Again, Amotekunisation as solution to insecurity 

The widespread insecurity and escalating threat to safety in the country can no longer be denied. The routineness of impunity, the aloofness of the law over transgressions, and the triumph of injustice are perceptible to discerning Nigerians. Every geo-political zone in the country is afflicted with gangs of gunmen on rampage. Kaduna State, reputedly the nation’s kidnapping capital, has graduated to become an expanding field of continuous massacres. Sporadic killings have resumed in Benue, while in remote places such as Uwheru in Delta State, Ohaukwu in Ebonyi State herdsmen are relishing a harvest of deaths.  Nigerians have been killed in Yobe, Benue, Borno, Adamawa, Katsina, and Taraba. Our people are being killed in little known villages in Ondo, Edo, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa states, and elsewhere, threats of more killing keep coming. Truly, no one can deny that Nigeria is under siege.
 
What is more, security operatives who are constitutionally charged with the responsibility of protecting lives and property and ensuring peace and order in the society, have expanded the class of lawless persons and institutions. They have imported questionable cultural practices of ‘appeasement of superiors, god-fatherism ‘settlement’ and ‘gift’ economy to oil the wheels of impunity. Security posts and checkpoints that should ordinarily deter bandits and other miscreants have allegedly become business ventures for some influential officers in the force. The impunity of trigger-happy policemen is still recorded everywhere. The nefarious activities of unscrupulous officers of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) have diminished whatever modest achievements the police might have made. 

Based on the above analysis, this newspaper would like to reiterate its support for the Amotekunisation of the security system. By this we mean the decentralisation of the security management structure to reflect the principle of subsidiarity consistent with a democracy. As has been reiterated in many informed comments, which we have also highlighted here, local or community discipline cannot be carried out by a general, centralised police system. For security management to be effective and efficient, security services have to be piecemeal. It should graduate from personal individual security consciousness to intelligence gathering and neighbourhood watches, and then to community policing as evident in the emergent Amotekunisation of security services. 
 
This piecemeal management of internal security would dissuade the impunity with which officers of the centralised police system carry out their duties. Nigeria is about the only federation in the world where the police system is inconsistent with its purported federalism.

Finally, Mr. President should own up to his responsibility as the chief security officer of the country. He must recognize first of all that Nigeria is stuck in a horrifying state of insecurity. He must, as all well-meaning Nigerians wish he does, retrieve himself from the grandiose display of denial and insularity, and come to terms with the fact that the country is rumbling internally like a sleeping volcano smarting to erupt. He should by his action forbid the situation where posterity would find him grossly culpable in the event of an implosion. That is why the exemplary ‘Operation Amotekun’ by the southwest geo-political zone to secure the region within the construct of community policing should be allowed to trigger a bandwagon effect in the country. It is a masterpiece for this time – when federalism has become a desideratum!