Unending Quest For Security Of Lives And Property in Nigeria

One among the many failures that have characterised Nigeria’s chequered nationhood is lingering insecurity challenges. While certain periods have been much better than others, the general reality is that security has never really been satisfactorily realized.

In discussing insecurity in Nigeria, it is vitally important that one avoids the ever-present temptation of viewing the varying security fortunes the nation has experienced over the years –periods of relative security and periods of unbearable levels of insecurity – as a product of the quality of governance provided by the respective regimes that were in power in each of the periods in question. For instance, it is common to hear people say that the Jonathan regime performed better in security than that of Buhari or that the administrations of Governor Ahmed Sani Yerima and his successor Mahmuda Aliyu Shinkafi in Zamfara State were better than those of their successors, Abdul’aziz Abubakar Yari and Bello Matawalle, simply because of the differing states of security in the respective periods. However, truth is that these two sets of governors governed under very differing security atmospheres. Yerima and Shinkafi governed when the present unprecedented security challenge as presented by the “bandits” phenomenon was yet unknown. Frankly, there was nothing they did differently from their successors; the relative calm in the state under them was purely a function of historical chance. On the other hand, had they been unfortunate to be in power when this novel security challenge has emerged, they would have still struggled like their successors.

In the same vein, President Obasanjo (1999 – 2007) did not give Nigeria a security architecture that is fundamentally of better quality than what Jonathan gave; the only difference was that Obasanjo governed without the nation having the misfortune of witnessing the advent of a new shade of crime – by way terrorism with its full paraphernalia of asymmetric attacks including suicide bombings. To be sure, it was the same security architecture Obasanjo worked with that he relinquished to Jonathan – the difference being that this historically weak security architecture was tested by unequal levels of insecurity under the two regimes – hence the differing outcomes.

In Southeast Nigeria, governors of today are grappling with forms and dimensions of insecurity that were largely unknown to their predecessors. It would be foolhardy to think that these predecessors had any magic wand which they would have waved had they been in power this time.

It is true that time and chance create and recreate social and governance challenges and that any government assuming power must be ready to adapt its governance machinery to the emerging challenges of the time. However, Nigeria’s security failures aren’t as a result of failure of the security architecture to adapt to emerging challenges, but a function of total atrophy due to long years of poor governance and neglect. Adaptiveness is a sign that an institution is healthy. Our security institutions are far from being healthy, hence lack the robustness, momentum, and resilience to adapt to emerging security challenges.

Like most of the Nigeria’s existential problems, our security challenges are not such to be addressed by routine short-term changes, but require long-term fundamental overhauling rooted in a firm commitment to breaking with the old order and embracing a new one. It is only after these fundamental weaknesses have been addressed that the security institutions can be healthy enough to negotiate through the emerging challenges.

One of the weaknesses – a key one indeed –is the miserably ill-equipped state of our security agencies. Truth be told, our police force is grossly unequipped to deal with routine everyday security tasks, let alone the more formidable challenges posed by elements like Boko Haram and so-called unknown gunmen. A visit to a police station in your area immediately tells you how ill-prepared it is to deal with the slightest of security breaches. Insufficient number of patrol vehicles, rickety vans, and conspicuous absence of facilities like computers and cutting-edge communication equipment are a common sight. Records at police stations are, in this age and time, still taken using pen and paper, meaning that the police, till now, cannot boast of a comprehensive central digital database from where information on criminals and crime suspects can be accessed at anytime. In countries that have been serious with security, suspects who are brought to police stations are digitally profiled including taking their photo and fingerprints. Such a database is crucial for future criminal investigation and intelligence given the reality that many criminals of today were still the criminals of yesterday, and many of today’s offenders will still be the offenders of tomorrow.

Police units in our country are not equipped with drones, acutely limiting their surveillance capabilities. This is a testimony to how much we are technologically unprepared for the security challenges of today.

Another challenge is the number of personnel. Nigeria’s security architecture is grossly inadequate in staff strength. The vast territory of Nigeria cannot be effectively covered by the existing personnel strength. This, combined with inadequate infrastructure and tools, accounts for the existence of large swarthes of unpoliced spaces across Nigeria. In many rural areas, police presence is almost non-existent, as the nearest police station or checkpoint is quite far away.

Another very important source of weakness is the unprogressive culture that has defined policing in Nigeria, which mainly manifests as corruption, poor investigative and intelligence practices, poor motivation, and lethargic attitude to duty. Admittedly, this mirrors the characteristic weaknesses found generally in our public service. Such a retrogressive operational culture can take us nowhere near achieving the security of our dream.

Aiming to have an efficient security architecture without addressing the operational culture will be an effort in vain. No matter the amount of investment made in equipment and personnel, not much will be achieved as long as investigation and intelligence are not strongly entrenched in the policing procedure, corruption stamped out, work ethic transformed, and motivation boosted among the rank and file.

