National Coordinator, ‘Financing Safe Schools Initiative’, Mrs. Halima Iliya, says plans are underway to actively engage hunters and vigilantes on intelligence gathering to curb attacks on schools across the country.
The National Coordinator, who gave this indication in an interview with newsmen yesterday in Abuja, said that aggressive community engagements and sensitisation of students, parents and teachers will kick off in the second quarter of the year.
She said, “As a component of the plan, for states with local vigilantes, we intend to train their hunters, vigilantes and volunteers while for states without registered vigilantes, we intend to advocate to use youths.
“Youths will volunteer to protect their communities because we cannot achieve anything within a community without their involvement. We will bring them to the security architecture for them to defend and protect their communities in the areas of intelligence-gathering, prevention and detection deterrent capabilities”, Iliya said.
She disclosed that there are plans to also use the platform of the National Orientation Agency (NOA) because of their presence in all the local government areas.
She said they will be used to reach out to the grassroots by developing some training manuals that could be converted to local dialects of communities for efficient communication.
Commandant-General (CG), Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), said the Corps, being the lead agency in the protection of schools, is dedicated to ensuring that schools are adequately protected in collaboration with other security agencies.
“That is why the three Cs; coordination, cooperation and collaboration cannot be over-emphasised, as this has yielded results amongst security agencies in recent operations so I think we are on the right track”, he said.
According to Audi, because the NSCDC regulates the operations of Private Guard Companies (PGCs), they have been leveraged to contribute their quota to the security architecture of the country by providing intelligence reports.
He said that the Corps had introduced the School Community Security Vanguard which has a non-kinetic approach in engaging communities, parents/teachers associations, traditional rulers and youth leaders in various communities to discuss security issues.
