Why security hasn’t improved in Nigeria – Researcher

A researcher and public policies analyst, Dan Mou, said on Monday that the worsening insecurity in the country is due to successive governments’ failure to proffer deeper solutions to address the problems from their roots.

“The situation of security got worse under the last government. And as this government came. Aside from changing the leadership, they have not really done anything significant about this,” said Mr Mou, the executive chairperson of the Centre for Poverty Eradication, Development and Equal Opportunity.

The author of different books focusing on governance, security, poverty, and national security said that instead of addressing the problems, “the policies that have been introduced so far are the ones that have made things worse in terms of poverty and unemployment.”

In a recent report which reviewed the country’s security situation under President Bola Tinubu’s leadership in its first year of coming on board, the menace continued unabated.

This, according to data gathered from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), has resulted in more than 4,556 fatalities and 7,086 abductions between 29 May 2023 and 22 May 2024.

ACLED, a global data hub that collects real-time conflict-related data, also said that when compared to the previous year’s data, the figures showed that more people were killed across Nigeria in the first year of the Tinubu administration than in the preceding year.

According to another ACLED data analysed by PREMIUM TIMES, 2,606 Nigerians were killed, while 3,523 others were abducted between 29 May 2022 and 29 May 2023.

What to do

The author of ‘National Security and Democratic Governance in Nigeria’ and ‘State Power, Agrarian Policies and Peasant Welfare’ also noted the contributions of open grazing and criminal elements among herdsmen to insecurity in the country.

“As long as these herdsmen continue to move around with their cattle, fighting farmers and taking over their farms, how are the farmers expected to cope with business? And you can see the government has not done anything significant regarding that,” said Mr Mou, former Secretary of the defunct federal government’s National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP).

Mr Mou, a scholar with three doctorates from Nigeria and the United States specialising in public policy analysis and African politics as well as international law and diplomacy, argued that addressing the country’s high poverty rate could help reduce insecurity in Nigeria.

The researcher said a strategic increase in the minimum wage based on productivity could reduce poverty.

“The minimum wage will reduce poverty. But to address minimum wage a lot of things have to be addressed. Minimum wage has to be tied to productivity; it has to be done in a way that can be easy to implement”.

Insecurity in diverse forms has plagued Nigeria with mass kidnappings, armed robberies and killings of, including military personnel, taking place across states.

Last week, Glory Adekolure, a 22-year-old recent graduate of the University of Benin, was allegedly raped and killed on 13 June 2024 by yet-to-be-identified persons while on her way home from processing her clearance at the university. Her body was found in the Iyowa Community, Benin City, Edo State.

On Saturday, a 70-year-old retired brigadier general, Uwem Udokwere, was stabbed to death by yet-to-be-identified robbers, who invaded his home at Sunshine Home Estate in Abuja.

A statement by the spokesperson for the FCT Police Command, Josephine Adeh, said the incident occurred at approximately 3 a.m. and that the Police Commissioner, Benneth Igweh, had “promptly ordered a thorough and discreet investigation into the circumstances surrounding the regrettable event.”