CULLED FROM NEWSHEREANDTHERE MAGAZINE
Akogun Adetunji Adeleye is the chairman of the council of Amotekun commanders in the South West . He doubles as the Core Commander Ondo state security network agency Amotekun corp . in this interview with NEWSHEREANDTHERE in Akure, the Amotekun boss highlighted certain measures needed to be in place in order tio boost the efforts of the government in combating insecurity in Nigeria.
Insecurity is a big challenge in Nigeria, how will you assess the present administration in tackling the menace of security issues?
Insecurity itself is an evolving syndrome that is ravaging different parts of the world . So Nigeria cannot be excluded. And I see the present administration striving to end insecurity. There are ways and measures that we can recommend to enhance the efforts they are putting in place. But it is to the knowledge of all of us that we see government trying to combat insecurity in Nigeria.
What are those ways that can enhance the efforts of the government ?
One basic panacea to ending insecurity in Nigeria is the development of grassroots security which is state policing. The reason is that each geopolitical zone has some different forms of insecurity ravaging them. If you look at the South west, we are being contending with robbery and kidnapping . in some other areas is armed banditry and so on. The fact is that bringing security men from within us makes it easy for us to identify suspected criminals or visitors who do not have any bearing to where we find them .so I want to recommend that the government should embrace the system of state policing as this will greatly reduce insecurity in Nigeria .
As the Amotekun boss in the South west. How will you describe the relevance of the security network in the fight against insecurity with the existence of the traditional security agencies?
I take your mind back to the creation of Amotekun which I always call the baby of necessity .it was the dwindling situation of the security architecture in the country. Looking at what is happening up North , the governors at that time came up together that they must checkmate the trend so that it doesn’t completely ravage the south west . Since the coming on board, we have been able to impact positively to the security architecture to the extent that the devastating herders farmers clashes that was going to bring so much food insecurity into the country was stopped. At least farmers to a large extent are going back to farms now and people could move and do their businesses as a result of the activities of the Amotekun corp in complementing the efforts of the mother security agencies . A lot of things were against the performance of our parent security agencies. Not that they would not have done well. You cannot give what you don’t have . A situation where somebody from Kano state is sent to Akure to come and look for a criminal in oja oba . it becomes a bit difficult . Tell an oja oba man to look for a criminal. He knows who is strange. He picks him up immediately. We know the depth of our rivers , we know the ones we can cross with legs , we know the one we use canoe. So these are some of the advantages .
And again if you look at the past few years of the existence of Amotekun in the South west , we had sent signals, you now see even our parent security agencies striving to do what Amotekun is doing. . We parade, we arrest , we do all sort of security checks , training and retraining and all sort of things. We see them coming back alive to what we believe should be the norm in the security systems in Nigeria. So we have greatly impacted positively to the security architecture .
in Nigeria.
What are you expectation from the government and stakeholders in boosting your activities?
The food for security is actionable intelligence information which we can only get from the public . right now, I want to tell you this that we enjoy so much confidence from the public . The extent that whatever we want from different part of the country we get it from the people . And once that is done , the next step is to move into action. Secondly, we would want a situation where equipment , state of the art equipment, drones and the likes are provided . And the government empowers the security architecture to such we can confront the criminals with better equipment than what we have now .
On the challenges, we would have wanted a situation where the security architecture are provided with more equipment. More training facilities , a lot of things that can enhance the operation.