Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, is worried about the recent raid on a train station in the Igueben LGA of Edo State, where armed men took several people hostage.
He then demanded that the federal government support local and state policing as the first line of defence.
In a statement released by his media office on Sunday, Atiku called the incident the latest in a long line of terrible security mistakes that had never happened before in the history of our country.
While we pray, it’s important to remember that this is just the latest sign that we need to change our security system right away to protect Nigerians’ lives and property.
The former vice president suggested that the Constitution might need to be changed to permit state and local law enforcement to act as a first line of defence.
He added that the nation’s security system “must give intelligence gathering and crime prevention a greater importance than our existing reactive strategy.”
“It is unacceptable for terrorists to plan such attacks, gather weapons and ammunition, raise funds, and move large numbers of people across vast areas without being detected by security forces,” Atiku said.
He pushed for the use of tracking technology to make it harder for terrorists to attack all over the country. He also wanted to make it harder for light weapons and assault rifles to move freely across the West African sub-region and through our borders, and he wanted to cut down on the number of street kids who couldn’t go to school.
He also said that “developing the economy to create jobs for a large number of unemployed Nigerians” will reduce “the pool of people from whom these terrorists recruit people to do bad things.”
