“There is an urgent need for a paradigm shift and reform of the architecture and structure of our security systems. Equally important is the citizen participation and collaboration in providing security”

— Senator Ahmed Lawan, President of the Senate, The PUNCH, January 29, 2020.

Insecurity, fast becoming an entrenched national albatross has returned to the headlines because of the persistence of attacks in several states across the country, and the renewed focus on it since Monday, by the two Houses of the National Assembly. Suddenly, the situation has spiralled out of the box of tepid official assurances and the monotonous chant of officialdom that “we have the situation under control”. This month alone, there have been attacks accompanied by bloodletting in Kogi, Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina and most recently in communities in Niger and Plateau states. The growing list does not include popular highways such as the Abuja-Kaduna Road, permanently shut down by criminal gangs, some of them reportedly dressed in military uniforms. Senator Lawan’s urgent call to arms, quoted in the opening paragraph, captures the mood of the debate in the upper chamber with one senator, Enyinnaya Abaribe, the Minority Leader, pointedly calling controversially on the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to resign his office for repeated failure to successfully rout the advance of the bandits.

The gravity of the situation re-echoes the atmosphere in the South-West, a fortnight ago, when it appeared that Operation Amotekun will be put under a legal sledgehammer. Fortunately, wise counsel prevailed, and Amotekun appears to have come to stay. In the same manner, the long running clamour for state police re-echoed in the legislature on Wednesday, with no one seriously prepared to argue against it because the police are out of their depths in the face of the criminal surge. Spreading banditry aside, the national fortunes in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East have either plummeted or remained chequered, given recent advances and occasional forays by the terrorists. It should be of interest too that as part of a revamping of the national security architecture, one of the Senate resolutions concerns the removal of the service chiefs whose watch has increasingly being called to question.

To be fair, government has continued to exercise itself to meet the insecurity offensive head-on. Nonetheless, the hard facts of the situation suggest that, rather than improve, at least in the short term, matters seem to be growing worse to the point where bandits carry out nocturnal or pre-dawn raids with relative ease. It does appear, therefore, as matters stand that the revision or rejig of the national security paradigm will take the form of the full or graduated unleashing of the power and potential of the states and communities in policing matters, alongside a centralised but weakening security apparatus. This week, Buhari is famously quoted to have expressed surprise about the scale of the banditry challenge describing it as an “evil plot against Nigeria”. The statement has been interpreted in some quarters as casting doubt on the quality of intelligence available to the President considering that what is on our hands, especially in the North-West, is the unfolding of a process of programmed escalation and arms build-up by communities of bandits out there in the forests. Ideally, if security institutions do scenario building, they ought to have predicted what is taking place now, especially in hard-hit states such as Katsina, Zamfara, and Niger. For example, state governors in those affected states have repeatedly warned of the disparity in firepower and sophisticated equipment between the bandits and regular security.

Although government did launch recently a security document, there is little or no evidence that decisive steps have been taken to close the gap in weaponry between the security forces and criminals. One recalls in this connection, the oft-quoted statement of former Zamfara State governor, Abdulaziz Yari, that the formidably equipped outlaw army in his state possessed in one armoury alone, over 500 AK-47, suggesting that vanquishing them cannot be a walk in the park. That deficiency is replicated in the North-East with what appears to be the re-equipping of Boko Haram, who reportedly is using drones to monitor the movement of our military. This is buttressed by a similar revelation that the weaponry of our boys is so obsolete that it includes the refurbishing of equipment brought into the country during the Second Republic. So, the problem is not just with the security architecture, although that protrudes heavily, but with our failure, to have foreseen the new game in town regarding the acquisition of modern weapons by insurgents and criminals, some of whom are funded by international terrorist organisations. In this respect, there are two possible loopholes to inspect, namely, whether adequate or at least sizeable resources are available to our security organisations, and the extent to which resources made available are being fruitfully and prudently deployed rather than being flittered away or outright mismanaged. This point is made, in the context of intermittent scoops and discussions in the media concerning the management of materials and funding allocated for defence and security (See for example Ayo Olukotun, Defence sector spending: Have we come full circle? The PUNCH, Friday 28, December 2018).

Another area to watch closely is the morale and skills of our security institutions, especially the police and the military. Taking the police for example, several presidential reforms embarked upon in the fourth republic have had very little effect on the performance of the police and other security outfits. This unhappy trend partly replicates the failure of public organisations in Nigeria, marked by their inability to deliver public goods. There is also the issue that reforms of the police and other security bodies, are viewed as technical problems rather than as part of a wider state building project in which security sector reform is just one component. Insights gleaned from contemporary studies of successful security reforms, suggest that progress is more likely in circumstances where state actors bring to bear on the issues such factors as political capacity, crackdown on the linkage between organised crime and the police, mark up in recruitment and promotion, as well as popular pressure from below. This speaks to the linkage between security reform and state capacity as well as state quality. In other words, a business as usual or laid-back approach is meaningless in a contest where criminals are already several steps ahead of state and society. What is required is an all out multi-sectoral approach to the current offensive by bandits and insurgents in order to defuse the challenge. To continue to retain service chiefs who have not delivered, instead of thanking them for their services and renewing high-level personnel, does not show that we understand the seriousness of the current situation.

Mercifully, there is a new unanimity cutting across party lines on the need for an urgent scale up of official response. Government can tap into this goodwill in order to give impetus to such imperatives as an overhaul of our security, easing out of incompetent staff, addressing shortfalls in equipment and morale as well as signalling a policy orientation tied to rewards, and alternately sanctions for performance and non-performance.

By Ayo  Olukotun