Why We Cannot Tackle Insecurity In Nigeria

Last week, on my return from Enugu, the usual traffic disruptions occasioned by military and police checkpoints on our highways was once again in full display. From point to point, we encountered these checkpoints, significantly slowing down the journey. At one point (I believe in Oji River local government area), our vehicle, like others on the road, had to park and the driver switched off the ignition because, unlike the previous ones we had met, this very checkpoint did more than slow down vehicular movements, it simply grounded traffic. The problem was that a lorry had fallen around the checkpoint and blocking one of the lanes, and the soldiers at the checkpoint were insistent on enforcing one-lane passage for vehicles coming from the both directions despite availability of an alternative.

With the scary reality of insecurity in the country including in the southeast, I would ordinarily have no issues with checkpoints dotting every one-kilometre length of our roads. My problem, however, is my serious misgivings as to the efficacy of the checkpoints in checking crime. If the strategy has been effective in driving kidnappers and robbers away from our highways, then it will be just foolhardy for anyone to quarrel against it simply because it delays traffic. After all, it is better to arrive at one’s destination late than to never arrive.

Over the years, I have thought about the practice of mounting checkpoints on highways and how much of a smart tactic it is against criminals. My conclusion has been that while no one can say that it is a totally impotent strategy, it is obviously quite limited in how much it can achieve. First is that our highways are long, stretching to tens and sometimes hundreds of kilometres, meaning that we can never have enough checkpoints that will reasonably cover the stretch of the roads such that criminals do not find any space to operate. What always happens is that there are usually long stretches of unpoliced space in-between checkpoints for kidnappers and robbers to operate. Our security operatives do not help matters here by the way they locate their checkpoints so close to each other in some parts of highways, while in other parts, very long stretches of road are left with no checkpoints. These unprotected long stretches cannot evade the eyes of criminals who are in fact looking for such loopholes.

Second, the fact that these checkpoints, in many cases, are permanently located at the same points makes everything about that security arrangement predictable. Any criminal familiar with any particular highway, would, waking up in the morning, know where to go and rob or kidnap without having to contend with the presence of any security operative. We have seen criminals operate on the road by exploiting gaps created by the positioning of checkpoints. This is in fact what highway robbers and kidnappers do.

Other forms of criminal activities would also thrive as a result of this loophole. For example, in the last one or two years, thieves have been ripping the metal sheets forming part of the front walls of Nnamdi Azikiwe University campus along Onitsha-Enugu expressway, Awka, such that the entire stretch of the fence have become ridden of that beautifying material. Also, some portions of the fence have been reduced to rubble as these night thieves continue to break the concrete materials to harvest the rods inside. They have also pulled down streetlight poles to cart away the solar panels and bulbs installed by the current Anambra state government. However, one thing instructive about these criminal activities is that the part of the university fence closest to the military checkpoint (by Stanel Filing Station) is largely unaffected, just like the streetlight poles in the same area – a testimony to the fact that the thieves were only exploiting unpoliced spaces between checkpoints.

While the foregoing proves that checkpoints are not after all completely useless. my argument is that its limitations and availability of an alternative make it a poor strategy for checking crime on highways. These limitations are hinged on the fact that we can never have enough checkpoints, and even if we have them, they will turn our highways to mad scenes of ubiquitous traffic gridlocks. And the implication of this for movement of humans and goods and its socio-economic reverberations are better left to imagination.

A better alternative, I believe, lies in patrol as against stationary operations in the name of checkpoints. Checkpoints are more useful when there is an operation to intercept escaping criminals or any other offender whose movement has become known to, suspected or anticipated by the security operatives. They are also useful for checking crimes that are primarily transit-based such as smuggling and illegal migration, hence should always be used by agencies like immigration, customs, and anti-narcotic bodies. Security agents operating on highways stretching to tens or hundreds of kilometres will provide more threat when they patrol. This will help them retain element of surprise (unpredictability) against criminals. My idea is that each highway should be divided into patrol zones with each zone having two or more patrol teams who should always coordinate their movements to ensure that at any given time their presence is evenly distributed across the stretch of the highway. This way, criminals will not see any part of the highway as permanently safe for operation as currently obtains.

If this strategy is efficiently implemented, criminals will have to work harder to operate on highways. They will have to be more sophisticated in coordinating their operations including by having to place some of their gang members at strategic points and who will use phone to alert them as to when it becomes safe to strike and when it becomes too dangerous to stay on. Thus, crime becomes more expensive and riskier. In Nigeria today, all indications point to the fact that crime has become too cheap and too safe.

Moreover, apart from their strategic weaknesses, one thing that has obviously rendered our checkpoints impotent is the culture of extortion going on there. This supposedly security measure has become for operatives a lucrative means of income. At military checkpoints, a common practice is for the soldiers to place a civilian to be collecting money for them, obviously in an attempt to contrive some form of distance between themselves and the infamy that act represents. The disastrous impact of this culture is that these law enforcement agents, once at their duty post, have their minds on how much money they can make as against how many criminals they can intercept. Little wonder, vehicles are more likely to be delayed and searched if the driver proves too stingy to part with money without delay.

At this juncture, it is pertinent to observe that the ubiquitous presence of military officers on our roads is an unfortunate testimony to the extent our civil security apparatus has remained impotent before the emerging security threats. The police, the DSS and the civil defence corps cannot be effective and soldiers will leave their barracks to flood the streets. The police in particular should, as seen in other countries, be competent to deal with everyday threats from armed robbers and kidnappers while the military should only be called upon in extraordinary situations where the prevailing threat requires the sort of force associated with military operations. However, it should be noted that in such cases, the military is being involved to provide a stronger force – force being only one aspect of policing – meaning that the police should not be found wanting in other aspects, notably intelligence gathering and investigation.

Undoubtedly, intelligence is one area of crime fighting where we have woefully failed as a nation. It is inconceivable that Boko Haram insurgents would all the way from Borno State plan and execute a bomb attack on a church in Niger State with neither the police nor the DSS detecting the moves. It is perplexing that various murderous gangs (popularly called unknown gunmen) are known to live and operate from communities in parts of Anambra and Imo, yet intelligence has continued to fail in terms helping operatives locate and flush them out. Funnily, military and police officers are idling at checkpoints on adjourning major roads, sometimes harassing innocent road users, while the criminals are having a field day in the interior areas.

Very importantly, it is high time we modernised our security apparatus. Technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence (AI) are redefining security operations today. But we appear content with continuing with old methods that do not work. One of them is non-strategic use of checkpoints. Whenever there is a criminal activity, especially a violent one, security agents arrive long after the perpetrators have disappeared and mount a checkpoint to intercept who God knows. Little wonder, they only end up apprehending innocent passersby, thus making mockery of anti-crime response.

What makes the whole failure absolutely agonising is that we are dealing with unsophisticated criminals including petty robbers operating with shot guns (as against assault riffles wielded by our security agencies). Similarly, groups like Boko Haram and the bandits are merely a bunch of illiterate gun-trotting perverts who are in no way near the organisational, tactical, infrastructural and ideological sophistication of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah which the state of Israel has contended with for decades. We are a people who have consistently demonstrated our knack for failing in the simplest of tasks. Were we to find ourselves in the shoes of Israel the possible consequences are better not imagined.

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