Terrorism: Group seeks comprehensive overhaul of NIA, police

Rights group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), yesterday, tasked the incoming administration, especially the President and the National Assembly to ensure the overhauling of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and the police to tackle terrorism.

HURIWA said the incessant attacks and mass killings of Nigerians, including security operatives by armed non-state actors, are intolerable unless Nigeria has become a failed state.

According to the group, there is an urgent need to comprehensively overhaul the operational modus operandi, the staffing and professional upgrading of the operatives, so as to prevent the persistent and intermittent intelligence failures that occasioned the rapid decline in the past eight years.

HURIWA’s national coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, in a statement, stated that without doubt, the extensive breakdown of law and order in all parts of Nigeria, in the last eight years, happened because the majority of southerners believe that the security forces are only headed by the northerner and therefore there is a lack of patriotism to the extent that it became difficult for citizens to give actionable intelligence to the security forces.

HURIWA blamed large-scale compromises by these top security chiefs from Northern Nigeria for the large-scale smuggling of weapons of mass destruction that are coming into Nigeria from Chad, Niger and Northern Cameroon, which is the same as the Nigerians affiliated to virtually all the heads of the top intelligence and security institutions in the country.

“It was shocking that even when the northerners dominate all the internal security operations as the heads, the North West States of Zamfara, Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto have become operational bases of top terrorists and bandits,” the group said.