Engineer Patrick Ekpotu is a former Deputy Governor of Akwa Ibom state between 2007 and 2011. A petroleum engineer, who also holds a masters degree in Leading Innovations and Change, Ekpotu is also the author of Lifting the Peril, a book that focuses on security and militancy in the Niger Delta.
In this second and concluding part of this exclusive interview with 365Daily’s Edward Dibiana, he speaks on the complex topic of the intractable security situation in Nigeria; why military solution appears ineffective; and possible alternative approach that may be useful in achieving sustainable peace.
The security challenges in the country have become seemingly intractable, what do you think is responsible for this?
The Northeast is about the only section in the country that has terrorism added to the list of all the nightmarish threats afflicting the nation. With terrorism having a near permanent presence for years, it could be held that the situation there has long been out of the range of any rational doctrinal policy to resolve. This is because Boko Haram has defied reason for cessation of hostilities and with heavy cost to safety of human lives, freedom and property.
It is generally known that corners of society where terrorists deploy their hostilities hardly admit issues resolution by any means other than the use of force. And conventionally, the world relies on government baring its superior fangs of force to bring down the tormentors and restore order through military operations. Our inability to achieve this within this long years is less than inspiring.
Currently, almost every section of the country, including the Northeast is still ravaged by banditry and kidnapping. What do you make of the escalating security crisis?
While it is implicit that military actions are needed to overcome terrorism because the use of force is implied, same is not true of banditry, kidnapping and other organised crimes. But we have consistently relied on the traditional crime tackling methods rooted in security-agency specific actions as means to deal with the scourge, even when no progress is recorded.
Changing an existing situation implies movements to a different or virgin situation or state. This means that a departure from status quo in approach is inherent in every change, however it is approached. No current situation changes that does not admit something different. And it is the embodiment of framework, procedure and measures to be followed in bringing about the difference that amounts to “new policy”.
This is a ceaseless feature of institutional setting – be it at operational or strategic level in the public or private sectors. The persisting challenges of banditry, kidnapping, robbery and other organised crimes tormenting the nation is the clear indication for the need to change extant approaches in use. You cannot continue to do the same thing all over and expect different outcomes. You must first be clear about the need for change; you must know what must change; commensurate techniques for lasting change; and how to manage change and non-change associated challenges so that failed attempts at changing the situation can be averted.
You have just raised four points about the need to change approach and technique, can you elaborate on them, especially on how they apply here?
Being clear about the need for change refers to whether or not there is actual need for any change at all. In our case, the persistence of the security problem despite money, time and human resources put into resolving it from time, but with no success, signifies the need for change.
The degeneration of our social behaviours to the complicated level where citizens kill one another in organised attacks, and at the slightest provocation; where criminal minded ones now target, ambush and kill our security agents, just to possess their body bags is another. There is also a progressively dimming of the hopes of citizens following escalated deaths, threats of many more and general disaffection from the situation.
The increasing inability of our prevailing response mechanisms, which view insecurity as exclusive tasks of security agencies is another, in addition to many other indicators like the astonishing development and growth of negative human passion including lust for power, wealth, vanity, destructiveness, etc. These are all great signs of urgency for adjustment of the society, hence the need for change to happen.
Next is what must change. This implies ability to determine what elements in the chain of causes that has to change for the situation to be different as expected. In this case, you have to identify all possible elements at the centre of possible causes and from there, determine which particular one is the basic cause of the situation. That becomes the precise thing to change. In the case of our situation, there is no sign that any such determination has been undertaken by any government. If they have, then government would not be relying on security agency-specific approach, knowing that it cannot change the situation. The other two are self-explanatory, that is, the techniques you are to adopt to bring about the change without fail as well as how to manage the change process to avoid failure.
I understand you to mean that narrowing down the challenges to the actual cause is essential in determining what must be changed to overcome them. What do you consider as root cause of our peculiar insecurity situation; and what do you think must be changed for us to have relief?
