A former member of House of Representatives Hon. Rima Shawulu, was a guest on the African Independent Teision (AIT) on Thursday morning where he spoke on a wide range of issues concerning the security situation in the country.
Shawulu a former chairman of the House of Reps Committee on Army, said the creation of state police will worsen the security situation in the country given the attitude of governors who behave like emperors.
He also said the recruitment of the so called “repentant” Boko Haram insurgents into the Nigerian Army is a threat to security.
Below is an abridged part of the interview monitored by AmazingTimes.
People talk of lack of “political will” to resolve issues in Nigeria, especially security issues, what exactly does political will mean?
Political will, in my understanding of the Nigerian context, means we as people, understanding and accepting the security situation objectively.
If you look at what has been happening, you will discover that we are not in agreement as to what should be done.
You will recall that under the government of former President Muhammadu Buhari, the minister of Defence and even Buhari himself blamed the people of Benue state for the crisis that was happening there.
Buhari told former governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state and those who accompanied him to the visit that he should go and let his people live in peace with strangers.
What does that mean? It means the President had taken side with one of the parties that was involved in the crisis.
Look at the way we appreciate the crisis – if communities are attacked in Zamfara, Kebbi and so forth, you will hear people say bandits have killed or kidnappped people.
But if it happens in Plateau or Southern Kaduna or Taraba state, the narration you will hear is that the indigenes are fighting with herdsmen.
So we have different understandings as to what is happening.
You will also recall that before the Boko Haram crisis in Borno State got out of hand, the elders in Borno came to President Goodluck Jonathan and told him that he was killing their citizens.
You will also recall that before he became president, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, had the effontry to say that Boko Haram were fighting for their rights (just like the Niger Delta militants).
So if you put all these things together, we have not come to the agreement as to the nature of what is happening today.
You will hear on the one hand people giving different interpretations and tragically, including the former Minister of Defence who was in charge of security agencies who should have solved these problems without bias by looking at the problems objectively. But that did not happen.
When you hear political will, we are first of all talking about our coming together to understand what is the problem at stake. We have not agreed on the nature of the problem that is happening in the country. That is why we have many interpretations about what is happening.
If you give the security agencies and the armed forces different interpretation of what is happening, they cannot get it.
Says government institutions are not living up to expectations
There are things that government institutions should do to check ordinary crime that is happening across the country.
Even though we are the most profiled people in the world today, because there are few places that you will go and five different agencies will require that you give them their biometric details.
In Nigeria you have biometric details at immigration, bank, NIN (National Identification Number).
Almost everywhere you go, you are using biometric. Yet money is moving, the government has not put in place the machinery to track these monies and bring to book people facilitating the movement of ransom money being collected by these so called kidnappers.
Related to it, is the fact that in all these killings and the criminality happening around the country, how many people have been arrested and brought to court for trial?
How many people were arrested in the crisis in Dogon Nahauwa near Jos, in 2010, where 500 people were killed one night!
People are talking about black Christmas black Christmas (of 2023), which is lesser in magnitude compared to the massacre in Dogon Nahauwa.
Don’t forget that these things have happen in almost all the places around Plateau.
Government’s unwillingness to track and trace these monies
The government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) submitted a list people to the Nigerian government (under the Buhari administration).
A list of people who were funding the activities of Boko Haram and other criminal activities in the country.
Those in the UAE were charged to court and jailed. But up till date, government has not published the list of those people not to talk of charging them to court…
Talking about political will, if you look at state governors, your state is in crisis and you are outside the country or in Abuja and the Local Government that should be the first to respond to emergencies, don’t have money to hold security meetings.
They don’t have money to even pay salaries, their staff don’t go to work. Government activities are grounded in the LGAs to the extent that even the security personnel that are posted there, can afford not to be there and nobody will monitor them.
All these are part of what we called the political will.
Lamented that security agencies, especially the police is under staffed, poorly funded and needs to be unbundled
I keep saying that our security agencies are under staff and under funded. I think that the police for instance, should have 2 to 3 or even 5 million personnel in the police force.
