Thursday, 28th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search
Breaking News:

Dogara tasks military on intelligence gathering to tackle terrorism

By Segun Olaniyi, Abuja
14 November 2017   |   4:27 am
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has charged the military to use effective intelligence gathering to fight terrorism.

Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara PHOTO: TWITTER/DOGARA

Group seeks ECOWAS joint-taskforce
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has charged the military to use effective intelligence gathering to fight terrorism.

He spoke in Abuja yesterday at the 2017 Defence Advisers/Attaches yearly conference organised by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Dogara, who condemned the activities of the terrorists in the North-East, spoke on “consolidating the gains of counter-terrorism operations in Nigeria through defence diplomacy.”

He said: “If we succeed in gathering effective and reliable intelligence that could be interpreted, we would always be ahead of the terrorists, kidnappers and all those who are threatening the country’s peaceful co-existence.”

The Speaker promised that the National Assembly would ensure that more funds were appropriated for the peace, order and good governance of the country.

“What we need right now even though we are practising democracy is not the institution of the Presidency. It is not the Legislature or even the Judiciary, but law and order and national security.”

According to him, terrorism is a global problem that no single nation should be left to deal with. He added that the best way to handle it was through conferences, building effective networks, engaging the officers and sharing experiences to make the security agents to be ahead.

The Special Guest of Honour and Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan-Ali, urged the defence attaches to be part of the efforts to sustain the country’s security and prosperity.

He explained that the surge in the activities of the Boko Haram terrorists had placed the country under severe internal security challenges.

He lamented that the country has been confronted with multiple security threats ranging from militancy, kidnapping, herdsmen/farmers clashes, sophisticated armed robbery, cultism, sea piracy/robbery and human and drug trafficking.

Also, the Chief of Defence Intelligence, Air Vice Marshal Mohammed Usman, disclosed that in the last 12 months, the country had been leaping from one national security threat to the other, from extremism and separatism, to extreme levels of violent crime and hatred in the society.

Meanwhile, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), United Global Resolve for Peace (UGRP), has urged the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to develop policies that would increase the economic capacity of member-states.

A statement in Abuja yesterday by its Executive Director, Olaseni Shalom, called for the creation of an anti-terrorism taskforce, comprising volunteer military forces from the member-state, as a panacea to the disturbing menace of terrorism in West Africa.

The UGRP urged the ECOWAS to address the internally-generated revenue of member-countries and increase their export in the international market.

Shalom said these issues deserve to be given priority in the sub-region, rather than the proposal to implement ‘ECO’ as the common currency for West African states by 2020.

In this article

0 Comments