Heightening insecurity

THREE different incidents over the past week bring home the creeping danger to life and property across the country. On Wednesday, March 31, unknown gunmen stormed a political gathering at Isuofia, Aguata Local Government Area (LGA) of Anambra State where former Governor of the Central Bank (CBN), Professor Charles Soludo, was holding an interactive session with youths in the community. The gunmen killed three police officers and apparently abducted another person. Mr. Soludo, who may have been the primary target of the assailants, was lucky to escape unhurt.

On the same day, and this time in a different part of the country, heavily armed gunmen numbering in the hundreds invaded the camp of the Joint Security Task Force comprising men of the Nigerian Army, Nigeria Police, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and vigilantes at Allawa, Niger State, killing several soldiers and abducting an unknown number of persons. Two days earlier, on Monday March 29, rampaging herdsmen had reportedly unleashed a reign of terror on the people of Egedegede, Obegu and Amuzu, all in Ishielu Local Government Area (LGA) of Ebonyi State, killing a Methodist priest and 17 others.

To say that these killings are egregious does not begin to capture the seriousness of the security situation in the country, and it takes no genius to surmise that they represent dots on a downward spiral that has thrown majority of Nigerians into palpable anxiety. To give an indication: in the first six weeks of this year alone, no fewer than 1,525 Nigerians were killed in different parts of the country, with causes ranging from the Boko Haram terrorism, to banditry, attacks by herdsmen, kidnapping, communal clashes, armed robbery, and extrajudicial action by law enforcement. According to Global Rights Nigeria, a human rights non-governmental organisation (NGO), the figure of 1,525 deaths is roughly half of the 3,188 total lives lost in the whole of 2019.

Like most Nigerians, we are deeply troubled by this ugly trend and call on state officials at all levels to put necessary resources at the disposal of law enforcement in order to arrest the deteriorating situation. Campaigning for a second term in 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari made all the right noises about squelching rising insecurity in the country, and it would seem as if many Nigerians in fact took him at his word. This is what makes his administration’s literal abandonment of its post even more maddening. Ponderous to the point of debility, President Buhari has refused to budge even as the people he took an oath to protect are slaughtered in their thousands.

It is also striking that having failed to protect the people during attacks by bandits and nomadic herdsmen, officers and men of the military and the police have become targets of the outlaws who are apparently now moving from soft to hard targets. For a long time, as herdsmen, bandits and other outlaws heightened their murderous onslaughts on law-abiding citizens, killing them for sport, the security agencies looked the other way, which further emboldened the felons in their criminal pursuits. Apart from Soludo’s police orderlies, soldiers and policemen were killed in Ebonyi and other places, and their vehicles burnt. The battle is now on the doorsteps of the men in uniform.

The situation across the country demonstrates the fact that whatever the service chiefs are currently doing is not what is needed to restore normalcy. They are merely promising to deal with criminals without taking decisive action. How do you say you are dealing with bandits when they are not dying? When United States forces came after terrorists in Niger Republic recently, they killed them all. Conversely, in Nigeria, the government continues to dignify terrorists by negotiating with them all the time. The situation is now so bad that in Minna, Niger State, people are now being kidnapped in their homes.

We hope that this government will not wait until law and order completely collapses before it rouses itself from its ungainly repose.

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