•Advises Jonathan to restore order
Former National Security Organisation (NSO) Director and Internal Affairs Minister Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi yesterday described the security situation as alarming. He advised President Goodluck Jonathan to restore order.
He spoke with reporters in Lagos .
Shinkafi said: “There is insecurity of life. The polity gets provoked and the people took to protests and the protests took the kind of dimension of violence that we witness. Every time there is a breakdown of law and order, it is threat to life and danger to society.”
The former minister disagreed that the violence rocking the North has ethnic connotation. He said the people are protesting the activities and decisions of state and federal governments.
He added: “A lot of the violence is not of deep grassroots origin. When government decides on something and people reacted and then, it took that form and the system tries to use its coercive forces, and then, people reacted. The leadership should realise that, nowadays, people are capable of reacting and causing instability, which can affect development, investment and peace. Wholesomeness and transparency in governance are of utmost importance.
“Somebody in authority invariably takes a decision, which generates pent-up anger. That is the way I see it and unless we see it that way, we will just be beating about the bush. Unless you realise the original, fundamental cause of these things, which is bad governance, we will never get to the bottom of it”.
The former minister said violence can never be an answer to violence, urging the people behind the insecurity to embrace dialogue with government.
He said: “Even the Vietnam war did not stop on the battle field. It came to the negotiating table. Serious and devastating wars in modern history did not stop on the battle field.”
Shinkaki urged the media to promote peace and harmony by sensitising the stakeholders to the negative impact of violence. He lamented that the Africa has been militarised by years of wars and strife, adding that riffles find their ways into the hands of citizens.
He added: “The civil war ended and the Biafran Army just disintegrated. There was no formal surrender of arms. There was no formal handover of war activities. The thing just disintegrated. Now, we are going back to 1970s. Come to Liberia and Libya. The entire Libyan army has just disintegrated. A lot of these things are common in West Africa. How can you be surprised about the prevalence of sophisticated weapons in any nation south of Libya, like Nigeria, Chad or Niger? I understand that in Somalia today, you can buy AK-47 like a packet of cigarette. What are you talking about?”
Shinkafi warned against a hasty and total removal of fuel subsidy, emphasising that only a gradual decrement in subsidy is tenable to alleviate its pains on the ordinary man and consequential effects on the economy.
The former Alliance for Democracy/All Peoples Party (AD/APP) vice presidential candidate said the answer to incessant strikes by university teachers is the establishment of more private universities.
Shinkafi also reflected on constitution review, saying that “what the constitution requires is not review, but re-doing. He called for the re-adoption of the 1979 Constitution as a guide, maintaining that it was one of the best constitutions in the world.
He added: “There was a conference in Canada in the 70s for the review of constitutions worldwide and the 1979 Nigerian Constitution received a high mark. We can go back to it. We need to restructure the Presidency so that it will not remain a regimented military way of handling a federation”.
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Insecurity is alarming, says Shinkafi