By Godwin Njoku
The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria clearly states the most important reason for having a government in place. In Chapter 2, section 14, subsection 2 (b), the the 1999 supreme law of the country says:”the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government..”
When the citizens of a country are attacked, killed, maimed or kidnapped in droves, at homes, in the farms, on the road and in the train, the logical question to ask is, where is our government?
It`s not only the ordinary people that are worried over the seeming lethargy, inertia or complete failure of the federal government to tackle insecurity. Echoes of doubt and frustration are coming from the eminent voices in the National Assembly, among respected state governors, and top opinion molders. Nobody is safe anymore, and everyone is duly agitated across partisan, regional, ethnic, and faith differences.
In the House of Representatives, Majority Leader Alhassan Ado Doguwa, didn`t mince words in order to sound politically correct. In apparent heat of frustration, he wailed that “there are killings, massacre, armed robbery, all over”, and these under a democratic government elected to ensure the safety of lives and property of innocent citizens. He lamented that the persistence of insecurity has made it extremely hard of representatives of the government to defend its actions.
Earlier, in another forum, the Governor of Kaduna state, Mallam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai had literally wept over the seeming unwillingness of the military high command to unleash maximum force on the merchants of terror and agents of death and destruction in the North West zone.
He reportedly lamented that, as people in government:”we have to seek your forgiveness because, in art of governance, we have failed” to secure lives and property of the people who elected the government.
More than anyone else of comparable official status, Governor El-Rufai has been the most vocal advocate of the deployment of overwhelming force to defeat the trans-border bandits who have made life “nasty, brutish and short” in North West zone, as in Thomas Hobbes` hellish state of nature.
El-Rufai has repeatedly called on the federal government to authorise carpet-bombing of the forests habouring the evil terror gangs. “We know where these terrorists have their camps, and we have their locations. Why are we not going there and bombing them off the face of the earth?”, El-Rufai queried.
While the federal government has yet to give cogent reasons for choosing to treat deadly terrorists with kid gloves, traumatized citizens are increasingly joining El-Rufai to question the effectiveness of the nation’s anti-terrorism war. If the strategy is effective, and if security and intelligence architecture is up and running, why should a rag tag army of bandits, perched on motorcycles, attack an airport, bomb a moving train, and occupy key federal road artery within the same contiguous area, at roughly the same period, without their nefarious activities being nipped in the bud? Again, why do the military always have to respond to deadly attacks instead of preventing them, or taking the war to the terrorists in their dens, pursuing the enemy constantly so he doesn`t have time to coordinate and launch an attack?
Commenting on the apparent failure of the intelligence network, Mukhtar Zubairu Sirajo, President and Council Chairman of Nigeria Institute of Public Relations (NIPR), spoke the minds of many voiceless patriots when he advised the national security outfits to reinvent themselves and “square up to the bandits perpetrating heinous acts against innocent citizens.
Sirajo said the security and law enforcement agents need to do more to inspire confidence of the people. He wrote: “There’s the very urgent need for our security agencies to restrategise and get on top of the situation rather than wait to react,” after innocent people have been killed, injured, or abducted for ransom. He goes on to say: The intelligence gathering processes must also be given a short in the arm to enable (them) get ahead of these criminals in all ways imaginable.
It’s obvious why everyone is scared and agitated, even as the traumatized populace tries to make sense out of the chaos, fear, and pains of the moment. Everyone feels the scourge of terrorism. Its a full fledged warfare, replete with physical and emotional damage. But it is not the classic war situation in which there is well defined dispute, the battle line is clearly drawn, and the opposing forces face each other in a mortal combat to kill, or be killed. Yet, what we have at hand is a full scale warfare, as deadly and as destructive as any war can be. And if the relevant authorities continue to live in the fools paradise of denial, and if they continue to view terrorism as a passing fad that`ll fizzle out with time, the losses would continue to mount, along with pains and tears.
Worse still, the scourge of attacks and destruction happening in the precincts of Kaduna state, and the entire North West zone, arent also your classic definition of terrorism. Typical terrorists don't kidnap victims for ransom. Often, they are a bunch of aggrieved persons who dish out death and destruction to spread fear in order to win or keep turfs, or to draw attention to their cause, which might be political, religious, or ideological. But, the criminals wrecking havoc across Nigeria today dont seem to have any cause for their murderous escapes, other than the money they make from ransom. At least, they have not articulated any cause that`s available in the public domain, unlike the North East insurgents who say they want a religious state bereft of western civilization.
So, who are the agents of death and destruction currently trying to over-run Kaduna state and the North West zone? And what exactly do they want? For long, they were simply called bandits, a term that somewhat belied the cruelty of their tactics, and the enormity of the impacts of their nefarious activities. Heavily armed with sophisticated weapons, they raid villages, massacre men, women, and children, take hostages for ransom, loot food and sundry belongings of their hapless victims.
Rather than fizzle out, they seem to have grown in numbers, expanded their reach, and raised the bar of their virulence. They have become so emboldened as to attack key military locations, kill or kidnap soldiers and loot weapons.
Indeed, its time to go all out against these godless, bloodsucking, criminals based on the standard operating procedure that Mallam Nasir El-Rufai has been advocating since 2017. Now that the bandits have been deservedly classified as terrorists, the coast is totally clear for the patriotic defence forces to go after them with the most effective arsenals in the armory, without fear of causing global outrage, or attacking possible allegation of human rights abuse.
Drawing from the El-Rufai’s suggested plan of action, the forests and camps of the criminals should be carpet-bombed in a scorched-earth approach. Terrorism, being a ferocious animal, should attacked with the most vicious weapons. The next item in the El-Rufai SOP is the recruitment of more personal into the volunteer force. He suggested intake of 1000 men from each of the 774 local government areas of the country, making a total of 774,000 personnel for all the security establishments. If that much cannot be recruited at once, due to cost implications, can we start with 100 persons per LGA, to inject 77,400 boots into the anti-terrorism war?
The point is, without putting more boot on the ground to overwhelm the hoodlums in the forest, no progress can be made toward defeating them and securing the lives and property of the people, which, as we agreed, is the primary responsibility of the government.
Still on the El-Rufai Terms of Reference for effective anti-terrorism counter operation, the nation must urgently look into the issue of State and Local Government Police. The continued reliance on unitary police structure, centrally controlled from Abuja, to police the entire supposed federated units, is an absurdity and a recipe for the sort of security disaster we now face. It has given room for what we now derisively and shamelessly call ungoverned territories where criminals can live, feel at ease and undisturbed, and therefore free to plan and launch attacks on law-abiding citizens.
This must be unacceptable to every right thinking person. Now is the time for the nation to rise in unison and demand the creation of State Police.
It would appear, therefore, that Mallam Nasir El-Rufai has got the strongest voice in the search for a more effective strategy to curb the menace of terrorism in the land.
Sadly, he is not even in the contention for the office of the Commander in Chief in 2023, owing to a contrived, undemocratic, so-called rotational presidency which tends to favour the most incompetent characters.
The Security challenges confronting Kaduna State, is actually Nigeria’s. Because the entire federal Republic of Nigeria, is under one form of security challenge or another.
