The Katsina State Governor, Aminu Masari, gave a damning verdict on the Nigeria Police last Thursday, pointedly telling the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Alkali Usman Baba, that the force cannot police the state.
Citizens in 32 of the 34 local government areas of Katsina, which incidentally is President Muhammadu Buhari’s home state, are suffering at the hands of armed bandits.
The state is among others in the North-west of Nigeria bedevilled by banditry. Since 2011, Katsina State has recorded a series of bandits’ attacks that had left more than 6,000 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes.
Governor Masari had drawn flaks a few weeks ago when, out of desperation, he recommended to the hapless citizens resident in areas prone to bandits’ attacks in his state to buy firearms and defend themselves.
However, Masari now has a meaningful perspective, emphasising that with 3,000 policemen in total for a state with about eight million people, which comes to a policeman to 200,000 persons, the Nigeria Police cannot adequately secure lives and property in Katsina.
The governor noted that not just do the police have a manpower deficit, they also lack adequate equipment to curb criminality.
Governor Masari painted a scary picture, revealing that bandits are recruiting young men into their fold with as low as N5,000, drugs and other intoxicants.
From the governor’s revelation, it is clear that IGP Baba’s response to Masari is only a scratch on the surface, not the solution to the identified problem. The police inspector general had told his host that: “It is the directive of the president that we should recruit 10,000 for 2020 and another 10,000 for 2021 from across all the 774 local government areas of the country. We are going to redeploy these policemen to their local government areas to fight crime.”
If the 20,000 are employed and deployed in 774 local government areas, that would only amount to about 878 additional policemen for Katsina’s 34 local government areas.
While the Federal Government will recruit about 26 additional policemen in each local government in two years, bandits are recruiting more young uneducated citizens into their criminal kidnap-for-ransom enterprise monthly.
Worse still, the bandits are not just targeting adults for abduction, schoolchildren are also seized in large numbers for their parents to pay hefty ransoms. Effectively, the bandits in Katsina and other North-west states are hindering the education of Nigerians of northern origin, while enrolling the youths into drug addiction and crime.
We had a few weeks ago on this page suggested to Governor Masari to focus on organising local vigilance groups, seeking the Federal Government’s approval to engage ex-servicemen who would bear arms and deploying them to complement the efforts of the military and the police in protecting lives and property.
It is noteworthy that the Katsina governor is already using the vigilance group option, as he told Baba that he would recruit more vigilantes, who would be posted to strategic places in the 34 local government areas of the state.
We must point out, however, that using vigilance groups to make up for the shortcomings of the federal police can only serve as a stop-gap measure. It is an ad-hoc measure, not the most suitable solution.
What better compels the establishment of state police than the inadequacy of the federal police that Governor Masari pointed to? But it appears that the Northern influential leaders including President Buhari do not buy the idea.
While the state police may yet be a dream, we hope there will be a northern unanimity in promoting responsible parenting, running an effective education system and providing the teeming jobless youths with the opportunity to earn legitimate incomes, as the panacea for banditry and other criminalities, which have for over a decade put the region in peril.