Based on the foregoing, it is clear that the expectation that a state governor will come to power and, in one fell swoop, cure the security ailment of their state is as unrealistic as it is myopic.This ailment, though may manifest with different symptoms in different parts of the country, is a national malady that has its root in institutional collapse. State governors, depending on specific cases, can provide palliatives, but the underlying sickness remains, meaning that security is never actually realized. What is always realized is some period of reprieve before another era of terror.

A cure for our security malady requires a holistic institutional actions to address the underlying problems. It is not a one-off intervention but a continuous effort which effect will be progressive and cumulative. For instance, with a government policy that unswervingly pursues a new culture of policing, the police force will only grow in efficiency. In other words, when the police is made to adopt and start implementing more efficient ways of policing (as rooted in investigation and intelligence), continuous progress will become inevitable as methodologies are perfected, procedures refined, and routines mastered. This is what is called institutional growth. Institutions become the best version of themselves through long periods of cumulative experience that refines processes and strengthens culture.

Furthermore, it is crucial to advert our minds to the fact that effective security does not begin and end with the direct anti-crime actions of the police. It involves a broader governance framework encompassing a nexus of institutions including the customs, the immigration, the judiciary, and the correctional service as well as database management institutions like the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC). Illegal arms flood into the country and irregular migrants (including criminally minded ones) breach the border security on daily basis largely due to the inefficiencies and corruption in the customs and the immigration. The police is very likely to be overwhelmed when these institutions woefully fail in their complementary duty of restricting the inflow of these enablers of crime into the country. The police cannot be everywhere at the same time. A police officer’s duty of seeking out and arresting a possessor of an illegal arm becomes necessary only the moment the importer has somehow evaded the watchful eyes of the customs officer at the border. Similarly, the police is expected to go after an irregular migrant involved in terrorism only when the migrant has somehow found a way to breach the border security mounted by the immigration. The judiciary also has to be efficient, fast, and unimpeachable in delivering criminal justice in order to complement the duty of the police in using the law as the chief deterrent against crime. In the same way, the correctional centres have to be indeed CORRECTIONAL to avoid the situation where the prisons become a mill for producing even more hardened criminals, thus complicating the crime fighting process. Very importantly, the NIMC must live up to its responsibility of producing and managing a comprehensive population database for the country whereby every individual becomes known and identifiable to the state. In advanced countries, such a database is a crucial resource for the police in their crime fighting duties.

The sheer scale and the multi-institutional dimension of the task to reverse Nigeria’s security fortune strengthens my earlier argument that it is myopic to expect any state government to perform meaningfully well here. The states that are not experiencing Boko Haram terrorism, banditry, or the so-called unknown gunmen phenomenon have done nothing spectacularly different to escape that fortune. Their relative security is merely a product of time and chance.

Finally, this brings me to the perennial issue of the over-centralization of the country’s security architecture. The police and the DSS are both owned and controlled by Abuja, and so also the customs, the immigration and others. This leaves the state governments with little or no institutional control as far as security is concerned. While a nation should understandbly have only one (centralized) customs and immigration, the same cannot be said of the police force. There are compelling pragmatic reasons why state police is desirable in Nigeria – including those related to spatial coverage, operational area familiarity, and close operational control. However, fears of abuse by state governments seem to be overshadowing these merits. This fear is not a product of mass paranoia but indeed a well-founded one, especially in the light of experiences of such abuses perpetrated by state governments using state-backed vigilantes.

Nonetheless, nation building entails using our thinking power to solve problems when they arise. We should rather think of how to prevent such abuse of state police than shying away from the idea completely. One strategy that has been suggested is strict constitutional delineation of roles whereby a state police force is barred from election security duties, political rallies and other spheres where security interlocks with politics. It should only focus on going after violent criminals like robbers and kidnappers and also steer clear areas like defamation, sedition, and treason where the line between criminal prosecution and political persecution can sometimes be blurred in our clime still weak in democratic values.

Another strategy we may try out is to start with regional police forces. Thus, each geopolitical zone will have a police force with each state command being surbordinate to the regional headquarters. Governance of the force should be under a regional police council comprising governors of the states making up the region – or their representatives – while the head of the force would be appointed by the council in a rotatory basis. Such collegial governance will, to a reasonable extent, guard against undue influence by any particular state government. And if any region, by chance, becomes multi-party, just like the Southeast is currently, there will be greater checks and balances in the collegial governance, and which in turn will deepen democratization in the control and use of this force.

We should not be afraid of taking bold steps to address our problems as a people. Unfortunately, no government, since 1999, has been this bold in approaching our perennial security problems despite the natural and philosophical truth that security of lives and property is the first duty of the state. But then, it is morning yet on creation day.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.