It is inevitable that human beings, existing in large numbers, exercising free will and pursuing different wants, must always create conflicting scenarios that require resolution. Government has remained the one immemorial way of having these disputes bindingly resolved. It does this by regulating market-place conducts of all its members by imposing a rule of equity which ensures that each person has a voice but none, a command. And it ensures that each member conducts his pursuits by means that are compatible to the analogous pursuits of other society members.
This means that citizens’ action are permanently embodied in the laws which govern them, laws whose making they do not know or control, but nevertheless submit to. Banditry, kidnapping, robbery, other organised crimes, corruption, etc. in any society are social problem that result from atrocious conducts and behaviours of individual society members. And should their action obstruct the proper functioning of the society, as is in the case of insecurity here, it means that the laws on ground either lack control of the citizens or are not available at all or are not correspondingly tailored to meet the challenges.
Nigeria’s insecurity is, in this way, a mere symptom of aberrant conducts and unregulated behaviours. And this implies failure of society headed by government that alone has the responsibility to regulate the market-place conducts of citizens.
So, we are the producers of the social arrangements that torment us. To overcome insecurity challenges is to combat citizens’ aberrant conducts. This means that the solution is purely political. Not policing issue and definitely not military, as it is viewed and pursued. It is appropriate political decisions and accompanying actions. And in instituting the conscious policy with needed framework of rules and laws to provide highly required motivation lacking in our value system to enforce new behavioural norms.
It is only by changing the laws to change the minds that we can change our world over time. If this is not in place, I am afraid that the scary security situation would not have defied all the security measures that governments have been busy deploying since the beginning of time. And in the manner of things, it would get pretty worse and hard to reverse, should we delay things further.
The terrorism in the northeast too owes its beginning to this. I hope we act fast so as not to have things degenerate further and open up many terrorist fronts in the country.
And do not ignore the fact that the rising tide of insecurity could endow a cheap platform to those wishing to rip the nation apart, because the drums of insanity getting louder would mean increased level of all-round threats to lives and property, which would pump up calls for “restructuring”, “state police” and “regional security outfits” as best resolution options even when they are nothing but self-defeating paradigm shifts.
Your conclusion sounds very scary. We don’t wish for that. There is something not quite clear… It is the underlying logic behind why the situation steadily deteriorates each passing year. Can you throw light on that?
Yes, it might sound scary but that’s the reality. Has the security situation improved since I started giving you this same answer for over 10 years now? Of course not. It rather gets worse by the year and would continue to be so for as long as we continue to deal with the symptoms and not the problem. And as long as we continue to tie its resolution to the wrong cause, and see it happening only in the light of security-agency-specific approach that we have adopted from time immemorial.
This is how it gets worse each passing day. The citizens’ attitude is embodied in their conducts and behaviours of the adult members of the society. If it’s the attitude that creates insecurity, it gets escalated by being transmitted generations upon generations of citizens.
This means that the originating adults pass it unto other adults and to children. The recipients now pass it unto those by them and below them, as they are growing up and the passing on continues nonstop. As that happens, it becomes deeply ingrained in the social character of the society and colours the nation’s cultural condition to become a way of life, at which point it appears to society members as being the right thing. Children’s appetite gets conditioned by the values the adult’s society transmits, which has become dominant in the culture.
These wrongs have so actively constituted our beings individually that we effectively transmit them at family, community, social, official and informal spaces. The fact that generations of our children are raised and moulded from this imposed social environment, makes the same behaviours, conducts and character to become theirs. It includes socially undesirable attitudes and crimes that underline all elements of past and present-day insecurity, corruption, rebellious and dissident attitudes, and cultism, getting rich by other criminal means like sale of drugs, ritualists, robbery, and the likes. This is how society steadily processes and passes on the defects that breed insecurity to generations to generations.
