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On May 9, 2019, I wrote a piece in this column, “Where are MD Abubakar drones?” I disclosed how the Nigeria Police, under MD Abubakar as Inspector-General at the time, initiated the idea by introducing the new technology known as the drone in the area of crime detection and other security activities. Suffice it to add that the idea never metamorphosed to any tangible account neither did it see the light of day.
As it has always been in Nigeria, great ideas that would be beneficial to all are usually toyed with and buried only to be exhumed when problems confront the country. The earliest drone technology was the unmanned aerial vehicle seen in 1839, when Austrian soldiers attacked the city of Venice with unmanned balloons filled with explosives. According to history, the invention of winged aircraft changed everything for manned and unmanned vehicles alike. Today, drones have undergone many technological reformations that have made them adaptable for various uses.
Drones can carry sensing equipment to assist with any number of functions, they are used for motion picture and filmmaking, and can be deployed in oil, gas, and mineral exploration. Drone technology can be used during disaster relief, construction and aerial surveillance. When states like Lagos, Kaduna and others recently showed interest in acquiring this technology to assist in solving insecurity, we were informed that the guidelines issued by the office of the National Security Adviser made it so stringent that many states abandoned the idea. One had expected that, by now, both the police, army and air force would have acquired many of these drones instead of the state governments. Should state governments need them for any purpose, they can access them through any of the afore mentioned security institutions that are even located in the six geo-political zones.
Had the federal government moved faster in decentralising the police through the introduction of state police, the insecurity palaver in the country today would have been nipped in the bud. That would have been scored as pro-activeness on the part of our security agencies, instead of our usual combative stand.
Drones would have enormously assisted in the tracking down of kidnappers and rampaging herdsmen. When the drone is deployed, it gets the correct axis and location of either the kidnappers or the killer herdsmen via the aerial surveillance camera installed in the drone. The information can then be utilised by the ground troops. Putting stringent measures in acquiring technology like drone helps in suffocating the security agencies by leaving them with the same old method of fighting crime, instead of opening up their horizon. Unfortunately, for the Office of the National Security Adviser, many online marketing shops display dromes for sale. In fact, precision flight technology drones can be purchased online and delivered to your doorstep with ease. Although there are drones and there are also drones, when the Buhari administration told Nigerians of its intention to embrace the state police system in 2017, many had believed and hoped that before long, its implementation would have by now been completed. Rather what we are noticing is a face-vault from the presidency. After two years of announcing its intention to restructure the police, the Presidency, like a confused child, has picked up the community policing system.
Whichever system is introduced, there must be organisational restructuring whereby the state commissioners would completely be in charge of their command and be supervised by an Assistant Inspector General of Police. When the chain of command is restructured, other organisational issues would be settled. The question is why would an officer be posted from Lagos to Sokoto when he cannot speak the language and does not know anything about the culture and tradition? Lagos, like any other state, is large enough for transfer a police officer for effective administrative and operational arrangement. The federal force, which would have federal might, is to be constituted by personnel drawn from all the states and should be under the IGP, who should be the political appointee of a constituted body, not the President. Likewise the state commissioner is appointed by a constituted body in the state. By this system, security issues emanating from each state are handled by the state commissioners who have sworn to protect the life and property of the people of that state. State policing is the in-thing all over the world. Community policing can only thrive where state police system is in place.
A situation where the people know the police officer and the police officer lives among them and knows his people, at a glance, he can detect who is a stranger in his area of jurisdiction. Not what we have today where a police officer is alien to the environment he is supposed to secure.
When state police system embraces community policing, criminals are easily detected. Criminals find it difficult to nest and perpetrate their plan. Kidnappers cannot operate the way they are operating today because both the people and the police would not give them breathing space. Same with security issues that emanated with Niger Delta militants, Boko Haram terrorists, Odua People Congress (OPC), Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), herdsmen and other related insurrections. They would have been the state security issues to be roundly tackled by the state security apparatus. None of these would have turned to a national issue. The same with other criminal tendencies. With state police, injustice will be drastically reduced and policing would be truly the professional friend of the people, not criminals in society.
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SECURITY ADVICE !!!
* To store and access your security emergency numbers on your phone, simply store the security numbers as “AAA”. This will enable you access the number easily. ( by AIG Wilson lnalegwu)
*Report any strange activities in your community or around you to the security office nearest to you.
