Against the background of worsening insecurity, the Senate resolved at its plenary last week to organise a security summit. The President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, in his affirmation, said, “The situation in the country is pervasive. Every part of the country has one story or another to tell. It is the duty of the Senate to hold an all-inclusive national summit on security.”
Certainly, not again. It is surprising that Lawan said so, just 14 months after he chaired an ad hoc committee of the Senate that held a similar security summit, under Bukola Saraki as the President, when he was the Majority Leader. The security agencies and the executive arm attended. Out of that summit came 20 recommendations, which Lawan presented to the Senate and they were adopted. Interestingly, the Vice-President, Yemi Osinbajo, at that summit, spoke with candour and plaintively noted the mindless January 2018 murder of 73 persons in Benue State by Fulani herdsmen and the cult members killing of more than 20 persons returning from a church vigil in Rivers State, among others. He said, “We cannot realistically police a country the size of Nigeria centrally from Abuja. State police and other community policing methods are clearly the way to go.”
This can only be achieved through the instrumentality of legislation. Had the Senate pressured the government to implement its summit’s report or taken some critical legislative measures, among them a review of our security structure, the country would have begun to have a handle on this menace. Nigeria recorded 25,794 deaths under questionable circumstances within Buhari’s first four years, according to the Nigeria Security Tracker. Therefore, implementing the report of that summit, which requires legislative imprimatur in some areas, is what Lawan and his colleagues should saddle themselves with; not incurring additional cost via a new talk shop. Even another national dialogue would not serve the country any good, with the 1994, 2005 and the 2014 national conferences reports gathering dust on government’s shelves.
As the Eighth Senate summit recommended, “Nigeria must assert its sovereignty among its neighbours, particularly in the area of arms control; drug; terrorism; trans-human and economic sabotage. All international commitments that impact our domestic national security must be reviewed.” The country must embrace ranching as the modern method of rearing cattle, develop a strategy to curb proliferation of fire arms; invest in technology and effectively control its border.
Nigeria’s tragedy is lack of political will by the executive arm of government and the legislature to be responsive to the needs of the society and imperatives of 21st Century governance. Buhari has been living in denial on restructuring since he assumed office, until recently when he admitted that Nigeria had reached a stage in her history when it should be embraced. It is a magic bullet that can no longer be avoided; more so that Nigeria is a natural federation, a vast territory of 923,768 square kilometres, with almost 200 million people, according to recent estimates. Clearly, the sundry summits or panels on insecurity have failed to yield the expected results. Specifically, several commissions of enquiries set up by either the state or Federal Government on the Jos crisis, including the Aribiton Fiberisma 1994; Niki Tobi 2001; Bola Ajibola 2008; Emmanuel Abisoye 2009; Solomon Lar’s and two panels from the Senate and House of Representatives achieved practically nothing due to non-implementation.
It is the parliament’s role to ensure that the security sector is effective and accountable. The National Assembly should apply its generic functions of law-making, oversight and budget control to the organisation and functioning of the police. Making law or amending the constitution for the establishment of state police and effective funding and monitoring of the present federal police do not require endless summits. It was the quest for a new security architecture that would deal with our growing insecurity that the 2014 National Conference recommended state policing for any of the states that opted for it. But by sticking with the centrally controlled policing, with its glaring inadequacies, government allows its authority to be undermined by non-state actors, thus pushing the country to the precipice. Some states have shown their readiness to establish their own police. With well-laid legal frameworks for their operations, they will undoubtedly complement the Nigeria Police Force as it is done in the United States, where federal, state and local police co-exist, each with defined spheres of operation.
Given that the herdsmen are an evidently criminal and malevolent embodiment of criminality now, and the acknowledgement by the federal authorities that they came from neighbouring countries, the ECOWAS trans-humance protocol, which the Federal Government signed in 1998, is a self-inflicted wound that should be jettisoned. The treaty guarantees free movement of pastoralists across the West African sub-region. A country with a sensible leadership cannot allow AK 47-wielding Fulani herdsmen from Chad, Niger, Mali, Benin Republic and beyond to exploit this protocol and undermine its national security. It is in this context that the Senate’s earlier advice that the country should “assert its sovereignty among its neighbours” is spot-on. Not doing so is the foundation for the influx of illegal weapons and foreign criminals into the country.
The periodic deployment of troops in troubled states, which Zamfara (thrice), Benue, Taraba and Nasarawa experienced in Buhari’s first term, will not extricate the country from its current security quagmire. Policing should be expunged from the Exclusive Legislative List. Only Lawan and his colleagues can do it. It is a bounden duty that sits well within the matrix of the Chief Justice of Nigeria Tanko Muhammad’s admonition during his screening in the Senate that it is the duty of the legislature to sanitise the society by enacting and amending relevant laws.
