Gambari charges government to spend less on security management

Former Permanent Representative of Nigeria to the United Nations (UN), Ambassador Ibrahim Gambari, yesterday, advocated better concentration on prevention of crisis and security threat rather than management.

Gambari, also a former UN Under Secretary General and one-time Nigeria’s minister of Foreign Affairs, who spoke at the 34th convocation lecture of Bayero University, Kano (BUK), insisted that effective government policies on crisis prevention cost less than deploying huge public funds in the management.

Citing the recent federal government’s approval of $1billion for procurement of security hardware, Gambari pointed that the security challenge would have been better managed if the root cause of the crisis were nipped in the bud. 

He recalled: “Take, for instance, what the UN is spending on peace keeping mission and prosecution of war across the globe. The UN spends $8billion in the fight, while $400 million is being spent for peacekeeping.

“So, preventing and make sure all the matters generating crisis are resolve, rather than managing the crisis after its finally broken.

“When I was in Darfur for peacekeeping, we had $2billion to maintain security crisis, while we knew the major cause of the crisis, which was lack of water.

“I called for a summit to rather address the challenge of water, which will cost far less, but unfortunately, the crisis continued, while the peacekeeping remains.”