DSS: Insecurity Threat to 2019 Elections
The Director General of the Department of State Services (DSS), Lawal Daura, has identified insecurity as a major threat to the 2019 general election in the country.
Daura made this submission at a presentation he made before the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on the Review of the Current Security Infrastructure in Nigeria headed by the Senate Leader, Senator Ahmad Lawan.
Presenting the committee’s 38page report at the Senate Plenary yesterday, Lawan said Daura, while appearing before his committee, raised the alarm over the bleak outlook of the 2019 general election “with all the hate speeches and insecurity prevailing in the polity.”
He quoted the DSS boss as saying “the country is getting more divided like never before due to the lack of synergy between the traditional institutions and the security agencies, as well as hate speeches that have dominated the political space.”
Lawan further said the other security chiefs who appeared before the committee spoke in the same vein.
He explained that the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Yusuf Buratai, on his part, identified the country’s major security challenges to include Boko Haram threats, militancy, cultism, secessionist and extremist groups ,inter-ethnic, religious and communal violence.
Buratai was also said to have identified impediments to combating internal security challenges to include absence of governance and ungoverned space, inadequate intelligence information sharing mechanisms among security agencies, inadequate resourcing of security agencies, administration of criminal justice system, porous borders and poor border controls, poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunities and cultural and social impediments.
Lawan said the committee observed that the security agencies require professional skills, equipment ant technology to contain security issues adding that agencies lack critical equipment and where they exist they are obsolete.
According to him, the Committee thereafter came up with an 18-point recommendation which include identification of poverty as a constant threat to national security and that government should ensure its reduction.
“Nigeria’s growing population will challenge anti-poverty strategies to a point where national security will be severely compromised unless the economy is radically improved at this stage and in future.”
Lawan also stressed that the nation’s basic security infrastructure requires comprehensive review with the political structure being a major factor in the review as well as the nature of the challenges the nation faces.
Other recommendations include the need to isolate current security challenges from political partisanship, narrow political interests and ethno- religious sentiments. The report also emphasised that the basic structure in the management of national security should be revisited by the Presidency to address weaknesses in co-ordination, collaboration and synergy.
“All the country security assets are dangerously stressed by current security challenges and there is the need to increase the size of of the Nigeria police, the military and other para- military agencies,” he said.
The committee also identified the existence of millions of Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, in the North East and millions of young uneducated people as potential threats to the present and future security of the nation.