Security 101: We fail serially, by Adekunle Adekoya

IT is no longer news that 17 soldiers, including a lieutenant-colonel, two majors, one captain and other ranks were ambushed by a gang of militants in Okuama village in Delta State. In fact, the slain soldiers were buried with full military honours at a military cemetery in Abuja on Wednesday. While the nation was grappling with that, no less than eight policemen got killed in Delta and Imo states, with six more still missing, according to the Police High Command last weekend.

These two incidents indicate the nadir into which our nation has sunk in terms of security. Meanwhile, as these were happening, a hapless journalist was abducted, Gestapo-style, from his home in Lagos and whisked to Nowhere. The resulting uproar from his professional cohorts eventually led to his release.

My people have a saying to the effect that if you don’t know how to dance, watch the footworks of the person next to you, with a view to copying, and eventually knowing how to dance. Just as we were grappling with our issues, a major global power, Russia, experienced a bout of insecurity.

On the evening of Friday March 22 in Moscow, the Russian capital, gunmen burst into Crocus City Hall, an entertainment complex on the outskirts of the city, where a rock concert was about to take place. Reports indicated that at least four people opened fire in the building’s foyer before entering the hall itself and continuing to shoot. Amid the shooting, the attackers then set fire to the hall using flammable liquids. Despite helicopters dropping water over the building, it took 10 hours to extinguish the flames.

According to reports, the March 22 attack lasted about 20 minutes, and in that time, about 137 people were killed and at least 60 others critically wounded. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.

Three days later on March 25, Russian authorities have charged four men to court for being responsible for the attack.

That means the appropriate security agencies there have carried out substantial investigations, prepared their case files and turned over to the judicial system for prosecution.  The swiftness of the Russian response seems to be the difference between our situation and that of the rest of the world. We just don’t take security issues seriously enough here, do we? Worse, we place greater premium on regime security than real national security. That is why a huge portion of our resources are spent on providing security for the president, governors, obas, and chiefs, while the rest of us that can afford it purchase security from the state. The rest are left to secure themselves as best as they can.

My take is that we just play with serious things, and now, ridiculous things are happening to us. Else, how do you explain to the whole world that your policemen and soldiers are being killed by rag-tag gangs of militant outlaws? If the ideal were the case, as exemplified by the Russian response to the ISIS attack on Crocus City hall, we would have arrested and prosecuted somebody for letter-bombing Dele Giwa since 1986. We also would have arrested and prosecuted the killers of Chief Alfred Rewane, Iyalode Bisoye Tejuoso, Marshal Harry, Bola Ige, Suliat Adedeji, Chief Dikibo, Funso Williams, and a host of other unresolved celebrity assasinations.

If we take security seriously, kidnappers will not be roaming around and abducting people, including children, at will, and herding them into bushes like goats. The case of the Kuriga schoolchildren is actually stuff for Nollywood box office hits. What baffles me about the Kuriga schoolchildren is that barely 24 hours after they were released, state machinery went into overdrive to sew clothes for all 187 of them, which they all wore at the reception held for them at Sir Kashim Ibrahim House in Kaduna. If that effort were put into making security work, maybe the kidnap would not have occurred at all. Again, since 2014, many of the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped are yet to be recovered. Same with Dapchi and others all over the country. Even the felons that have been arrested, something, somewhere, is holding up their prosecution.

The message we are sending to outlaws and would-be criminals is that they can continue to live outside the law since nothing will happen to them. But if the reverse were the case, deterrents would have been put in place that will ensure that taking to a life of criminality is a no-no. In the North-East, high-tension electricity pylons were brought down by some yet-to-be-identified vandals. Who are those vandals? Have they been arrested? If they have not, why not? Whose job is it to go after them?

Who is waiting for an order to go after felons that willfully destroyed critical national infrastructure? Or is it that somebody, or some people have not linked the vandalism of those pylons with national security? Arise, O compatriots! Nigerians, let us wake up to the ramifications of security. Let us stop playing with matters of security. In fact, we must begin to look at all national issues through the prism of security. When we do that, we’ll pass Security 101, and move on to the next level.

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Reporting by Naija247news in Lagos, Nigeria.