‘Safer, secure Nigeria can only be driven by what we make of it’

The levels of challenges we are faced with security and otherwise remain a culmination of so many dysfunctionalities, spanning decades of our collective existence as a country.

You could also see the status quo across board in Nigeria today as rife indicators that the country is bulging at the seams; meaning, we have outgrown much of what we consider the parameters for regulating our collective existence.

Parameters here refer to the norms and laws that inform our nationhood. 
Security wise, the challenges we see are symptoms that adjustments, upgrades or downgrades are required as the case may be, to properly align our present state of being (in 2016 Nigeria and going forwards), with laws and norms that were conceived and enacted way back in time, and either outdated or totally irrelevant.

These laws relevant as they could be when enacted decades ago were not driven into existence by the status quo as we have it today. Don’t forget that as humans, whether political, social, or even economic, we are always perpetually in a state of flux. That means nothing remains fixed over the long term, there are bound to be deviations or convergences as events unfold.

A consistent inability to manage these variable deviations and convergences properly over decades has directly spawned the symptoms of dys-functionalities which appear today as our security threat challenges or problems as it were.

Our “FUTURISTIC” security challenges as the years unfold, are a direct function of, and will draw substance from what we do or fail to do in the ‘’NOW.’’ 
As earlier inferred, the challenges of the “MOMENT” were sown and nurtured in the “PAST”, and have morphed into what we see or have in the “NOW.”

Looking ahead, security- Nigeria will come to depend heavily on what is done “NOW”, or “TODAY”, if you like. This calls for strategic thinking, intellectual rigour, imagination-ability and meta-cognition on the part of all security and law enforcement agencies. 
 Gone are the days of pursuing crime and insecurity, which is expensive, and cost-inefficient; more like leading and pre-empting crime, which aligns to our ever-changing dynamics as people beings. Getting to do this, calls for a more mentally and technically approach, than physically or manually-driven approach to security problem solving.

There are indeed reasons for concern; given the yearning gap between security and insecurity levels. The encouraging aspect of this remains that acts of insecurity in themselves are laden with information or indicators as to where, what and who the dys-functioalities are.

These indicators provide a cesspool of data, which properly collated and analysed, form the Terra-firma for effective security, intelligence and law enforcement operations.

A safer and secure Nigeria can only be driven by what we make of it. Insecurity has no mind of its own…it is created; we create our reality as we go.
The challenge here remains in Albert Einstein’s words, going a level higher to solve a problem, instead of doing so at the same level with the problem.

We need a better and more informed approach to security threats management. We need serious mind and intellect upgrades security wise.

The crime sector is out-thinking the security sector. 2016 earth has become more non-stereotype and imagination driven, ditto crime and its corollaries. Law enforcement Nigeria must accept and key into this line of sight and thought in all its ramifications. There is much to be done with attendant economic and strategic benefits for all and sundry.

• Umar Aliyu, a retired captain of the country’s Army x-rays, with Samson Ezea, insecurity and challenges that lie ahead as Nigeria clocks 56