I also think that the police force should be unbundled in such a way that if you are doing VIP (Very Important Personality) protection, you have no business going to arrest any person for anything.
You do you VIP protection.
If you are investigating serious crime, you have no business going to do VIP protection. That way, you will know who to hold responsible.
How do we mob up the large number of small arms in Nigeria?
Declares that it is difficult to control illegal arms when government has failed to protect citizens
When people say citizens should arm themselves, it is like what I said before. We are living like the ostrich. There are too many arms on the street of Nigeria today. I have forgotten about the statistics of the number of small and light arms that are circulating in the country.
As government continues to fail in its responsibility to protect communities and bring to book those who are offending people in those communities.
Nigerian communities are beginning to develop the arms and ammunitions that they are going to use. So you are going to have
You hear government talk about locally fabricated arms and the rest of them. It means that people are already manufacturing the weapons that they need to use because the law is not there.
As long as a community is destroyed and people are not brought to book, members of the community will go ahead to look for how they can protect themselves.
So how so ever you do, they will look for creative ways of accessing arms to protect themselves.
The difference between us in
Nigeria and most of Africa and other parts of the world is not that they don’t have arms, but the arms are regulated .
You can always know who has a certain kind of arms in this house, but the arms that we have in Nigeria today, a lot of them are what you call, elicit, illegal…
So when those bandits come to the communities, I will not be surprised if they also harvest some of the arms that the people in those communities have, increasing the bandits’ availability of arms.
Insists that state police is not the solution, rather security architecture needs to be worked on
I think that what ought to be done, first of all, in my opinion, is to really work on the security architecture of the country because it is not serving purpose.
I want to say again that we need to increase the number of people that are doing policing work.
I am not a fan of those who say we should have state police. My reasons are very obvious. If you look at the fact that most states don’t have effective state houses of assemblies, the governors are like emperors us doing whatsoever, they want.
if you give them access to setting up those agencies, it will increase the insecurity that we have in the country
We copied our policy system from the United Kingdom. Today, the United Kingdom (UK) has changed its system of policing. You have police that investigate serious crime, you have police that is in charge of boundary, you have police that is doing VIP protection.
Police doing different things, reporting to different departmental heads, all reports to Parliament, through the home Secretary trade.
So, you don’t have a situation where in Nigeria today, you have an Inspector General of police commanding
350, 000 police personnel. Those involved in traffic management, those handling serious crimes and those involved in VIP protection, it cannot be effective.
Frowns at joint security patrol between police and soldiers, urging that it should be discouraged
I also advocated that the idea of having soldiers and the police in the same patrol team should be discouraged.
The police have a different approach security, the military have different approach to security.
What has happened is that if you go round the streets of Nigeria today, you will discover that people are no longer afraid of soldiers.
Before, if you hear about soldiers or mobile police you will be afraid. Now people are not afraid of mobile police and soldiers. This is because they stay on these check points.
When I was chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Army, I had course to raise this with the Chief of Army Staff.
On the streets, soldiers on check points also collect, N10, N50 and N100 from people that are passing through these check points. That was completely unheard of and that created problems for the integrity of the military and disregard for them.
We need to rapidly improve the manpower of the police and train them properly.
Says recruitment of so the call “repentant”, bandits, Boko Haram terrorists, poses serious threat to security
The idea that you are going to reform so call repentant bandits and put them into the police is very scaring because if someone already have an ideology of hate, that ideology cannot change simply because he is wearing uniform.
In fact, he will use that uniform to implement that ideology. That is my worry about the so called repentant Boko Haram terrorists being recruited into the Nigerian army. it is a mistake that should have been avoided.
The ideology of hate that propelled them to live in the bushes and go about slaughtering people cannot change simply because they are wearing military uniform.
In fact they are likely to sabotage the military personnel that they are working with and become informants.
I dont have any evidence but I dont have any doubt in my mind that someone with an ideology of hate, will drop those things simply because you gave him three months orientation in the bush.
He will remain an informant and he will continue to be a threat to those who are doing their work honestly.
