This is our first edition in 2024. We thank God, the Most High for letting us see this day and may we wish all our numerous readers and loved ones a prosperous New Year.
Security is the most essential of any purpose of government. It is important because whenever a person dies, his thoughts, dreams, visions, perish. Anytime I visit any Nigerian burial ground and see the number of very promising young men and women cut short in their primes by accidents, bandits, insurgents, terrorists, kidnappers, armed robbers, ritualists, religious fundamentalists, separatist agitators, depression related suicides as a result of harsh economic environment, I weep, because lying with them in those graves are lost hopes and aspirations. I doubt whether the spirit of those young souls are actually resting in peace especially when they realise that most of them were sentenced to their early graves by the incompetence and corruption of their leaders who used their blood as manure to fertilise their selfishness and inordinate desire for primitive accumulation of wealth and power.
During elections, they will be used as thugs to rig elections and be killed while the children of politicians are abroad studying. During insurgency, they will be used as suicide bombers after being drugged to go to paradise early in their lives and receive 7 virgins with pointed breasts, while their leaders remain on earth marrying many wives to enjoy themselves on earth. They will be used by separatists to stone the armed forces and be shot dead while the separatists flee abroad to use their blood to raise money from unsuspecting public for their pleasure. They will be used as kidnappers and bandits burrowing in forests and be killed by the armed forces while their negotiators will be flying on first class with their entire family to the choicest cities in the world. They will be used as herdsmen and be given AK 47 to kill farmers and indigenes and be killed while their sponsors will relax at home and take over the territories which they acquired with their blood by sacking the farmers and indigenes. And so on. Shameful!
Tackling security problem is very easy. Governor of Plateau State said it’s lack of political will on the part of government that is making the task of tackling insecurity intractable. This is because everyone knows where the assailants come from, they know the reason for their attacks yet they are not stopped before the attacks. The solution is simple. The Inspector-General of Police said he needs about 190 thousand additional police officers. Please give them to him or increase the number of the police reasonably. The present number of the police may not be enough to confront the security challenges of the nation. In Plateau, on the eve of christmas, 36 distress calls were received by the police command in Plateau from three different LGAs attacking 23 villages, burning 221 houses and eventually killing more than 200 people including women and children. This requires battalions of members of armed forces to contain. More intelligence is needed and this entails more hands and technology in the intelligence department. Above all, state police should be allowed immediately and while waiting for the necessary legal amendments of the Constitution to allow state police, every state, local government and community should be allowed to establish their own security outfit by whatever name called to defend their people from the hands of the marauders.
Gov Caleb of Plateau failed woefully in defending his people by choosing rather to be a weeping boy rather than a brave soldier to defend his people. The late Gov Akeredolu established Amotekun with all the other states in the South-West to confront the assassins, terrorists and kidnappers that were ravaging South-West then. Today South-West registers the least incidences of insecurity than all other Geo-Political Zones. He was a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) who understood that by law, he was the Chief Security Officer of his state and must use every means to defend his people. The Constitution gave him that right and he exploited it to secure his people. Section 11(1) provides that “The National Assembly may make laws for the Federation or any part therefore with respect to the maintenance and securing of public safety and public order …” while 11(2) provides that “Nothing in this section shall preclude a House of Assembly from making laws with respect to the matter referred to in this section ….” Where there is any urgency in the protection of the lives of a people and there’s no already made law by the House of Assembly, the Governor has the power to use executive orders to operate pending the enactment of the necessary laws by the House of Assembly. In the defence of human lives, seeing that life has no duplicate, history will forgive the governor for taking wrong decisions but will not forgive him for taking no decision at all.
The Governor of Texas in the United States of America, seeing that the influx of migrants is threatening the security of his state, and believing that the Federal Government of Biden is not doing enough to contain it, encouraged the Texas legislature to make a law granting him the right to arrest the migrants. They did. This prompted the Biden administration to head to court to challenge the law. Even if he loses in the court, he has succeeded in increasing the awareness of the problem to the world. No responsible governor should fold his hands and allow his people to be murdered in cold blood on the excuse that the Federal Government has exclusive power over the security forces. The present government may not have what it takes to defend the people because it may not summon the political will to be blind to ethnicity, religion, and politics, which are the condition precedent for a successful war against insecurity. A government that appointed the Minister of Defence and the Minister of State for Defence from the same neighbouring states in the same Geo-Political Zone, and appointed all the Service Chiefs without one single officer from the North Central is not serious in tackling the security challenges of that Geo-Political Zone. It doesn’t appear also that this government will advocate for state police because state capturers enjoy totalitarian powers and are always reluctant to share their powers with subregional governments.
At the root of these insecurity is economic hardship and poverty. It does not appear that a well educated man with gainful employment will prefer to leave his comfort zone to enlist with the bandits and terrorists and take up abode with them in the forests to torment his fellow citizens for money which he already has access to through gainful employment. This places a huge burden on the government to tackle the economic problems of the country, starting with defending the value of the naira. The currency of a country is the determinant of the value of the welfare and property of the people. A government that is unmindful of defending the value of the naira cannot make a success of any economic policy. There’s nothing magical about strong currency because strong currency is predicated on strong economy and strong economy presupposes an industrial productive base and a steady export market.
The present strategy of depreciating the naira to match the value of the naira in the black market is akin to the government endorsing and joining the bandits to defraud Nigerians. It’s like saying if the government cannot beat them, the government should join them to exploit Nigerians. The solution is that the government should shore up the value of naira by banning importation of unproductive luxurious items or goods that can be locally manufactured, and support the value of naira by creating conducive environment for production which include: stable electricity supply, security of lives and property, availability of capital, affordable price for petrol, diesel, kerosene etc, lands for farmers, building and repairing physical infrastructures, human capital development, honest and efficient civil service and so on. More than 200 notable foreign companies operating in Nigeria like GSK and P & G had left Nigeria from 2015 because of lack of these amenities. Labour unions should protest more to increase the quality of naira in their possession, not the quantity, because insisting on continual increase in quantity will prompt the government to continue printing more valueless naira for them to assuage their demands which will be worthless on getting to them as inflation, which results from more naira chasing fewer goods, would have rendered their agitation useless. There’s no alternative to building a production centered economy.
If this government wants to succeed, it must cut the cost of governance and fight corruption. It’s not late for it to reduce the number of Ministers to about 37 Ministers, remove completely, budgetary allocations to non-constitutional entities that have no identifiable constitutional duties and functions. Spending more than N5b for the office of the first lady, N20b and N15b to renovate the houses of Chief of Staff and Vice-President respectively, spending N6b to build car parks for the National Assembly members, N5b for unapproved presidential yacht, and so on in these unproductive ventures during this austere period seem more like legitimising corruption and waste than improving the productive capacity of the country.
Fighting corruption should not be limited to political enemies of the government. If the government is serious in fighting corruption, it should sack everyone in the Humanitarian Ministry and close the ministry entirely. The ministry from inception is an arena to siphon money for politicians. Whether it’s called school feeding programme, anchor borrower funds, trader money, etc, they are fake. There’s no authentic data to monitor any spending in this ministry. If 1000 children are fed in the name of 1,000,000 children, how will the President know? What is the rational in feeding school children who sit on the floor under the trees to learn because they don’t have classrooms or seats. Good enough that Emefiele was arrested, where are all his accomplices? To succeed in the fight against corruption, everyone, irrespective of his status, ethnicity, religion, language, political persuasion, must be equal before the law. If this government is serious in fighting corruption, it can recover from corrupt politicians and Nigerians the money it may need to run its entire budget for four years. Yes, it’s that terrible.