Insecurity: Let’s borrow from Iraq’s experience
One of the best selling points of Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 was his ruthlessness in dealing with security issues during his military career. A particular point of reference was his prompt response in giving the Chadian military a bloody nose for encroaching into Nigerian territory and killing five soldiers without him waiting for the orders […]
One of the best selling points of Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 was his ruthlessness in dealing with security issues during his military career. A particular point of reference was his prompt response in giving the Chadian military a bloody nose for encroaching into Nigerian territory and killing five soldiers without him waiting for the orders of President Shehu Shagari. Even though his action created a diplomatic demarche with the Chadian government, it was celebrated in Nigeria as heroic patriotism.
Having secured the mandate of Nigerian voters to become president on the platform of the APC in 2015, the realities of the deep rot in the country’s institutions became manifest. The military, police and other security agencies inherited by his administration, were merely glorified boy’s scouts with a dearth of modern training and equipment, ebbing morale and inadequate in numbers to effectively rout the scourge of insecurity within a short period.
Given the aforementioned drawbacks, the Buhari government, rather than expose the weakness of the Nigerian military to the outside world by engaging the services of foreign private military contractors to tackle insecurity, took the patriotic stand to rebuild the military and the police through exposure to modern training and equipment, improving welfare packages and more recruitment which still remain largely inadequate and overstretched to hold the ground in tackling the scale of terrorist killings in rural communities, jailbreaks and kidnappings for ransom that have reached an epic proportion.
Although the military in the last one month has been able to some extent to decimate the terrorists and kidnappers, none of the well-known, notorious bandits such as Dogo Gide, Turji, Alero, Dangote, Dankarami etc has been taken out by the security forces and as such, these men of the underworld continue to spread to other parts of the country and wreak havoc on the citizens.
Therefore, it is pertinent and expedient for the president to consider the inevitable option of mobilising other critical security architecture in the states behind the security agencies to have the numbers to bring to a halt, the hydra-headed monster of insecurity, in an octopus operation before year-end, so that Nigerians can sleep with their two eyes closed.
To this end, it’s imperative to borrow a leaf from how Iraq was able to defeat the notorious Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS) which has an affiliate in Nigeria (ISWAP). The Islamic State terrorist group started in Iraq in 2011 as Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
It went underground and metamorphosed into a much more dreaded group known as the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The group went berserk around Iraqi cities, towns and villages, destroying monuments, religious shrines, UNESCO heritage sites, killing and abducting women and girls as slaves etc. while the Iraqi security forces were handicapped in terms of numbers and equipment to stop the devastating menace.
However, by 2017, the Iraqi government mobilised the Kurds and other local militias with the necessary weapons supplied by the United States to fight alongside the military with the sole aim to outnumber the terrorists and defeat them while the US provided air support.
By December of 2017, the Iraqi prime minister had announced the defeat of ISIS and the local militias were converted to community security watchdogs in order to prevent any other terrorist group from springing up, and generally reduce the crime rate in the neighbourhoods.
In the same vein, President Muhammadu Buhari should summon an emergency security meeting with the governors with the view of giving the various state security outfits the required training in weapons handling and the rules of engagement and arming them alongside the security forces to simultaneously take the battle to the terrorists in the forests and defeat them before the end of the year.
After the successful end of the operation, the states’ security outfits should be confined to the forest areas to make them free of terrorists, kidnappers, cultists, and any other criminal groups and above all, provide the necessary security to our farmers to produce more food for the country, engender food sufficiency and stem the tide of food inflation.
As the president has said, he would bequeath a lasting legacy to his successor. Such a legacy should not only be in the conduct of free, fair, credible and acceptable elections but should also include a very peaceful and secure country.
Abubakar Mundir is a researcher, can be reached via [email protected]