It must be noted that each generation comes with changes that improve on crime narrations, crime strategies and thought system, newer skills, newer techniques and they unleash insecurity with impacts and staying power, greater than the generations before them. It points only to the story at the end of which doom alone is written and so signals the need for a completely new policy to combat them.
You don’t expect not to have citizens whose best behaviour is in cruelty, neediness, distinctive combination of comic bravado and paralyzing insecurity; who hardly reflect on feelings and put those feelings to work as was the case generations back. And you don’t expect to wake up one day and see a changed citizens because you have recruited one million policemen or two million soldiers, 98% of who share the same behavioural frailties. And it is from this same poorly baked society’s pool that we recruit personnel into our institutions, elect our leaders and representative, who we hate the day after.
Meanwhile the use of police and military translate into the use of force to solve the problem. Is force the issue? Have the citizens ever resisted obeying the laws the nation has made? If the use of force is the option and the solution in killing, how many will you kill to have order restored when the behaviour that breads the problem is shared by entire society that you have failed to change?
As you can see, the manifold hindrances standing on the path of our will to succeed over the years are deeply lodged in citizens’ behaviour and aberrant conducts. It is there that they start and sustain the cascade of insecurity process involving all levels of crimes that define society’s social character and cultural conditions. Is it still surprising that underage children now constitute more than 15% of crime suspects in our security custody?
How did you arrive at these frightening data?
I normally derive them from self-study. You can run it if you are interested. I tabulate monthly arrests made by security agents on various crimes as reported in the media. Of importance to me are usually age of crime suspects, date the crime was committed, location, and nature of crime. At the end of the particular month, year or sets of years, as the case may be, it is easy to determine, at a glance, the age difference between the youngest suspect and the oldest. And with the aid of some data analysis tools, it is possible to obtain other measures desired. You can also determine what percentage of suspects of a certain age bracket were involved in crimes within the period under study.
And by the way, this government did not create the security situation being witnessed today, even though some crime types have surged within its reign. The sequence of insecurity disorder outlives the regime since deterioration and cascading started to gather momentum since 1998, according to my earlier study. With very minimal exception, the results obtained in 2009, 2012 and 2014 showed similar patterns while the more detailed study in 2019 revealed a more disturbing result. All indicated a progressive rise in number and ages of adult suspects; and greater rise in the number of younger suspects who now have underage children among them.
This means that while more adult suspects are pushing up in organised crimes in each passing year, under age children are also recruiting into crimes than in the previous years, which is like, “Oh my God! I can’t wait to be like my friends”. Putting it simply, it means crimes that were previously committed more by people within the age brackets of say, 18 and 33 years old in 1998 now have 14 to 43 years old people committing them more. Quite a sad observation and I hope our universities could regularly be encouraged to be running this kind of study and furnishing government with relevant data, since it is always better to take decisions on the best available evidence.
For instance, data from 2019 study showed that about 92% of crimes are committed mostly by suspects in the age brackets of between 15 and 43 years old. From the analysis, a child that was born in 1998 is 21 years old today. A 10 year old child as at then is today 31; 18 years old is today 39 years and a 22 year old is now 43. It implies that citizens from early 40s and below are the ones most impacted by the manifest conducts dominant in our culture in the last 21 years. Sadly, it also corresponds with the period of our flourishing democracy, which indicates that our priorities in crimes prevention and control are not right because we undermine the significance of behaviours, conducts and habits giving birth to them.
What in your opinion do you think should be the solution to this identified problem?
Yes, we can turn the page. But we first have to change our view of the complicated and interrelated issues affecting our social behaviour and security. Bad apples, they say, come from rotten trees. To have good apples from the tree is to replant the roots of the rotten tree. In the same vein, criminal elements in the population imbued with structural capacity to wreck our security are products of our rotten society. To fundamentally solve the insecurity problems, we have to replant the roots of the society, by way of the people who make it up, and alter their conducts and behaviours. Effectiveness of any action is in how deeply it subjects the citizens to inner changes as the basis for a new social order. Once that is caused to happen, it is a matter of time for banditry, kidnapping, and other forms of organised crimes to stand decimated.
