SAN FRANCISCO, March 06, (THEWILL) – President Muhammadu Buhari has stated that the focus of his administration was the strengthening of the nation’s intelligence gathering capacity and intelligence sharing among security agencies in order to rout insurgency and other violent crimes.
Buhari stated this at the 8th National Security Seminar 2018 of the Alumini Association of the National Defence College (NDC) in Abuja, with the theme ‘Fighting Tomorrow’s warfare Today’, represented by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
According to him, without investing in intelligence gathering there would be very little hope for the country at the mercy of large swathes of ungoverned spaces and feeble borders saying that there was a limit to what the armed forces could achieve by conventional means of establishing barracks and bases insisting that the scope of the battle against insurgency is broadened by the vast land mass in the North-East.
“One current focus is the strengthening of Nigeria’s intelligence gathering capacity. For this to happen intelligence gathering must not be seen solely as a task for law enforcement agencies,” he stated.
“It is a task that must involve every citizen, every community.
“And at the level of the military and intelligence agencies, intelligence-sharing must become the rule and not the exception.
“Land mass on that scale is unquestionably a delight for terrorists and their unconventional tactics.
“The primary advantage that the Government should have over them is in intelligence gathering; the ability to expertly assemble the pieces of various puzzles together in order to be able to progressively contain and limit terrorism.
“This necessity of robust intelligence gathering underlies every one of our security challenges in Nigeria, not just terrorism but also clashes between herdsmen and farmers, cattle rustling, armed banditry, cultism and militancy.
“In the herdsmen, farmer crisis we have seen that herdsmen attackers have included armed confederate from neighbouring North African countries, especially Libya which has in the past few years been a repository of small arms.
“We must significantly upgrade our capacity to collect intelligence, as well as build a culture of sharing it amongst our military and law enforcement agencies in a timely manner.
“We must also increasingly depend on cutting-edge technology to make this task easier.
“Cutting-edge technology will allow you to better anticipate and predict the antics of terrorists, increase your capacity to surprise them before they surprise us.
“And it will make it far less likely that tragic recent events like Dapchi and Rann will ever happen again.”
Buhari said that government was aware that Boko Haram was being inspired by ISIS in the Middle East and had quickly learned that a terrorist group could benefit much from its media operations as from its armed warriors and gave three ways by which terror war could be won, namely:
“It is first to win the minds of young men and women fed with the false ideologies that promote terrorism,” he said.
“Second is to continuously address the material conditions that make it attractive for some young men and women to take up arms against innocent people as an option for economic survival.
“Third is to rebuild and secure the communities destroyed by terrorist acts; the President has asked me to Chair an inter-ministerial team to plan and implement the physical and social rebuilding of such communities.”
