The recent rise in cases of kidnappings, banditry, ritual killings and sundry other criminal activity is increasingly becoming a source of worry to many Nigerians.
In the last two months, it is as if the country is under siege by bandits, kidnappers and Islamist insurgents in the North-East, unknown gunmen and ritual killers, with no place deemed safe again.
Against the backdrop of a boiling surge in violent crimes across the country, three weeks ago, the House of Representatives invited top echelon of Nigerias security architecture: service chiefs and the inspector general of police to a parliamentary inquiry on the reasons for this surge in kidnappings and killings of innocent Nigerians.
Pundits have, in many fora, pointed out that Nigerias intractable insecurity is often widely believed to be closely linked to the lack of good governance and political will, aloofness and official corruption, the service chiefs at the parliamentary inquest amplified this position as their frustration was discernible from their delivery.
In their full complement, and without mincing words, Service Chiefs spoke truth to power in response to the House of Representatives inquiry. Led by the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, they took turns to lay on the table with uncanny demonstration of their challenges, the issues that have made their operational efficiency and effectiveness an uphill task.
Recall that the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Musa, recently painted a disturbing canvas that is worrisome, as according to him, the situation has got to the extent that prison warders connive with Boko Haram members in their custody in the planning and execution of their felonious crimes, using the bank accounts of these warders to transfer operational funds.
He said the country is on the road to self-destruct, because the institutions of the state are often complicit in the ongoing saga of insecurity, adding that the system needed internal cleansing. Boko Haram members kept in prison, according to CDS, and other criminal suspects are routinely released by the judiciary, only for them to return to their evil enterprise with greater cruelty.
The CDS warned, People are hungry. No matter how well you tell them to keep the peace, they will not because they have to eat and it aids criminality.
The CDS emphasised that 1,000 unmanned borders posts of about 4,000 kilometres 1,600 kilometres shared with our Sahelian neighbours exacerbate the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the country, and this has been a known fact for decades, aiding the destabilisation of the Nigerian state by Boko Haram, ISWAP and other criminal elements.
In the South-east, Simon Ekpa, living in faraway Finland, has made the region ungovernable with his treasonable and illegal orders to Igbos to sit at home and close their businesses every Monday, over the continued incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu. Thousands of citizens and security personnel, who dared him have been killed by criminal gangs, who take fiendish delight in enforcing Ekpas directives. These rogue elements have hijacked the Kanu and IPOB irredentist movement. IPOB has since washed its hands off the sit-at-home orders.
The Chief of Army Staff, Taoreed Lagbaja, was quick to remind all that, We (soldiers) are not magicians. This is incontestable; more so, when the military have been overstretched and involved in asymmetric combat duties and policing responsibilities in about 33 States, outside their professional remit.
Also, the Inspector-General of Police, (IGP) Kayode Egbetokun, called attention to the gaping shortfall in Police personnel, which inevitably puts the policing ratio at 1 to 1000 citizens, as against the UN benchmark of 1- 400 persons.
Similarly, according to the Chief of the Nigerian Air Force, Hassan Abubakar, the rising cost of Jet-A1, or aviation fuel, and the mismatch between its present price of N1, 050 per litre and the N360 budgeted for it, is an operational challenge.The armed services, according to him, does not have a different foreign exchange market or regime for the ease of procurement of their fighting equipment.
Given the worst case scenario submissions of the Service Chiefs, it is clear that the road to redemption is still long, made so by the failure of leadership over the years.
The Service Chiefs also said Nigeria would have by now destroyed the terrorism financing ring fuelling its insurgencies if the 400 terror financiers that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), helped it to identify in April 2021 were prosecuted in tandem with anti-terrorism law.
Recall that in the UAE, Messrs Abubakar Ado Musa, Salihu Yusuf Adamu, Bashir Ali Yusuf, Mohammed Ibrahim Isa, Ibrahim Ali Alhasan and Surajo Abubakar Muhammad were promptly arrested, put on trial and convicted. In one fell swoop, they transferred $782,000 from Dubai to Nigeria. While Salihu Adamu received a life sentence, Surajo and others were slammed with 10-year jail terms each. Ironically, more than two-and-a-half years later, Nigeria is still shielding them. Observers say duplicity such as this will affect whatever remedy the N3.25 trillion in the 2024 budget for security is set to achieve.
These contradictions give amplitude to the concerns expressed by the military chiefs.
So, it gets to a stage where the security forces are not even willing to do anything, one of them starkly told members of the House of Representatives.
