As a matter of urgency, the Federal Government of Nigeria must disband all secret and intelligence departments and agencies in all the country’s security architectures.
The Human Rights, Liberty Access, and Peace Defenders’ Foundation (HURIDE) made the call in a statement available to the media after their crucial executive meeting in Enugu.
It said the call to scrap the departments and agencies was necessitated by the abysmal and monumental failures associated with their operational activities.
In the statement endorsed by the Executive Director of HURIDE, Dede Uzor A Uzor, the group said the emergence of new terrorist groups was a result of a lack of intelligence gathering and abysmal intelligence failures.
The rights groups said the ongoing insecurity in most other parts of the country, especially the South East, was also a result of intelligence failure on the side of our security operatives.
The intelligence outfits, the rights body said, that should be overhauled or scrapped are the Department of State Security (DSS), National Intelligence Agency ((NIA), Police’s Federal Investigation Bureau (FIB), and State Criminal Investigation Department (SCIB) Rapid Response Squad (RRS) Special Anti Robbery Squad (SARS) among others.
The group called for the immediate reactivation of the Olusanya report and said that the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) should also be disbanded as it has failed in its statutory function and now “engages in extensive corruption and extortion of motorists.”
The FRSC, they said, was set up to reduce drastically accidents and traffic gridlock, among others, on Nigerian roads. Still, now they focus more on impounding private vehicles and extorting money from road users.s
The rights body lamented that they also focused more attention on private vehicles, from which they make more money, than commercial vehicles, which “violate traffic regulations with utmost impunity and recklessness.”
HURIDE lamented that most commercial vehicles on Nigerian roads have no life–saving equipment or essential health management kits in case of emergency. Still, they were always left to operate at the detriment of their passengers because they settled FRSC officials on the road.
The rights group advocated for three months of mandatory retraining for security operatives in Nigeria every year to ensure they are in tune with protecting citizens’ lives.
“There must be a statutory and mandatory three months training in each year for every security operative to enable them be in tune with protecting citizens’ lives,” it said.
