The government of Enugu State has been charged to equip its forest guards with state-of-the-art facilities to enable them to flush out any bandits across the state.
A security expert, retired Deputy Commandant General of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Mr Edwin Ugwuja, stated this in an interview with NewsNGR in Enugu on Monday. Ugwuja decried the poor working conditions of the personnel, especially those who were recruited late last year.
He said, “They need gadgets, drones, tracking devices, and good weapons. If you just employ them without these gadgets, you have not started anything. The old ones are being paid, as I was told, but new ones are not. The morale of the men is low. The work is a great sacrifice, and they deserve something better. Again during their training, they were the ones that sewed their passing-out parade uniforms. I learnt that the government did not sponsor the uniforms. They were recently asked to pay for their ID cards.”
On the increasing kidnap cases in some parts of the country, Mr Ugwuja blamed lack of political will on the country’s leaders. “The only way out is the political will to fight banditry,” he said. “I believe our leaders don’t have the political will to fight terrorism. If you want to fight a cause, you must find out the root cause of the problem. Locate the sponsors. By the time the chain of sponsorship is destroyed, you have done something reasonable. They know the sponsors, but they keep quiet because of their political interest.”
He described recent efforts of the federal government in tackling banditry as “reactionary”. According to him, “It is reactionary. It is not proactive. The situation will remain the same even if you employ one million forest guards without equipping them well. They require necessary logistics.”
He said state police would not eliminate banditry unless politicians adhere to the rules establishing the outfit. “It is a step in the right direction, but do we have the maturity to control state police? You have seen what is happening with our forest guards and neighbourhood watch where our politicians use them to do dirty jobs. If you establish state police, they may be used for other purposes rather than the main reason for their creation. The law establishing state police will state what they are supposed to do, but they will be made to go contrary to it. If we can adhere to the rules of engagement, it will be good because security is local, and it has to start from our locality.”
