The security challenges in the North-east geopolitical zone may proliferate and engulf the entire nation if unchecked, the chairman of the Presidential Committee on Security Challenge, Gaji Galtimari has warned.
Mr Galtimari, who was speaking when the committee paid a visit to the Bauchi Government House on Thursday said his team has been going round the North-east zone talking to stakeholders, especially state governments and security personnel, on the way out.
He said it was to prevent an escalation in the crisis that the committee was set up to explore ways of bringing normalcy to the North-east zone.
He explained that the committee, in its assigned responsibility, is to liaise between the federal and state governments in the zone on security issues and file any other recommendation which it feel can bring normalcy to the zone.
Mr Galtimari, who described security as a big challenge to the well-being of the people in the North-east, said the crisis was mostly occasioned by the violent activities of the Boko Haram group.
“We have been in Borno, Yobe, and we are now here,” he said. “Our mission is to find out the immediate and remote causes of the security challenges in the North-east and offer recommendations to government as to how we can go about making our security what it was in the past.” According to Mr Galtimari, security is everyone’s problem and called on the people to support security agencies in bringing the violence under control.
“Even the committee members are perhaps in the same shoes as other people, because they are not security personnel who have gone through the drill to know everything,” he said.
He said that although there was no likelihood of organising a public hearing due to time factor, people with ideas and information should write and present these to the committee up to the 16th of this month.
“We are optimistic that the committee’s recommendations to the federal government will answer the problems within the North-east zone, and the attendant repercussions for security across the country,” he said, even as he expressed satisfaction with the views collected so far from the states visited.
Bauchi state governor, Isa Yuguda, appealed to the federal government to provide an enabling environment for the security operatives whom, he said, are under-financed and lack adequate job security.
“The federal government has to guarantee the future of security personnel and their children, because these are people who are supposed to give their lives for the nation’, Mr Yuguda said. “So, if you die and you imagine that after your death, your family is in trouble, would you leave the trouble and die for your country?” The governor stressed the need for a good compensation package and salary structure for the military and other para-military arms to motivate them to be patriotic and ensure adequate security for the nation.
He said though the nation’s security operatives are patriotic, the system ought to make them comfortable to be able to perform effectively, and expressed dismay that security personnel in the country are even poorly equipped.
“You see a policeman being beaten by rain without raincoat,” he said. “He doesn’t have torchlight.
Some of them don’t even have stick in hand because they don’t have it. But when we were growing up, they used to have whistles. I cannot remember the last time I saw a policeman with a whistle.” He said that the problem of the country was self-inflicted, saying Nigerians don’t love themselves and their country.
“There is thus the need for all and sundry to be patriotic, make things happen, to create jobs, wealth and make people have purchasing power so that the economy can turn round, and those are the solution to the nation’s security problems,” he said.