OUR ALARMING INSECURITY

Oru Leonard 

To be fair, by the time President Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office on May 29th 2023, insurgency, acts of terror, banditry and kidnappings had lingered for a record fourteen years.

In the same vein, these acts of terror had, at the time, held nearly all the geopolitical zones in the North in their chokehold.

On President Tinubu’s watch, conscious efforts were made to increase budgetary allocations to the country’s defense, and by extension, our Armed Forces.

Hundreds of Nigerians abducted by terrorists and gunmen had been freed by our security agencies, the latest being the abductees from Ngoshe, Borno State. Several terror kingpins have been neutralized while a few have surrendered to our gallant Armed Forces.

By the same token, the Tinubu administration has brought the issue of the creation of State Police to the front burner.

Additionally, the government has declared a state of emergency on security and it has proceeded on a recruitment and training binge of Forest Guards. The terrorists hide in our forests, in their numbers, and they scurry their victims into them.

In spite of these salutary efforts, insurgency has spread beyond the North. It has strayed to the South West. As this piece is being authored, Learners,

Students and Teachers, recently abducted in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State are still in captivity.

Even though humongous amounts are being budgeted for the defense area, and with media hype and flourish, these sums are hardly appropriated or made available as per recent undisputed and un refuted reports.

Even as hundreds are being freed from the dens of these terrorists, hundreds more are being abducted with a daring and frequency that beggars belief and comprehension. Apart from the school children and Teachers abducted in Oyo State, another set was abducted, by a curious coincidence, on the same day,(May 15th) at Mussa, Askira-Uba-Uba, Borno State. These abductions were to serve as a prelude to atrocious others in Kogi State were students were writing their West African Examination Council(WAEC) and at the Federal Polytechnic, Kaura Namoda, Zamfara State.

As if these were not bad enough, gunmen attacked Nigeria’s foremost Institute, the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies(NIPSS) at Kuru, Jos, Plateau State, on Monday 15th June 2026, killing two soldiers and a police officer.

Worse, the country continues to be fed on a daily gory diet of abductions and killings particularly in Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Plateau and most recently, Oyo State, where the sister of a former Minister and two of her children were abducted. The most searing, and probably the most wicked, was the recent death in captivity of Major-General Abubakar Rabe(Rtd).

The security situation has become so dire that hitherto reticent and reserved Nigerians are shrilly calling the government to be alert to its constitutional responsibilities of safeguarding the lives and properties of Nigerians. Only recently, a group of ten Nigerians, led by Professors Ibrahim Gambari, Attahiru Jega and Jibrin Ibrahim, identified insecurity as one of the major threats to the country.

Our religious leaders too have found recourse in their bully pulpits to call strident attention to the alarming security situation in the country. The Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, in a message to mark the Islamic New Year directed Imams leading the five daily congregational prayers across the country to recite Qunootun-Nawazil, a prayer traditionally reserved by Muslim faithfuls for periods of calamity and distress.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria(CBCN) said while celebrating the 90th birthday of Emeritus Archbishop of the Lagos Archdiocese, Cardinal Anthony Okogie, that:”Everyday, we hear of people being kidnapped, soldiers being ambushed and killed, communities displaced and traditional rulers fleeing their domains. It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand what is happening in our country.”

If the aforesaid speak eloquently to both despair and dismay, they urgently summon the government to rise stalwartly to the challenge of our heightened insecurity.

Resources required by our Armed Forces should be made available to them forthwith. With their stellar pedigree in many war theaters, within and outside the country, we have full confidence in their ability to deliver. Let them be equipped with requisite state of the art military gear and be highly motivated.

It is one thing to declare a state of emergency on security. It is another to match its pronouncement with unwavering commitment and political will. Instead of the government to summon these qualities, it seems nearly obsessed with perpetuating itself in office. Members of the opposition are either coerced or corralled into the governing party.

A lot of energy and precious resources are being dissipated on this endeavor rather than focusing on security and other urgent concerns such as the economy and the power sector. In this misguided immersion, the government soon forgets that the easiest way for it to etch itself in the consciousness of the people and to endear itself to them is to secure their lives and to impact positively on them.

In this respect, the governors are complicit. They have also not helped matters. In spite of the ghastly monthly allocations they receive from the federation account in the aftermath of the withdrawal of subsidy on petrol, seldom do they invest their largesse on constructing rural roads, schools, hospitals, providing portable water or creating jobs for our youths. Most have elected to devote these huge sums on white elephant and prestige projects such as Government Houses and Fly-over bridges in their state capitals.

The consequences are writ large. There is now a serious disconnect between the governments(Federal and State) and the people. Rural roads are decrepit and impassable. This makes transporting foodstuffs, men and women an uphill task. The insurgents, who often use motorcycles, exploit our infrastructure deficits to attack, abduct and kill vulnerable rural folks with abandon.

 

They know that help will hardly come for their helpless victims. Or if they will come at all, it will take almost forever.
Destitute and severely deprived, rural folks, understandably, do not feel a sense of belonging. In such a circumstance, they are bereft of patriotism and are not obligated to provide information regarding the terrorists menacing their lives. After all, our governments have since abandoned them. If anything, some of them, ironically, find comfort in the terrorists and are, in the absence of government presence, prepared to pay tax imposed by these loathsome terrorists.

Our governments must realize that to win the war on terror, our Armed Forces must not only take the war decisively to the insurgents and bandits, we must, at the same time, deliberately succor and take care of our people, hundreds of millions of which are hurting and are impoverished.

It is only then that we can demand, and the people will be forthcoming with the much needed intelligence our security agencies require to act. After all, and to parody a well-worn saying, these terrorists are not spirits. They are human! And the people at the receiving end of their wickedness know their ways and wiles.