ABUJA—AS part of its contribution to address insecurity in Nigeria, the United Nations, UN, on Monday, charged Nigerian leaders to intensify their approach towards taming insecurity in the country.
This is even as the UN advocated that one of the best approaches to addressing issues bothering insecurity in Nigeria, is adopting a preventive security deployment in all facets of the country.
The UN’s Resident Coordinator and Representative of the UN Secretary General in the Kyrgz Republic, Dr. Ozonnia Ojielo, made this call during a one day Seminar on: Agenda for Peacebuilding in Nigeria, organised by the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, IPCR, in Abuja.
While bemoaning the increasing state of criminal activities in the nation, he noted that adopting a preventive security model would ensure that grounds are prepared for other actors with the mandate, capacity, skills, and experience to step-in.
He maintained that early approach to addressing issues of insecurity, if accepted, would give room for community peacebuilding, confidence building, among others.
His words: “Every community or group has some challenge, or some grievance. So you see multiple actions by different groups, manifested in different ways.
“Some are even taking up arms against the state. The key is that these issues do manifest as security challenges. But most of them are not of a security nature. These manifestations have social, economic, environmental, and sometimes political underpinnings.
“So, if you have a problem that is social, you cannot use the toolbox for security to address them. So it’s a combination of integrated approaches, strategies needed. Security is a core part. But there’s only one element of the response. When violence is threatened and you do preventive security deployment, the people don’t need to take up arms to defend themselves, because they feel that the security officials are responding.
“But the preventive deployment is really to value the space for other actors with the mandate, the capacity, the skills, and the experience to engage to step in. Then you do community peacebuilding, you do confidence building, you do community meetings, consultations with community groups, until the issues are understood, you may not actually solve the problem, because the problem may be deep and protracted.
“But, what you’re doing is you’re establishing a process for solving them, the issues may be so difficult that you need a long time to solve them, but create a process and once you create a process that the people trust, people will have faith they walk through the process, it may take you several months or years to resolve them.
“So what we need is to break the cycle of violence, that when one group attacks, the other group feels the need to respond. You break it by engaging in early warning mechanisms. And you have the whole community, the country has a constituency, you have NGOs, you have civic groups, in which you use technology. If violence is threatened, people should be able to send an SMS message to somewhere and somebody’s you look at that message, pick up the phone, call another person and say we have this message you are closest to it.
“You DPO in that community, have you checked, we’ll give you 30 minutes, we’ll give you an hour, go check, report back to us to ensure that what you had maybe through if it is through the violence is threatened you do preventive deployment, we must prevent the violence from occurring. It is no longer enough. It is not acceptable that violence occurs, of course, and they will say to the community, we condone you. You condoned them but they’ve lost people, they’ve lost animals, they’ve lost community members, it has to stop from happening and you do it by working with the communities or groups or NGOs.
“It’s been done before in Nigeria, in many parts of Nigeria, it is done in many parts of the world. It is not rocket science, it’s just the ability to organise and to step up. So, part of my lecture today is to challenge leaders. It’s not the role for the government alone, or community members, leaders from Nigeria to step up.
“People with gravitas who can convene groups, they need to step up, and let us create this mass movement of leaders and activists and people specific to each conflict, and let us respond. That is what Nigerians expect of us as our leaders. That is what I support governments to do in many parts of the world. And I know there’s expertise and capacity in Nigeria to do the same thing.
“So let’s hope that our leaders will step up in different ways and political actors must watch their language. Anybody threatening any group or any society with violence, threatening to the people should be killed. That person needs to have a date at the court of law by the security agencies because the Criminal Code criminalizes such behaviour, but while you prosecute the person, if there’s a group grievance, you engage that group on their grievance. So, you respond to these issues. People must stop feeling that they can take the law into their hands and nothing will happen to them.”
Earlier, the Director General, DG, IPCR, Bakut Tswah Bakut, pointed out that “the country is tense and what is most essential for Nigeria, is to build sustainable peace.
