John Adoyi, PBA Journalism Mentee
By John Adoyi
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On Sunday 5 June 2022, the Christian community worldwide and the nation Nigeria were aghast at the horrific scenes from a massacre that took place at Saint Francis Catholic Church Owo in Ondo State, where many parishioners’ songs of jubilation for the coming of the Holy Spirit became songs of dirge and wailing for the souls of their beloved ones that got trapped in the carnage that was unleashed by criminals.
We are not done talking about the lynching of Deborah and the Okada passenger in Lagos and this happened.
This shows that insecurity in Nigeria has gotten to its peak and it deserves a state of emergency.
The most precious asset to a country, is national security. National security has been described as the ability of a state to cater for the protection and defense of its citizenry.
National security can only be in place when the citizens of a secured country basked in relative peace and the economy is flourishing and human right is guaranteed.
But when all this state of delectation is missing and law and order has lost meaning, there goes insecurity and that is the position Nigeria as a country is at right now.
According to the Oxford advanced learners dictionary, insecurity simply means: state of not being safe or protected.
From time in the past, Nigeria has been going through one form of insecurity or the other. But then people could sleep with their two eyes closed and tomorrow was assured. You could travel through the country and not be scared of not reaching your destination in one piece. Church was a safe haven for all and not a place you recite your last prayer but today, the country’s security is in a downward spiral.
The economy is not flourishing, political instability is on the prowl and citizens are dying in aggregate on a daily basis.
You can’t tune to a radio station, flip through the dailies or watch television without seeing blood of the innocent being sacrificed on the altar of insecurity.
It is either a bandit attack on a community, kidnap on the Kaduna-Abuja highway or Massacre in churches, farmer’s herder’s clashes or Boko-haram attacks in the North that is gradually spreading to the south.
All this has left Nigerians completely at a loss of what to do or which part of the country to go for safety.
Recall that in 2021, the Minister of defense, Major General Bashir Magashi (rtd), during a chat with Journalists, told Nigerians to defend themselves against Bandit attacks and I asked myself, is this how much the government has lost its grip on the security issue. Is it that they have no clue on what to do and they are living Nigerians to waste?
I don’t think the government understand that the insecurity is the reason for the downward trend of the economy.
Nobody would want to invest in a nation where there is no security.
The brain drain in the country is on an increase every day, People are tired of the situation so they would rather live the country than be a potential bull’s eye for the next attack.
The duty of every government is to protect the lives and property of it citizens.
You can only do that, if your security system is working.
Instead of the president to say the perpetrators of the evil will go to hell, he needs to instruct his defense chiefs to rise to the occasion. The president need to stop giving service chiefs ultimatum but sack them if nothing is working.
The Police, intelligence community and other security agencies needs to start doing their jobs, pay them good salaries, train and retrain them, get them good weapons and not this rickety guns they have .
The economy is bad and unemployment is increasing, get a good economy plan and work with it. We shouldn’t be living on a budget that is only working on paper.
The unemployment issue need to be well tackled. Fix the power issue, there is a lot that stable electricity can do to help the country develop. People who lack economic freedom and are hungry are the sources of insecurity.
The government needs to do better before it gets too late.
Ban Ki-moon said “The basic building block of peace and security for all peoples is economic and social security, anchored in sustainable development. It is the key to all problems because it allows us to address all the great issues-poverty, climate, environment, political stability-as parts of the whole.”
