A professor at the University of Ibadan, Nelson Fashina, has listed some measures to be deployed to check insecurity in the country.
Prof. Fashina outlined these measures as a guest lecturer at the Nigerian Army Resource Centre, Asokoro, Abuja on Tuesday.
Fashina, a super vigilante cop, National Commander and a distinguished scholar was invited by the Nigerian Army to deliver the lecture on behalf of all the entire structured and core vigilante informal security groups in Nigeria in order to address the kernel of vigilante relevance to national security.
The lecture which became seminal was explosive in its fearless chronicle of the achievements and failures of the security agencies in tackling national insecurity problems.
Fashina argued for the relevance of the vigilantes in securing the nation’s ungoverned and security porous spaces – the forests and bushes as hideouts for the Boko Haram bandits.
According to him, the total population of the regular security personnel in Nigeria is not enough to combat and conquer the terrorists.
Therefore, he appealed to the Nigerian Army as the parent-security agency and to the Nigeria Police and all its extended police family, to support the National Assembly in the bid to enable a legislation of the well disciplined, well structured, patriotic and nationalized set of CAC incorporated vigilantes as a formal security agency.
He made scholarly and sociological distinctions between two types of vigilantes: 1. “Ethnic Militia Vigilantes” (Negative Vigilantes) who are subversive of national unity and of the government, and who are criminals of electoral violence in Nigeria. 2. CAC incorporated vigilante groups whose data base is with the Nigeria Police and the NSCDC. He argued that category 2 vigilantes are the patriotic volunteer/informal security groups who have been assisting the police in crime detection, prevention, report, and arrest, and that they have also been successfully assisting the military in the Joint Task Force operations against the Boko Haram guerillas in the Northeast and other terrorist afflicted regions in Nigeria.
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Essentially, Fashina argued that Boko Haram being driven by religious, socio-economic and and political ideologies of subversion cannot be overcome with physical counter-insurgency strategies. Rather, he called for psychological, logical, and social orientation strategies to divest the Boko Haram enemies’ minds from their wrong affiliations with inhuman, ungodly and false indoctrinations.
According to him, crisis is an endemic part of any society that arises from grievances against the state, especially in capitalist societies.
He averred that conscious attempts should be made by the state/government to reduce the gap of socio-economic inequalities, as a giant step to reducing crime and criminalities.
He talked about the need for a massive creation of employment through the establishment of a new security agency from the vigilantes, especially the Vigilante Group of Nigeria, and the Hunters Group of Nigeria, because the HGN has no internal leadership crisis and their personnel are well disciplined and ready to undertake formal national security assignment of policing the forest, the bushes and the schools, being the spaces yet to be secured.
He said the aim and objectives of the HGN do not duplicate duties of the Nigeria Police or the Civil Defence. He said the VGN was the oldest and most structured group whose Bill was passed by the 8th National Assembly, but the Bill has not been Assented to by the President.
He called for a synergy between VGN and the HGN in the realization of the nation’s noble objective in national security. He appealed to the already existing Govt security agencies to eschew what he called the “co-wife” pattern of unhealthy rivalry and jealousy against the personnel of the standing and well structured informal vigilante security groups that are assisting them in crime control on voluntary and pro-bono basis.
He rounded off by advising the vigilante groups to comply to the strictures of lawful ethics in their conduct and assisting roles in aid of both police and military duties.
The lecture is full of high levels of conceptual definitions and applications of theories of security, under the Community Policing Initiative of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
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