Civil society groups have agreed that Insecurity in Nigeria has become routine and endemic, and in recent times have assumed pandemic proportions, posing an existential threat to the country and her people.
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The groups, Alliance on Surviving Covid-19 and Beyond (ASCAB), The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) and The National Youth Democratic Association (NYDP and a cross-section of academics, intellectuals, and activists, made this remark on Wednesday, during a Public meeting held via Zoom which was organized by ASCAB.
The theme of the Meeting which was on; “Insecurity and the Failure of Governance in Nigeria; Exploring the causes and options for Transformation,” has Comrade Jaye Gaskia present the proposed policy paper on Insecurity. The presentation covered, Forms of insecurity; The Character of the State and Policing; and solutions.
The groups established that there is a direct nexus between the calamitous collapse of the welfare and wellbeing of the people, and the current pandemic scale of insecurity in the country.
“In this case, it is clear that the idle, hungry, and alienated mind is the workshop of the devil. To be sure, it is clear from the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended [1999 CFRN] in chapter two, section 14, subsection 2, b that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.
“On this measure alone, there can be no doubting the fact that there is unfolding before our eyes, a catastrophic failure of governance, itself the direct result of the cataclysmic failure of the collective leadership of the ruling class. There is no easier way to put it; the ruling class has failed collectively, in its role of providing class leadership, and on such a scale as to threaten the collective existence of the country and the people.”
At the meeting they resolved as follows:
1. Policing must be decentralized and policing authorities devolved to ensure that establishment of policing jurisdictions at national and subnational levels. However, the criteria for recruitment into these decentralized and devolved policing authorities must be residency and citizenship, and not indigenship to avoid the proliferation of legal ethnic policing formations, which are a potential danger to the cohesiveness of the country.
2. Adoption and rigorous implementation by the policing authorities of the strategic operational approach of community policing, enabling the active and proactive participation of citizens and communities in ensuring their own security and safety.
3. The police as an institution must be enabled and capacitated to deliver on its mandate as lead agency in internal security. A timeline for the withdrawal of the military from internal security role should be drawn up, and a comprehensive program to ensure that the police [various police jurisdictions] are able to fill the gap must be put in place.
4. An implementation plan for the Police Act 2020 must be put in place immediately, with the Nigeria Police Council inaugurated, and its meeting convened immediately to discuss the internal security and policing challenges facing the country, commission and consider and take action on the report of nationwide insecurity risk and threat assessment. The Nigeria Police Council must become operational and functional. The appropriate place to discuss insecurity and take action is the Nigeria police council, chaired by the president and comprising all the governors of the 36 states of the federation, and not the National Economic Council as it is presently being done.
5. An institutional mechanism for ensuring coordination and synergy amongst the police and various law enforcement agencies responsible for internal security needs to be established and operationalised.
“A similar coordination mechanism between internal security agencies led by the police and defence agencies also needs to be put in place,” they noted.
They further agreed that options needed for socio-economic police are
a. Crime must be punished, and criminals must be apprehended, investigated and prosecuted.
b. Victims of violent crimes must be compensated. Crime and criminality should not be rewarded in anyway, including through the misguided and often ill conceived hurriedly contrived amnesty programs. Giving material resources away to organised criminal gangs, while ignoring their victims, and ignoring the horrendous nature of their crimes, and with no intention to append culprits, much less prosecute and punish them, mere complicates the crisis. It sends a clear message to criminals that crime is rewarding and can force inclusion into the power dynamics; while also sending the clear message to hopeless and alienated citizens, impoverished and victimized by the criminal gangs, that the only language the state understands is violence, and that violent crime is rewarding and ennobling. Furthermore, it establishes back channels for official corruption by state officials involved in the negotiation and reward disbursement chain.
c. Eschew ethnicisation of crime, and avoid wholesale labeling and stigmatization of entire groups as criminals.
d. Mechanisms to seek and obtain redress for abuse perpetrated by policing personnel, other law enforcement personnel and military personnel must be established, and operationalised, with access guaranteed by victims of abuse, and protection ensured for complainants. And while indicted personnel must be prosecuted and punished, victims of abuse must also be compensated.
Independent citizens oversight bodies, such as ombudsmen, should be established and enabled to carry out oversight of policing and law enforcement and also investigate abuse and wrongdoing [of citizens as well as of personnel].
e. Essentially though governance must be reoriented to ensure the prioritization of human security, ensuring that the primary purpose of governance is the welfare and security of the people.
f. Towards this end, the state must be retooled and overhauled to become a provider and enabler of basic social services, ensuring universal access to all citizens and residents.
g. The bulk of public investment must be directed at ensuring human capital development; enabling universal and user cost free access to education, healthcare, portable safe drinking water, and toilet and personal hygiene, and provisioning social housing.
h. The state must put in place mechanisms to enhance access to business, livelihoods and job opportunities for citizens and residents; enabling their capacity to access these opportunities, and ensuring the implementation of a regime of living [minimum] wage for workers across the country.
i. Governance and the governance process must become socially inclusive and enhance social justice, enabling equitable access to levels of political processes, as well as to societal wealth. Such a policy in our current conditions of extreme poverty and intense exclusion will necessarily have to include wealth redistributive measures, as well as measures enabling greater active and proactive participation of citizens without discrimination in the processes of their governance. The state and the polity will have to become thoroughly democratized, catalyzing popular democratic participation of the people.
j. Comprehensive reform of governance that devolves more powers and authority to subnational levels of government, including in particular strengthening local government, and establishing a functional system of democratic community self-government.
k. A framework for the registration of residents and keeping, updating and managing the residents register must be urgently put in place. It should be managed by the states and local governments and should be integrated into the National Identity Number managed at the federal level by NIMC. The NIMC process should be speeded up and the various personal data collection management systems across the country including BVN, SIM card registration data, Birth registration process, driver’s licensing data, etc should be integrated.
l. In the specific case of the herders – farmers crisis, a comprehensive plan to enable assisted transition from open grazing method of cattle rearing to enclosed forms of cattle rearing through ranches and cooperative ranching will have to be put in place and faithfully implemented.
m. The meeting agreed to Launch a nationwide campaign to demand that government ensures the security and welfare of the people as the primary purpose of government, including the justiceability of the provisions of chapter two of the 1999CFRN.
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