Worried by the spate of banditry across the country’s, especially in the North East, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Sani Shinkafi, has charged President Bola Tinubu to rejig security architecture, to stem the tide.
Shinkafi, in a statement yesterday, said all hands must be deck to address the problem, lamenting lives and properties have been lost as a result of criminality.
He said: “The need to review and rejig the nation’s security architecture cannot be overemphasized. Security is everybody’s business. Life has no duplicate. We must value the sanctity of human life.
“Let us set aside partisan politics and resolve to build a strong, united, progressive, prosperous and inclusive democratic nation.”
The Executive Director of Patriots for the Advancement of Peace and Social Development, also urged security agencies in Zamfara State to be firm and decisive in crushing armed banditry in the state and stop untenable excuses of awaiting orders from Abuja before discharging their constitutional mandates of protecting lives and property when citizens are under bandits attacks.
“The good people of Zamfara State have been at the mercy of armed bandits who kill, wound, abduct, rape, displace indigenes from their ancestral homes, impose levies, rustle cattles and destroy properties worth billions of naira for over a decade in the state.
“Most of these attacks could have been prevented if security agencies had worked in synergy with the Zamfara State government under Governor Dauda Lawal who has procured advanced technology of environmental remote sensing, Geographical Information System (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS) which provide precise location and timing information to track activities of bandits in their hideouts.
“Governor Lawal also provided 150 operational vehicles which were distributed to security agencies. He engaged the services of 2000 Civilian Joint Task Force and hunters from Borno and Yobe States to complement the efforts of security personnel and the State’s Community Protection Guard ( Assakarawa) who are deployed across the 14 local government areas of the state with additional operational vehicles, motorcycles, licenced weapons and logistics to assist conventional security agencies in the fight against armed bandits and other criminal elements in the state.
“In spite of the incumbent Governor Lawal’s unwavering commitment to end armed banditry in the state which was the main thrust of his 2023 electioneering campaign, it is curious that security agencies do not respond quickly to intelligence reports from the state government of bandits planned attacks to forestall them nor respond promptly to crush such attacks and, save lives and property,” he added.
