By Emmanuel Oloniruha
Director-General of National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS), Prof. Abubakar Sulaiman, has called for comprehensive security sector reforms and research-based solutions to tackling Nigeria’s security challenges.
Sulaiman made the call when he featured on the Personality Interview Series of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Sunday.
According to him, relying solely on military hardware and deployment of troops without addressing the socio-economic dimensions to insecurity is unsustainable.
He argued that the traditional perspective of evaluating security entirely through the lens of weapons and coercion was inadequate.
The director-general said an effective security approach must be holistic, including environmental safety, economic stability and social justice.
“Security goes beyond somebody pointing an AK-47 at your head.
“People die not only through the instrumentality of weapons. It’s not only through the barrel of gun that people die. Danger does not emanate from instruments of coercion alone.
“When you don’t take care of your environment, you dump refuse anywhere, people will die. That’s threat to your life.
“When people are hungry, that is imminent danger. When people are jobless, that’s a potential threat. If nothing is done, it becomes a real threat.
“When you have cases of injustice and people are pushed to the wall, they will react. When they react, there’ll be crisis.
“If that crisis is not well taken care of, it will degenerate into serious threat,’’ he stated.
The director-general also advised government and policy makers to prioritise threat assessment and conflict prevention.
He also urged policy makers and the National Assembly to base security legislation and budgetary allocations on empirical research rather than spontaneous responses to security breaches after lives and property worth billions of naira would have been lost.
He said that through research, threat assessment and evaluation, insecurity could be prevented or addressed.
“We wait till it happened; we now budget trillions to buy weapons, to mobilise troops. How do we prevent it? We should have been spending less in preventing insecurity than fighting insecurity.
“So, our position here in NILDS is that we need to do more in the areas of research, in the areas of evaluation, in the areas of assessment, in the areas of preventing insecurity than fighting insecurity.
“As long as we keep on appropriating funds and we respond to security challenges spontaneously, with no holistic policy or legislation, backed by evidence-based research, it’s like dropping water in a basket and that will produce no result.
“That’s why we’re not getting results. If you can spend trillions on the military, on the army, on the air force, spend some billions on research institutions too,’’ he said.
Sulaiman also stressed the urgent need for comprehensive security sector reforms to eliminate overlapping mandates and operational conflicts among security agencies.
“There are duplications of responsibilities. When there is civil unrest, who takes charge between the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and the police?
“When you have the National Security Adviser (NSA) in charge of rescue of kidnapped people. The NSA office has almost taken over the work of the Chief of Defence Staff and the Chief of Army Staff.
“NSA should not be a front-liner when it comes to security operations or defence operations. So, we have these overlapping mandates,’’ he said.
To enhance accountability in defence spending, Sulaiman said that NILDS had developed a security sector oversight toolkit for the national assembly to properly scrutinise the huge money spent on security agencies annually.
“When your policies, laws, acts are not evidence-based, they are not sustainable. They are bound to collapse,’’ he submitted.(NAN)(www.nannews.ng)
OBE/FEO/WAS
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Edited by Francis Onyeukwu/’Wale Sadeeq