to the current security issues especially banditry and kidnapping because they would have patriotism, selflessness and commitment.
9. The Legislative and the executive can support this and it can be passed into law within few weeks because everyone is tired especially the legislative.
Finally, whichever way the Federal Government consider it best to address the issues, the ratio of military workforce compare to Nigeria’s population is also importance.
Hon. Ugbede Paul Ebije
Former Commissioner For Culture And Tourism
Kogi State.
