Indices of Failure: Insecurity and the Peter Obi Solution 2

While there have been several lamentations by Nigerians regarding the manner in which the APC federal government has handled insecurity, one outstanding complaint is that of lack of responsiveness. Nigerians have persistently complained about how long it often takes security agents to arrive at the scene of a terror attack. This is largely because the Nigerian security agencies are understaffed, under-equipped and under-trained. Peter Obi has, in various interviews, demonstrated the disparity between the personnel strength of the Nigerian Police and that of other African countries like Egypt.
In a recent interview with the BBC Focus on Africa, Obi laid out his approach to tackling insecurity. “We have to review and restructure the entire security architecture, make it responsive and responsible,” he said.
To achieve responsiveness, not only is Obi proposing to increase the personnel strength of the Nigerian Police and other security agencies. He also promises to decentralise policing in Nigeria, and make a constitutional provision for state governments to recruit, train, arm and command state police within their jurisdictions. This will make state governors true security officers of their states. It will banish, once and for all, the current embarrassing mere school-perfect arrangement, in which 36 state governors have to depend on the goodwill of one man in Abuja for security deployment in their domains. In Nigeria in the past seven years, that man has been a Commander-in-Chief who spent half his time in office being shocked and the other half being unaware.
The creation of state police will also have other corollary advantages. It will engender more trust in the local police by the citizens, because the majority of its personnel will be indigenes of those states. Apart from their pay, they will have the added motivation of defending their localities from murderous invaders of the kind that have been having seamless advancement southward from the Sahel. Also, the state police will be persons who are familiar with the terrain, understand its risks, and who can distill local policing methods to handle local security needs.
Obi is also promising Nigerians a responsible security system. “Responsible is that someone is in charge, and if you are not doing it, you don’t stay: you go,” he explained in that BBC interview. Over the past seven years of Buhari’s presidency, there have been no consequences for failure or even negligence. The Commander-in-Chief has been so satisfied with the performance of his appointees that he has not found any reason to fire any of them, not even after several intelligence reports were ignored on the Kuje jailbreak that saw the escape of high-profile terrorists. Obi is going to change that. People will no longer hold positions like mere chieftaincy titles with no attached obligations in particular.
More fundamentally, Peter Obi is promising to adopt a holistic approach to the security situation. He believes that insecurity broadly derives from two motives – poverty and organised crime. After dealing with organised crime by restructuring the security system, he is offering to turn the country from “consumption to production.” The ensuing economic revolution will produce massive jobs, pull Nigerians out of poverty, and end hunger-induced insecurity.
Concluded.