Security: Nigeria Still At 100 Level

By Adekunle Adekoya

In the last few weeks, the global news media and the internet have been awash with the exploits of the state of Israel in the campaign against Hamas, Hezbollah and other real and apparent threats. In sympathy, Iran launched at least 180 missiles into Israel last Tuesday. Israel claimed most of the missiles were rendered ineffective by her advanced air defence systems called the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow.

For information, the Iron Dome is the most well-known of Israel’s missile shields, and is designed to intercept short-range rockets, as well as shells and mortars, at ranges of between 4km and 70km from the missile launcher. David’s Sling is meant to destroy longer-range rockets, cruise missiles and medium-range or long-range ballistic missiles from a distance of up to 300km. The Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems defend against medium-range and long-range ballistic missiles when they are anywhere up to 2,400km away.

My point here is about insecurity at home. We may have Police, Army, Navy, Air Force and other security agencies, but we are still at 100 level, like a freshman in university. There is a Yoruba saying to the effect that if you’re on a dance floor and don’t know how to respond to the music, pay attention to other dancers near you.

We have battled and are still battling various forms of insecurity which cumulatively have worsened our condition. The unrelenting attacks by killer herdsmen militia, bandits holding entire states to ransom, as in the case of Bello Turji in Zamfara, kidnap gangs rampaging without let or hindrance and other insecurity issues have left thousands dead, crippled farming activities, and turned what was once a land flowing with milk and honey into a desolate wilderness where famine is ravishing people. Can’t we borrow from the Israeli approach to dealing with insecurity?

As usual, the political class has failed to respond with policies and initiatives that will end the menace of insecurity, besides platitudes and rhetoric urging the service chiefs to end the war against insecurity. In the Israeli instance, it can be seen that politicians of various leanings are unanimous about the threats to the state of Israel, and have accordingly empowered the Israeli Defence Forces, IDF, to eliminate those threats. 

In addition, that nation’s topmost intelligence organisation known as Mossad is playing its role by generating credible intel which the IDF uses to great effect in going after its foes.

In comparison, what do we have here? This year, we have seen the DSS raiding the offices of the Nigeria Labour Congress, and later, arresting NLC president, Joe Ajaero at the airport, thereby aborting a planned trip to London. Several journalists have also been arrested and detained by the DSS. In addition, other security agencies clamped down on protesters during the #EndBadGovernance protests of August 1-10. Many of those protesters, some 2,412 of them, are still languishing in detention, for protesting hardship. Meanwhile, those that inflicted or instigated the hardship are roaming around, free. Are placard-carrying protesters threats to national security? How does harassing labour leaders eliminate threats to the country? 

In fact, it can be seen that security managers here all the time confuse national security with regime security, or even security of the tenure of incumbent political officers, and this confusion shapes their approach to critical national issues. Nothing could be worse, in security terms. It is the reason there have been strident calls for a complete overhaul of the nation’s security architecture. These days, people talk of vast ungoverned spaces where felons hole up in and from where they hatch and execute their nefarious  activities. Truth is these ungoverned spaces have always been there.

Until 2015, BC, insecurity challenges were not as deep as what we now experience. What happened? We must find the answers by taking security far more seriously than we have. It is not moin-moin business, as we say here; security is big, serious business, because every other thing depends on it. The hunger in the land now is partly as a result of attacks on farmers by herdsmen militia, which, for fear of survival, drove many farmers off the farms. What has been the response of our security agencies to that? Or they don’t see hunger or food insecurity as a national threat?

For our men and women in the uniformed services, we need to do more. They need better equipment, higher pay, improved welfare,  and above all, we simply need more of them. Asking 371,000 officers and men to police 923,777 square kilometers of our landmass on which a population of 200 million sits is simply unserious. That gives us, on the average, one policeman to nearly 600 people. Even with the best equipment, what can one man do to 600 people?

In August, Inspector-General of Police, IGP, Dr. Kayode Egbetokun, in an address to participants in the Senior Executive Course, SEC, 45 of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, NIPSS, in Kuru, near Jos, Plateau State, said Nigeria must recruit an additional 190,000 officers to secure the country adequately. Did the politicians listen to him? If they did, are they going to do anything about it? We just play here, and when the problems come, we pray.

As if Nigerians are the only people in the world God has to look after. If the Israelis didn’t apply their God-given know-how to develop the Iron Dome and David’s sling, Iranian missiles would have reduced their country to rubble by now. We must wake up! Daily, bandits and other criminals are being arrested and their arms paraded. How do they get their arms and ammunition? How do these things come into the country? What is our security apparatus doing about these? Enough of harassing journalists, labour leaders and other dissenters. Le’s get to work and secure this country!

*Adekoya is a commentator on public issues