Nigeria has a serious mix-up of security, political and religious issues – IGP

The Inspector General of Police, Mr Mohammed Adamu on Tuesday, expressed concern over mix-up of security issues with political, ethnic and religious issues in the country.

Adamu stated in Abuja during a courtesy visit by Executive Members of the Alumni Association of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies.

He said securing the country was a herculean task because of various issues that were mixed up with security.

Adamu said political, ethnic and religious issues were not supposed to be brought on board in line with securing the country.

According to him, some people make use of the issues to create impressions that there is insecurity everywhere.

“Apart from insurgency, we had some issues in the Northwestern part of the country and the situation was bad before the inception of the current Federal Government administration.

“The issue was aggravated by some political undertone and immediately the political problems were addressed, the crime situation suddenly went down.

“The problem in the Northwest is an issue of some group of people being deprived of their means of livelihood and they have to fight back to survive and in the process we had conflicts,” he said.

He said one of the ways to address conflict and insecurity was through good governance

According to him, the federal government can never be left alone to deal with security issues, because, if we are having insecurity, there must be a cause.

“The causes must be dealt with before we can achieve good security and the causes could be lack of employment, poverty or injustice

“Those that are responsible in addressing those issues are really the politicians, the state governors.

“A lot of things are left for the federal government alone to do. If the state governors take responsibility of providing necessary social amenities within their states, the rate of crime will reduce,” he added.

He said the police would continue to ensure that crime rate is reduced through strategies to be implemented gradually.

“We know that we cannot do it alone, because it is believed that the security of lives and property is the responsibility of government but every citizen is supposed to be involved.

“It is on that ground that we came up with the community policing strategy where everybody within the community must be involved in securing their environment,” he said.

He said the police had sensitised the entire country on the concept of the principle of community policing.

According to him, we are at the implementation stage, we have compiled names of eminent persons, traditional rulers, faith based organisation leaders, National Union of Road Transport Workers and market women to form committees.

He said the committees, at national, state, senatorial, local government and ward levels would help to drive the community policing initiative.

In his remark, Mr Mohammed Abubakar,  President of the association,  said the visit was to identify with the I-GP and associate with his good work in policing the country.