Tackling The Security Conundrum
It is beyond the enforcement of law and order, argues Charles Onunaiju
The growing calls to establish unorthodox security measures to contain the worsening security situation in the country implies that the current security challenges in the country flow majorly from the lapses in the enforcement of law and order. The South West state governments acting purportedly in the best security interests of the people of the region have set up a security outfit tagged “Amotekun”, launched with fanfare with regional command in Ibadan. A section of some elements in the North has launched a similar security outfit.
Most likely, other zones in the country would follow the pattern of establishing regional security outfits to protect lives and property within their domain. All these regional security initiatives are purported to fill the gap in the enforcement of law and order, with the ultimate aim to guarantee lives and property of citizens.
Beyond the drive for regional security initiatives, calls have gone out for government to remodel its security framework, though, according to the perspectives of its proponents, this would only consist in the shake-up of the top echelon of the country’s formal key security institutions.
In addition, loud calls have also gone out for community policing, a major vocabulary in the current raging discourse on the country’s security challenges, but which, if soberly deconstructed, amount to very little in substance, because it is difficult to imagine what the over hyped community police can do, that the current federal police is not doing in the local domains.
However, the assumptions behind the vociferous calls for all manner of unorthodox security initiatives to fill the gaps in the purported failings in law and order enforcement is seriously deficient and even misleading to the understanding of the current existential security challenges in the country.
Firstly, a social order perverted by structural exclusion with an entrenched road block to social mobility is condemned to structural disorder in which law enforcement can be nothing but barely rudimentary.
The pool of untapped manpower ignored and left to boil over deepens the crisis of structural social exclusion with the consequence of a growing reserve of the discontents, standing perilously and tendentiously on the free flowing slope to crime and other anti-social vices. Actually no army in the world or any other security organization, including a hundred regional security outfits can arrest the inexorable drift to the sliding slope to crimes, including insurgencies.
The truth is that assorted strata and formation of the Nigerian elite most vociferous in the current alarm of the national security quagmire are culpable in its making. With a huge sense of entitlement, they have taken out and still take out from the total social pool, disproportional share of the commonwealth with little consideration for any mechanism for replenishing and multiplying the stock, the only guarantee for an enduring social order. The embarrassing state of the current security imbroglio in the country cannot be blamed alone on the failure of existing national security institutions to cope with the incremental breakdown in law and order and the uncanny impunity with which marauders and other anti-social elements breach security. The desperate calls and even rush to set up regional security outfits testify to the misguided national penchant to treat outcomes instead of fundamental causes. And more importantly, it suits the culpable elite and their narrative that the spate of insecurity is only a failure of the country’s security institutions to muscularly enforce law and order. Their notorious avarice and corruption that have dried up critical investments in strategic sectors that is germane to an inclusive social order is the fundamental cause in the upsurge in crime, banditry and kidnapping.
Traditional rulers that accept public funds to such personal conveniences like guest houses outside their domains, charted aircraft for routine local runs, religious leaders that scoop huge revenues from tithes and other offerings and pour it into prestigious auditoriums, property speculations, luxurious private aircraft and politicians that yank away unconscionable sums from the national pool to fund their next elections and other out of this world luxuries, along with bureaucratic parasites who lay siege at the public service arena to the nation’s dwindling resources are variously and collectively culpable to the current spate of insecurity.
The unconscionable consumables procured with public funds for personal convenience deprive vital investments in critical sectors that would generate employment and create a valuechain that can considerably reduce the number of our youthful population, most vulnerable to crime and other anti-social vices.
Additionally, the new national craze of wedding, naming and birthday parties to hold in Dubai should interest the tax authorities, where at least 10% of the total spending on such parties should be plunged into the social insurance pool to fund investments in employment-generating schemes.
Muscularly enforcing law and order to reduce the spate of the current insecurity is admirable but is certainly not enough. The various levels of government, especially the state and local governments must take measures like establishing skill acquisition centers, entrepreneurial training centers, farm settlements, small scale industrial processing plants to engage the burgeoning pool of idle manpower that naturally mutate and drift to crimes and other anti-social vices, without constructive engagement to positive endeavors. Huge financial outlay that would be channeled to regional security outfits can usefully be deployed to critical investment in skill acquisition and establishing secondary industrial processing plants, which would in turn create value chains that could turn potential criminals to prospective entrepreneurs.
National security cannot only consist merely in the enforcement of law and order, but also in the conscious and deliberate cultivation of an inclusive socio-economic order, where equal opportunities are elaborately offered to all citizens to usefully engage their individual talents and abilities. In fact law and order is more efficiently enforced where majority of citizens are freely privy to a social consensus and voluntarily networked to its defence, unlike the tall order in law enforcement where unwilling majority is being bullied and dragged to acquiesce to a social contraption.
Also recent calls to sack the hierarchy of the security institutions, especially the military will bring little or no value to the security situation. While there may be other serious reasons to sack the service chiefs, the assumptions that their sack would be the magic wand that will improve security is only a conjecture.
The pool of untapped manpower ignored and left to boil over deepens the crisis of structural social exclusion with the consequence of a growing reserve of the discontents, standing perilously on the free flowing slope to crime and other anti-social vices