The Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) has called on the country’s government to empower security agencies to enable them to tackle the various security challenges in the country.
Abdulwahed Omar, President of the NLC made the call while briefing reporters on Wednesday in Abuja on the recent bombings in some parts of the country after the May 29 inauguration of President Goodluck Jonathan and state governors.
Omar said the bombings in Maiduguri, Bauchi and Kaduna states and Zuba in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) constituted a dent on the successful inauguration of the new administration.
He said 15 Nigerians were reportedly killed and several others injured in the bombings, while property were destroyed.
According to him, there is the urgent need to re-strategies on how to effectively curb this mayhem by exploring better technological and intelligence gathering to bear on the situation.
“Mr President, Goodluck Jonathan, should also take urgent steps to overhaul our security,” Omar told reporters.
“He should appropriately instruct all the security agencies, including the armed forces to arrest all those involved in these crimes and prosecute them immediately; these attacks should be treated as war against the state and should be confronted as such, ” he added.
Omar said the Nigeria police, the State Security Service and other security agencies must justify their existence and renew the confidence Nigerian people reposed in them.
This, he said, could be done by confronting the attacks with the desired result-oriented action, which all Nigerians expected of them.
“For us, we believe that the survival and sustained operations of these misguided agents has exposed our security agencies as being weak, ill equipped, poorly-motivated and unexposed to effective contemporary security operations,” the NLC chief told reporters.