THE Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lieutenant General Azubuike Ihejirika, in aspeech delivered on his behalf by Major General Jack Nwogbo, has called for more recruitment into the Armed Forces to meet local and international security challenges facing the country.THE country has had a long experience in peace keeping, beginning from its involvement in the Congo in the 1960s. Today, there is an increasing demand for the services of the Nigerian Armed Forces in international peace-keeping operations in many flash points in Africa. The latest deployment has been the contingent to Mali where the crisis that followed the coup, led by Captain Amadou Sanogo in March is yet to settle.MORE critically is that the military has been massively deployed to internal security assignments in recent times in a manner that is unprecedented in the life of the country during peace time. By December 2010, the army had deployed 17,000 officers and soldiers for internal security operations in the South-East, the Niger Delta, in Plateau, Bauchi and Borno states to curb militancy, internal crisis, kidnapping and the Boko Haram uprising.DURING that period, all training exercises for that year had to be cancelled for soldiers to be deployed for internal security operations. With the escalation of the operations of Boko Haram and fear of its spread to other parts of the Northern Nigeria and the country more broadly, the military has had to make further deployments. This deployment has increased the number of officers in internal security operations significantly. All these demands, coupled with external security problems, have stretched the Nigerian army to a great extent; the result is that practically every army unit is engaged and there is no redundancy or reserve to cater for rest and recuperation of troops. The situation has also stretched the limited resources of the armed forces.THERE is no sign that the internal security challenges will reduce very soon. This is because of the increasing inflow of small arms and light weapons (SALW) into the country from Libya and other parts of the world. The Chief of Army Standards and Evaluation, Major-General Shehu Abdulkadir, in a paper entitled, 'The challenges of internal security and implications for national development' at the 7th annual Ramadan lecture of Muslim Media Practitioners of Nigeria (MMDN) in Abuja, noted that Nigeria is both a producer and consumer of SALW in the West African sub-region.ALTHOUGH 'it is difficult to determine the exact quantity of illegal SALW circulating within or penetrating into Nigeria, it is estimated that over 70 per cent of eight to 10 million illegal weapons in West Africa are in Nigeria.' These illegal weapons circulating in Nigeria, Abdulkadir added, are 'manifested in the level of human causalities and material damage recorded in the aftermath of their use in the country. It can therefore be best left to the imagination the consequences of this situation.' The access to illegal weapons has made crime more dangerous, made criminals and militants bolder when facing security agents, and has rendered crime fighting more difficult and more expensive. The call on the military in aid of civil authority to deal with crime will not reduce in the short run.THE demand for more men and women to join the military, the need for more equipment to deal with counter-terrorism and the need for training for these recruits means that the Federal Government has faced pressure to spread resources among competing needs. Indeed, the Army Chief has called for legislation to commit state governments to provide budgetary allocations to soldiers deployed to their states. Whatever the merit of this suggestion, there is a clear challenge arising from the massive deployment of the military in managing internal security. One of these challenges is whether it is desirable to have so many soldiers on Nigerian streets, performing police duties in the long run. Across the world, there are moves to upgrade a section of the police, to establish a kind of hybrid policing to deal with special crimes, including terrorism.ONE of the reasons why the military has been so massively deployed is the absence of confidence in the ability of the police to maintain law and order. Many of the officers and men in the police are frustrated because of poor remuneration and poor equipment. Professionalism has ebbed. Thus, the internal security challenge is not only complicated by the changing nature of crime alone. However, concerns about security capability of the police must not be limited to training and equipment for personnel of the police and the State Security Service (SSS). There is a need to improve the condition of service of the police and address corruption within the organisation.EFFORTS should also be made to upgrade and strengthen the role and capability of other ancillary security support services like Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) and the Nigerian Civil Defence Corps. Inter-agency cooperation is also very critical. Interagency rivalry has been implicated in the failure of intelligence. This has been embarrassingly demonstrated in the case of results of investigations into the murder of the private secretary to Governor Adams Oshiomole of Edo State. In this case, the police and the SSS paraded different suspects as responsible for the same crime.FINALLY, we call on the Federal Government to provide a comprehensive national security policy that includes a clearly defined framework for cooperation among all security agencies. This is necessary to ensure synergy among the various agencies in order to avoid situations that over expose the military to police duties and confound the readiness of the military for its primary duty as an effective and decisive defence instrument.
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