The United Kingdom says the authorities in Nigeria are overwhelmed and grappling with insecurity in the nation.
The United Kingdom’s High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing, made this known in an interview on Tuesday.
Laing argued that the issue of kidnapping both in the north and south could not be divorced from unemployment and poverty and maintained that the Nigerian police needed to ramp up their intelligence-gathering capabilities.
She, however, urged the Nigerian government to firm up strategies to tackle the growing unemployment crisis as part of moves to addressing the root cause of insecurity in the country.
“On the scourge of kidnapping, the police need to be able to deal with it. They need much more intelligence and therefore need to work with communities to identify these kidnappers.
“There’s physical infrastructure that needs to be better. And the children need to know what to do; they need to be very well drilled if there’s going to be an attack. Even with all those kind of measures, ultimately, you’ve got to get to the root causes, which is why this epidemic of kidnapping is happening in Nigeria,” she noted.
Drawing a correlation between COVID-19 and the current economic crisis in Nigeria, Laing noted that insecurity had risen across Nigeria as more people have been thrown into poverty and unemployment, who are finding alternative sources of income and tragically finding kidnapping as a means of livelihood.
“And these are poor people, who see it as an easy route to funding through the kidnapping scourge. There needs to be some form of community kind of inter-peace dialogue to ensure that those, who are preyed to stray can be brought back in through elders as well as religious leaders to persuade them that this is not the pathway.
“But I think the government is grappling with this. The range of insecurity challenges that this government is facing is just completely overwhelming. And so I really do understand the challenges they’ve got, particularly with kidnapping in terms of paying a ransom,” she added.
While stressing that the UK had a very clear policy of not paying ransoms, she admitted that it was a dilemma for the parents of kidnapped school children, who were left in very dire situations, with their kids in the bushes.
She mentioned that the farmer/herder conflict and kidnappings associated with that, would be resolved through livestock ranching, because people’s means of livelihood would have to be preserved.
“You’ve got this farmer/herder sort of conflict and then kidnapping increasingly spreading around the country. In the northeast, its the Islamic State of West Africa. If you’re a young man without a job, they present to you a viable alternative. Ultimately, employment opportunities are probably the single most valuable way to solve this underlying problem,” the UK envoy said.
