Stakeholders at McPherson varsity harp on collective vigilance to tackle insecurity

Stakeholders in the education sector and security agencies, yesterday, converged on McPherson University in Ogun State, to address the menace of insecurity headlong in almost every sphere, particularly in the education sector, under the auspices of the campus security committee of the university.

Vice Chancellor of the university, Prof. Francis Igbasan, who spoke at a seminar with the theme, “Managing Campus Security: The Roles of Members of Staff,” held at the university’s multipurpose hall, admonished the participants to talk on security matters regularly whenever they have current emerging security issues that are “peculiar, novel and capable of affecting lives as members of the university community.”

He said that the watchdog role should not be for security personnel alone, but for everybody.

Also, a security expert and don in the Department of International Relations of the university, Dr Paul Ojo, setting the pace for the discourse, defined security as the protection of life and property, noting that the “security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government” in line with Section 14 (2) of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution as amended.

He said that through collaboration with the citizenry in the areas of intelligence sharing and obedience to the law, governments at all levels could curb the rising insecurity in the land.

According to the don, many of the security challenges confronting tertiary institutions in Nigeria today were both internally and externally-induced.

He hinted that internally-induced security challenges could manifest in form of cultism, drug abuse and addiction, sexual harassment, examination malpractices, kidnapping and Internet fraud, while government policies, political interferences, mismanagement of parents’ influence on university’s management, lack of respect for the culture of the host community and breach of campus security and so on could trigger externally-induced security challenges.

Ojo said that if those challenges were not properly managed, they could lead to leakages of official information, factionalisation within the system and growing mistrust, among others.

In his presentation, the Senior Security Officer and Head of the Security Unit of the university, CSP Oluwaseyi Lala, said that the best way to safeguard the university community from insecurity is to proactively prevent it collectively.

The stakeholders, therefore, agreed that security of life and property should not be the government’s business alone, but everybody’s business and that everybody should be security conscious and vigilant.

In the same vein, members of staff were advised to be mindful of their utterances in the public domain and on the Internet to guard against security breaches either on the campus or outside the campus, among others.

Meanwhile, the presence and positive contributions of representatives of the Nigerian Army, Nigeria Police Force and Vigilante Group of Nigeria at the parley attested to the much-needed collaborative efforts in tackling the menace of insecurity across tertiary institutions in Nigeria.