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The National Assembly has been busy legislating on the delicate subject of insecurity in the last 16 years, but without commensurate return on investment.• 63,111 killed in Buhari’s era, 7,582 under Tinubu
The House of Representatives’ resolution last week that citizens be allowed to bear arms and ammunition in defence against banditry and criminality tells the story of how deep-seated the peoples’ frustration has become in terms of insecurity. Among the bills passed are some N12 trillion worth of appropriation acts, including supplementary budgets in at least 20 different legislative processes. It was a period of massive work on legislative processes targeted at hastily ending the insecurity saga that claimed 756 lives during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration; 63,111 in Muhammadu Buhari’s regime and 7,582 lives so far in the administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
This is in addition to the parliament’s condemnation of other killings across the country, which was entirely an update on an earlier motion sponsored by former governor of Zamfara State, Abdulaziz Yari, in which he disclosed that a total of 155 persons were killed by bandits in 21 communities in the last two weeks.
He believes that more funds are required to tackle issues of inadequate weaponry and obsolete equipment, as well as welfare for military and security personnel, in addition to boosting the intelligence capacity of security agencies. In 2018, N576.31 billion was allocated to defence and N157.71 billion was set aside for capital expenditure. By 2019, the allocation to defence increased to N589.9 billion, and the operation in the Northeast codenamed ‘Lafiya Dole’ got N75 billion, while N159.10 billion was set aside for capital expenditure.
In 2018, President Buhari authorised the withdrawal of $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account, out of which $496 million was used to order 12 Tucano fighter jets. Senators Stella Odua, Uche Ekwunife, Sani Musa, Eyinnaya Abaribe, Salisbury Abdullahi, Betty Apiafi, Biodun Olujimi, Obinna Ogba, George Sekibo, were very useful in the sponsorship of security related legislations.
And when it became very imperative, the two chambers had resolutions after separate security summits to among others urgently overhaul and reorganise the country’s security architecture. In order to increase the capacity of the Nigerian police, military and other paramilitary agencies to respond to national security issues, the summit asked the federal government to ensure that there is further recruitment in these organisations.
Analysis of details of the 64,142 persons killed within the period showed that in the six years that Jonathan presided over the affairs of Nigeria, some 756 persons were killed. He said the 63,111 death tolls are conservative because only reported cases from multiple sources were included. And many cases are under-reported or not reported at all.
“The Nigerian authorities are obliged under international human rights law, regional human rights treaties and Nigeria’s own constitution to protect the human rights of all people without discrimination — and that includes the right to life. Those suspected of criminal responsibility for these callous crimes must urgently be brought to justice in fair trials.”
“If there were enough men on the ground like about 100 well-armed policemen, this kind of thing would not be happening.” He added, “These things have their roots in the very serious security architecture that we inherited over a long period of time. We have to look at these issues from a historical perspective.
The committee observed that there are very ill-defined operational boundaries and overlapping jurisdictions among the security services leading to confusion in priority setting, platform acquisition, training, direction and general orientation. “The law governing the operation of the three intelligence agencies i.e. Department of State Services , National Intelligence Agency and Defence Intelligence Agency is very defective and clearly responsible for the failure to define their functions, boundaries and relationships with one another.”
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