President Bola Ahmed Tinubu demonstrated his defiance in the face of the recent upsurge in mass kidnappings in Kaduna, Borno, Sokoto, and Bauchi, by affirming that no ransom would be paid to kidnappers to set those held in captivity free. Rather, he gave a marching order to security agencies to bust the criminals and release the women, children and men from where they are held in forests.
The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mr Mohammed Idris Malagi, relayed the message to Nigerians: "The president has directed that security agencies must, as a matter of urgency, ensure that these children and all those who have been kidnapped are brought back in safety, and also in the process to ensure that not a dime is paid for ransom...It's important to underscore that the government is not paying anybody any dime, and the government is optimistic that these children and other people that have been abducted will be brought back to their families in safety."
And true to his words, a total of 137 students abducted from their school in Kuriga, Chikun Local Government Area, were released on Sunday. We commend the president and security personnel for this and urge them to sustain the tempo until the remaining students and everyone else in captivity are freed. It is still not clear if any ransom was paid, but going by the president's recent comment, it is hoped that no dime was paid to secure their freedom.
Indeed, we commend the president for giving security operatives the order to rescue abducted Nigerians from bandits. One of the cardinal responsibilities of government is to provide security for its citizens; our security agencies are paid to play this vital role. In the past months, there have been several reports of abductions in states across the country and this should not be the case.
Therefore, the president must not stop at issuing orders to our security operatives. He should provide them with the tools and technology needed to carry out this assignment. Terrorism and banditry have bedevilled Nigeria for more than a decade now, a period enough for the country to have acquired the technology for monitoring our forests and detecting criminal hideouts. There are many Nigerians, including security personnel, who have the intellectual capacity and skills to manage such technology to fight criminals, but our misdirected bureaucracy either sidelined such persons or created bottlenecks for the deployment of the technology.
Terrorists and bandits exploit the delay created by the layers of authorities in giving orders to security operatives to respond to criminality. In many cases, Nigerians provided security operatives with intelligence reports about impending attacks. However, such operatives did not prevent the attacks because they were not given the 'order' to halt the criminals. This way, bandits spend one or two hours assembling hundreds of victims, hurling them on motorcycles or into trucks, or forcing them to trek kilometers in the forest for five or six hours, without being intercepted by security agents. What is the use of our security agencies, if they cannot be deployed swiftly to respond to emergencies?
President Tinubu's stance is in the spirit of the Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Act 2013, which criminalizes the payment of ransom to kidnappers. It is not the desire of many people to crowd-fund ransom to pay kidnappers. Rather, the failure of the government to prevent kidnapping or capture kidnappers has placed desperate family members under pressure to scout for resources to free their loved ones.
Therefore, the government must back up its stance with effective intelligence gathering, promptly giving orders to security operatives to tackle kidnappers, providing them with the necessary weapons and technology to checkmate the criminals, and penalizing security operatives who are in bed with kidnappers and terrorists. It is an open secret that many bad eggs in the security architecture make illicit wealth from the misery Nigerians suffer at the hands of bandits and kidnappers.
Most importantly, the government's failure to follow through on its investigations to capture the masterminds of banditry and terrorism is responsible for the growing lifespan of the criminal acts. As long as those who benefit from the crimes are left to enjoy the bloody lucre, while security agencies capture foot soldiers, Nigeria will continue to be unsafe.
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The federal government said it was expecting technological support from the West. No doubt, it is a step in the right direction, but such support must be applied and not rendered redundant, like the Super Tucano, acquired from the United States at a very costly rate. Nigerians have not felt the impact of the weapons. We must seek all the help we need, but put to use the technology and personnel brought in to assist Nigeria.
We support the government's decision not to pay ransom to kidnappers because money is the oil that lubricates the crime. Kidnappers are encouraged to engage in more exploits, looking at the gains involved; they use the ransom money to acquire weapons that ease their criminal activities. They must be denied the ransom money. And the government must be decisive in ending this scourge.
