We’ll Contain Insecurity In South-East ― Osinbajo

BY ONYEKACHUKWU IBEZIM – Nigeria’s Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo says the Federal Government will not relent in its resolve to contain and check insecurity in various parts of the country, including the South-East region.

He said though the country’s challenges are daunting and quite disturbing, the Nigerian military are being repositioned to stop the reigns of insecurity nationwide with new arms ordered for deployment in the fight.

According to him, the present administration will continue to work extra hard in proffering solutions to the security challenges, adding that the Military have been drafted to several parts of the country to tackle the unfortunate and worrying development.

The Vice President, who spoke in Awka, the Anambra State capital on Friday during an engagement with the All Progressives Congress (APC) delegates in continuation of his presidential bid, said though the military is not trained for civil unrest, it is working hard to adapt, and handle the new role of assisting to curtail cases of insecurity.

Admitting that the military have also been stretched to its very limit by the many cases of killings and criminality across the country, Prof Osinbajo said; “Security is central in everything we are doing in this government. I believe that every government has its challenges. The challenge of this particular government is security.

“We have opened up the Northeast and containing the insecurity. The same with the Northwest; we are also handling the cases of violence going on everywhere including in the South East and the South-South regions of the country.

“For the first time, the law enforcement agencies in Nigeria are stretching, obviously beyond even their own capacity. If you have four or five different fronts where the law enforcement agents are required, there is no question that they will be there.

“The military is not trained for civil conflicts and all of that but they have to adapt. They are everywhere. But what this period has taught us is that we must drastically re-engineer our security apparatus.”

On the Federal Government’s efforts at purchasing new arms for the military and other security agencies, the Vice President said besides the bottlenecks in the procurement process, more personnel are also needed to boost the various security agencies.

He noted that there have been more security council meetings in this current administration than every other one before it, adding; “A lot of work has been going on in reengineering our entire security architecture, from men and women in the armed forces and the police; ensuring that we are able to beef them up because this is a big country.

“We need more men in our security outfits; we will need to recruit more people; even the equipment. Our equipment so far, we are importing a lot of equipment from America and from the western world.

“But there is a lot of politics around the equipment. They take a long time to come. But don’t change the supply order because you have all sorts of maintenance and all that to handle.”