The Director-General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Mr Garba Abari, has said that Preventive diplomacy is an integral part of boarder conflict prevention.
Abari stated this on Tuesday while delivering an address at a leadership course on Preventive Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution which held at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) Kuru, near Jos.
The course was organised for stakeholders drawn from the civil society, media , security agencies and the military.
He said that preventive diplomacy referred specifically to diplomatic action taken at the earliest stage to prevent disputes from arising between parties and to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflicts and limiting the spread of violence if it does occur.
He said that it was evident that the efficacy of traditional models for tackling and preventing violence and its extremism was increasingly diminishing in contemporary times.
According to the director-general, this is evident as 90 per cent of the conflicts globally occurred within the states rather than between states.
“Generally, the world over conflicts are taking place more within the boundaries of nation states, than within nation states,” he said.
He said that terrorism and violent extremism which occurred within the borders of nations had become a critical factor for global concern.
Abari expressed the need to understand how preventive diplomacy could be deployed to head off the emerging threats to national security as currently being witnessed.
He opined that one of the steps toward the prevention of conflicts was the marshaling of all stakeholders and forces together, especially in terms of intelligence gathering, sharing of intelligence, which he said would lead to early warning analyses.
He also called for the analyses of the nature of the triggers of conflicts within the society which he said would either be political, socio-economic, religious or ideological.
“ The relationship between the drivers of violence, the structural push factors and the proximate incentives or pull factors call for us to deepen knowledge of both the sources of the problem, the responses required and the role of preventive diplomacy in tackling the challenges,” the director-general said.
He said the transformation of institutions that provided citizens with security, the provision of justice and employment were key to breaking the circles of insecurity which would in turn lead to economic development and stability.
He said that the leadership course on preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution was apt as it had participants drawn from the civil society, media, security agencies and the military that were charged with this responsibility of securing the country.
One of the participants at the Leadership course, Mrs Maryam Gawuje, said that she had learnt how to tackle problems and not the symptoms of the problems before they occurred.
Gawuje said that the course had availed upcoming leaders with the technical know how of interacting with their communities to avert problems and to tackle such problems.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the course was organised by the Peace Building and Development Consult in collaboration with NOA. (NAN)
