As part of its contribution to addressing insecurity in Nigeria, the United Nations, (UN), yesterday, charged Nigerian leaders to intensify their approach towards taming insecurity in the country.
This is even as the UN advocated that one of the best approaches to addressing issues bothering insecurity in Nigeria, is adopting a preventive security deployment in all facets of the country.
The UNs Resident Coordinator and Representative of the UN Secretary-General in the Kyrgz Republic, Dr. Ozonnia Ojielo, made this call during a one-day Seminar on: ‘Agenda for Peacebuilding in Nigeria, organised by the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, (IPCR)‘, in Abuja.
While bemoaning the increasing state of criminal activities in the nation, he noted that adopting a preventive security model would ensure that grounds are prepared for other actors with the mandate, capacity, skills, and experience to step-in.
He maintained that an early approach to addressing issues of insecurity, if accepted, would give room for community peacebuilding, and confidence-building, among others.
His words: Every community or group has some challenge or some grievance. So you see multiple actions by different groups, manifested in different ways.
Some are even taking up arms against the State. The key is that these issues do manifest as security challenges. But most of them are not of a security nature. These manifestations have social, economic, environmental, and sometimes political underpinnings.
So, if you have a social problem, you cannot use the toolbox for security to address them. So its a combination of integrated approaches, and strategies needed. Security is a core part. But theres only one element of the response. When violence is threatened and you do preventive security deployment, the people dont need to take up arms to defend themselves, because they feel that the security officials are responding.
But the preventive deployment is really to value the space for other actors with the mandate, the capacity, the skills, and the experience to engage to step in. Then you do community peace-building, you do confidence-building; you do community meetings and consultations with community groups, until the issues are understood, you may not actually solve the problem, because the problem may be deep and protracted.
But, what youre doing is youre establishing a process for solving them. The issues may be so difficult that you need a long time to solve them; but create a process, and once you create a process that the people trust, people will have faith as they walk through the process; it may take you several months or years to resolve them.
What we need is to break the cycle of violence, such that when one group attacks, the other group feels the need to respond. You break it by engaging in early warning mechanisms.
Its been done before in many parts of Nigeria; it is done in many parts of the world. It is not rocket science, its just the ability to organise and step-up. So, part of my lecture today is to challenge leaders. Its not the role of the government alone, or community members, or leaders from Nigeria to step up.
People with gravitas who can convene groups, they need to step up and let us create this mass movement of leaders and activists and people specific to each conflict, and let us respond. That is what Nigerians expect of us as our leaders. That is what I support governments to do in many parts of the world. And I know theres expertise and capacity in Nigeria to do the same thing.
So lets hope that our leaders will step-up in different ways and political actors must watch their language.
Earlier, the Director-General, DG, IPCR, Bakut Tswah Bakut, pointed out that the country is tense and what is most essential for Nigeria, is to build sustainable peace.
