Insecurity in the Southeast: FENRAD Condemns Prison Break In Imo

Foundation for Environmental Rights Advocacy and Development (FENRAD), a human rights advocay and pro-democracy group, considers as ill-fated and ill-omened, the recent attack on a detention facility of the Nigerian Correctional Services (NCS) at Owerri leading to escape of some 1,884 detainees afterwards.

FENRAD, worried about the growing insecurity in the Southeast calls on governments at all levels within the region and as well all the well-meaning sons and daughters of the region to sit up and do the needful towards ensuring that calm and peace returns to the region, status quo ante. FENRAD condemns in its entirety the attacks and decimation of citizens by suspected armed herders recently at Enugu and Ebonyi both in the region and as well the killing of some northern businessmen in the region. This is no win-win situation, FENRAD says. The most worrisome trend in all this being that the people behind these attacks remain faceless or ‘unknown gunmen’ as have been defined in mainstream and local media outlets. It is, a common knowledge, FENRAD says that these men behind these attacks did not fall from the outer space.

What is playing out in Nigeria and which has only recently begun to rear its ugly head in the Southeast sequel to the highjacked EndSARS protests is an ill wind that blows no one any good, at most. Nigeria, FENRAD warns, is nearing failed state threshold. Currently, the security apparatus in Nigeria is stretched to thin with non-state actors dominating almost the centre stage; this situation needs salvaging if there must be a Nigeria of and for the future.

Transborder and domestic terrorism both have become almost the order of the day, recurrent and recrudescent with coordinated attacks against security agencies by bandits, gunmen and insurgents being hard to tell apart or pointedly. For example, while the police authorities alleged that the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) are behind the Owerri prison break, the group denies any involvement in the said attack; and while Boko Haram claims responsibility for the missing Alpha Jet of the Nigeria Air force (NAF), Nigerian military authorities say the jet just got missing – no debris, no wreckage. One thing is clear as day here says FENRAD. It is that the Nigerian intelligence community, as we have it constituted, has not often been able to use national intelligence resources and logistics at their disposal fully to their advantage to the extent of being able to preempt or forestall often a would-be terror attack. Nigeria needs a localized intelligence to navigate through domestic terrorism, such that involves community-based approach and operation since the locals know better their own lands, clime and coordinates than any foreigner whether a deployed commissioner of police or any other units stationed thereto.

Strongly, FENRAD makes case for an inward assessment of the deteriorating security situation in a hitherto peaceful region – Southeast. A region known for its commercial activities will definitely lose such commercial potentials if this status quo remains as shaky in the foreseeable future. Traditional and religious leaders, community and opinion leaders, governments and agencies of same, all must come together to devise a way out of this security dilemma. Nigeria does not need any further creation of fronts and theatres for asymmetrical warfare given the level of terrorism and banditry keeping it down.

FENRAD says that as chief security officers of their various states, the five governors of the region have a role to play here. Such a role requires a vertical top-down approach with all hands on deck. Herein comes the question of local and community policing. What are the conscious and conscientious efforts being made by these same governors of the region (Southeast) towards ensuring that peace reigns by the creating of a security network whose mandate complements that of the police and other law enforcement agencies as seen elsewhere with Amotekun and others? It is this silence and inaction on the part of the five governors, FENRAD understands, that led to Eastern Security Network, ESN, being established by the separatist IPOB as forest guards with the stated mandate of warding off armed Fulani herders.

FENRAD laments the fact that a recent United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament (UNREC) release quoted that of the 500 Millon illicit firearms (small and light weapons, SALWs) in West Africa, Nigeria alone has 350 million of these – some 75%! What the report didn’t strongly or pointedly hint at was whether this figure was inclusive of loccally-sourced and locally-fabricated weapons. Should this add to that, then suffice it to say that the number of guns or firearms in Nigeria twice outnumbered that of citizens. This is a recipe for violence. The federal government should be more intentional and strategic in blocking all illegal corridors and sectors of arms smuggling and infiltration even those coming from Libya of the Maghreb, Sahelian and sub-Saharan axis.

What however is deducible under the present circumstances is that the security architecture of Nigeria has failed to address insecurity not because it does not have the capacity and capabilities to succeed but because it is simply overstretched. Security is a collective role and where you have the federal government solely controlling same even to paramilitary outfits does not bode well in areas of organised and localised crime (domestic terror/ism). FENRAD calls for decentralisation of the security apparatus under the control of federal government vertically down to state and community levels. A constitutional provision for regional, state and local security design should be contemplated, says FENRAD.

This is not the best of time for Nigeria and should what is happening in the Southeast continue unabated, nobody would be spared of fierce and fiery inferno. From burning of police stations and carting away firearms to killing of men and officers of security agencies and now with the recent prison break in Owerri, nothing is farther from a failing state and failed region. Let all the stakeholders, traditional rulers, governors, youth bodies, religious and cultural leaders interface for good; the fact of being attacked by gunmen who are unknown is the evokes fear of the unknown too.

FENRAD understands the morale state of the security agencies but urges comrades on to keep defending Nigeria and to improve on what obtains today. They can do better; they can be better.

The only thing FENRAD wishes to see as done, not even being done, is peace building and return to status quo ante; nothing else.

Signed:
Comrade Nelson Nnanna Nwafor

Executive Director
Foundation for Environmental Rights Advocacy & Development FENRAD Nigeria

7/4/2021

Aba.Abia state, Nigeria

Emails: info.fenradnigeria@gmail.com, fenradnigeria@yahoo.com
Info@fenrad.Org.ng

Twitter: @FENRADNigeria

Website: www.fenrad.org.ng

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