The Federal Government on Thursday lamented that challenges contributing to insecurity in the country included indiscipline and poor attitude to work among personnel of the security agencies.
The Minister of Interior, Lt. Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau (retd.), who stated this in Abuja during an emergency security meeting with personnel of the police, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, the army and other agencies, noted that the country was also faced with poor logistics, including weapons and ammunition, to tackle insecurity.
Dambazau said the trafficking of drugs and arms, as well as the spread and access to smuggled weapons, particularly the AK-47 assault rifles were other factors fuelling insecurity in the country.
He said, “There are many challenges contributing to insecurity and impeding the optimum performance of the security agencies. There is a general problem of command and control, indiscipline, poor attitude to duty, and poor welfare among the personnel of the security agencies in the field.
“The prevalence of porous and poorly managed borders also makes it easy for transnational crimes, especially trafficking in drugs and movement of terrorists. In the same vein, the spread and access to smuggled weapons, particularly AK-47 assault rifles, aggravates insecurity.
“We are not dealing with conventional threats, but peculiar threats that are laced with terrorism, sabotage, and efforts to manipulate our society’s religion and ethnicity.
There are indications that some of these threats are politically motivated from within the country: some are induced from outside of the country by those who are not comfortable with Nigeria’s potential; while others are as a result of outright criminal acts or violent extremism or both.”
Dambazau said the government was currently pursuing the implementation of a tripartite agreement for the voluntary return of Nigerian refugees in Cameroon, Niger Republic and Chad.
“Currently, there are very large swathes of ungoverned forests that are inter-connected, covering Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna, Katsina, Niger, Yobe, Borno and Adamawa states, serving as sanctuaries for bandits and criminals,” the minister said.
The Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Muhammed Babandede, said the government must separate intelligence from operations to combat insecurity.
“There is a need to strengthen the separation between intelligence and operation in Nigeria. Every agency is collecting intelligence and every agency is operating. This is a challenge. In many countries, you will find out that there is somebody who is dedicated to collecting intelligence.
There should be an agency dedicated to only the collection of information,” Babandede said.
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