Sagay, Ubani Advocate State Policing, Technology To Check Worsening National Security

Prof. Itsey Sagay, rights advocate and scholar, and Mr. Monday Ubani, former Chairman of Ikeja branch of Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), have called for state police anchored on true federalism as panacea to the esca­lating insecurity in Nigeria.

While saying that the cur­rent federal system of policing has failed to galvanise efforts towards stopping the insecurity in the country, the two lawyers, in their separate chats with Dai­ly Independent, said it was high time the government went the way of state police to stop the insecurity that has seen Nigerians living with their eyes wide open. ­

Speaking on why the call be­came imperative, Prof. Sagay, the former Chairman of the Presiden­tial Advisory Committee Against Corruption under former Presi­dent Muhammadu Buhari, said even without official approval from the Federal Government, the South West Security Net­work, Amotekun, has recorded a lot of successes, thus charging the Federal Government to start the process of restructuring the country in order to create room for state police.

He also said deployment of technology is also a way of stop­ping the insecurity in the country.

“As a solution to the problem, we should have had state police long ago and that would be possi­ble where various federating units are allowed to do what is safer for them.

“You can see what Amotekun which is not state police and which is not well-equipped is already do­ing in the South West, particularly in Ondo.

“So state police is part of the solution but not the whole solu­tion. There are so many other things. We need to deploy tech­nology in our security. We need to map out a technological approach on how to identify various places where these criminals are through their phone calls so that we can pin them down and monitor them ef­fectively.

“We can have some strategic places where security units will be based so that there will be no place that is far away from secu­rity operative to be present. Such units may be smaller in groups but they should be spread all over the country and there should be elec­tronic connections among them to schools and households.

“We should employ more of drones, more use of satellites and more use of tracking of move­ments as they are done abroad. These would help in the location of possible settlement of crimi­nals and their movements.

“Unfortunately, we are not us­ing all these things but we are still relying on the old, primitive and crude methods of security and it is not going to get us anywhere.

“The criminals are getting so­phisticated by the day and they at times have informants so the best way to go about tracking them is to deploy technology which will help the state police to achieve results and if we fail to toe this line, it would be a bit hard to arrest the current situation in the country,” he said.

On his own, Monday Ubani said he had been an advocate of state police, however, noting that much as such is very necessary now, there should be enabling laws to check a possible abuse of the system by state governors, who he feared could use the police to intimidate political opponents.

“We have been using federal po­lice system for so many years and it is not working. I have been an advocate of state police and true federalism. In the face of what is happening in Nigeria today, state police is the answer.

“So let’s go for state police now even though I have advocated that there will be an in-built system to check its abuse because governors can use it against their political op­ponents. We should make law that will specify and identify those in­stances of abuse and what should be done to mitigate such.

“We must not continue with this system of policing because it has never worked against the insecurity in the country. When policing is concentrated in one place, it will be difficult to check the insecurity,” he said.

Meanwhile the two lawyers were speaking on the backdrop of rising kidnapping and other crimes in the country, with the re­cent being the abduction of school children whose parents reportedly paid N15 million before they were freed.