What we often overlook is that society’s character is in man’s character. And a man’s character is always his fate, we are told. Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from reaching his goals, just as nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. The great solution to character-deficient issues is ability to change one’s character. And this implies that that which is rightly or wrongly held as destiny can get altered if the character is altered. In any change process, the individual’s character remains the key. And is absolutely true of society too, which is why it is said that one refined mind is a tremendous asset to society. So why can’t we refine all our minds when the facility is there?
It must be understood, however, that the lasting change coming from this strategy is not attainable overnight since it cannot be commanded or invoked. Insecurity did not acquire its status overnight by command but by a cascade of our behavioural actions and inactions over many years. Its elimination too has to come through a cascade of behavioural sanity involving every citizen. The framework for resolving it must commit to regulating, controlling, eventually debasing and freezing out individual’s aberrant and socially unacceptable behaviours to change the prevailing situation. It also offers the needed inherent stabilising mechanism to sustain the new atmosphere by insulating the society against manifest reappearances of those conducts. This it does by the public scrutiny that it exerts on the society as a whole. And this makes the change it offers to be a permanent.
As can be seen, it is a purely political action. Ironically, it cannot happen without some legislation which includes constitutional amendments. Its gains are enormous because the framework, when established can be used to drive every major national initiative and aspiration.
In all these, what specific advise would you give to government?
I have discussed this same issue for 11 years now and like everyone else I also watch the situation degenerate with every step we take. So I don’t think government actually needs advice on how to deal with this situation. It seems to be most comfortable with the conventional crime tackling approach that it has, no doubt, more heavily mobilised in recent years. The only unfortunate thing being that the government does not seem to be reading the frustration on the faces of our security chiefs.
Yes, there is a workable approach to deal with the situation provided it is implemented throughout the federation. I will try to summarize some of its essential features. The approach recognizes that the conduct and behaviours of individual citizen is at the centres of insecurity and that focuses its actions on individual citizens. But managing individual citizens in a population this large is unwieldy. To reduce this entity, the villages are made the cornerstones of its administration. This enables individual’s attitudes to be touched on in their respective families by control measures executed through their village administrative structure.
The village being a collection of manageable number of families, whose members are known to one another, then becomes the psychic agency of the policy. The village heads, who would serve as accounting officers, are an indispensably crucial force in the policy.
For its strategic importance, it raises concerns about the necessity for the village level to become the last tier of governance in the country with an established system of administration, structure and funding.
Notably, every individual belongs to a family; many families constitute a Village; many Villages make the Local Government Area (LGA); many LGAs comprise a state; while the 36 states and FCT embody the Federation of Nigeria. It is implicit that if each citizen is guided to act out socially acceptable behaviours along target context at the family level that each belongs to, general calm will transmitted along the linkage: Individuals – Family – Villages – LGAs – State – Federation. In other words, the success over individuals means stability at families and villages, which automatically becomes the gain of the Federation. Tiny details including how it is billed to function in metropolitan cities where traditional village structures have been lost to modernity and legislations, are fully captured and well provided for.
By relying, for its effectiveness, on each community’s customs as provided for in our extant laws, by strengthening the customary laws of individual traditions. Masterminds of disorders will be thrown up early enough when their evils are still unborn possibilities, enabling them to be nipped before they fester and become a source of sleepless nights. The equations of peace and organized crimes will be rewritten. In the rewritten equations, organized crimes, communal crisis and the likes come out a suicidal proposition with the village heads and entire administrative structure of affected villages on statutory duty to the nation. The pool of quality citizens will emerge to fill our institutions.
This is the much I can go on it but the comprehensive policy document carrying all details had been available and would be provided at any time if so required or if someone says, yes, we need it.