Legal luminary, Dr. Olisa Agbakoba SAN has lamented widespread insecurity in the country.
He said Nigeria was living up to its billing as a failed state as categorised by the International Crisis Group.
Agbakoba made this known while reacting to reports of banditry and kidnapping in the Northwest, Boko Haram activities in the North East and other forms of criminality across the rest of the country.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria noted that a failed state is a state where certain institutions of government are no longer functioning, especially characterised by the government’s failure to secure the lives of its citizens.
He disclosed that Nigeria could not overcome insecurity with conventional methods without examining and address the factors fuelling criminality in the country.
Reacting to pervasive insecurity in Nigeria in an interview with Saturday Sun, Agbakoba said:
It just tells that we are in an extremely failed state status. If you look at the data of failed states produced by International Crisis Group, it has categorised this nation in diverse ways, and Nigeria is second from bottom on the categorisation.
Read Also: “North, Southwest should allow Southeast produce the president in 2023” – Balarabe Musa
A failed state is a state where certain institutions of government are no longer functioning, and one of the most critical is when the government is unable to secure lives and property. The security architecture of Nigeria is very strongly challenged, and so we need to ask, why is this happening? It is happening because we have timid and redundant security apparatus, not trained, no equipment, and the results we get are exactly the same. I’m not shocked that we are getting poor results – Boko Haram, banditry, kidnapping, killings everywhere because we don’t have the wherewithal, the modern capacity to deal with these serious security challenges. That goes back to show how the president wants to see himself remembered. It is a clear invitation to him to understand that the national security situation is not just about buying arms, guns and ships. If you have a situation in which Nigeria with a population of say 200 million is poorer than India with a population of 1.2 billion, and is poorer than China with a population of 1.4 billion, something is seriously wrong. Why is china with its population not described as an extremely poor country? What are we doing wrong? Those are the sorts of things that I will think that a confirmed President Buhari will have to tackle; he has to grapple with the economy. If you have 20 million Nigerians unemployed, this is a canon fodder to looting and stealing; these are the people that easily equip the bandits, kidnappers and Boko Haram, so, it is not enough to say. I’m spending billions of dollars on military equipment; there is a linkage between poverty, unemployment and crime. I expect in the new agenda, all of these interlocking issues will be properly designed.
So, we don’t just see a situation we talk about; corruption, corruption, corruption as if corruption will solve the economic challenges. Corruption as bad as it is, is not Nigeria’s biggest problem. Our biggest problem is incompetence, the failure of the system to properly feed its people and provide the relevant impetus for economic growth.
Leave a Reply