Renowned lawyer and former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Dr Olisa Agabkoba, has said the insecurity in Nigeria can only be defeated with irregular tactics from security agencies.
The lawyer said he had met with President Bola Tinubu about the worsening insecurity in the country, warning him that he could not win the irregular war far with regular mechanisms.
Agbakoba made this known in a recent interview with Control TV monitored by Daily Trust, while faulting the security policies of the Federal Government.
He argued that he met with Tinubu to change the strategy of tackling the insecurity that have put Nigerians in sleepless nights as kidnappings and killings spread.
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He said, “It’s not working and the reason is…I had the opportunity to talk to him (Tinubu) on this. In the course of doing my LLM and Ph.D back in the 80’s. I just got interested in counter-intelligence and I did a lot of readings at the School of African Oriental Studies,” Agbakoba said.
“Now, there is regular warfare and irregular or conventional warfare. The reason Americans lost in Vietnam was because they were fighting an irregular war.
“To put billions of dollars into a conventional war strategy where you are fighting regular people like IPOB, and Boko Haram is destined to fail. So, I told him ‘Change your strategy. Go to irregular war, and you’ll see result.’ That’s the problem.”
The legal luminary further explained that changing service chiefs in order to address the menace of insecurity cannot take Nigeria anywhere, unless the strategy is changed.
He further said the remedy to solving the problem is not necessarily about the personnel by about tactics.
“What has happened in the last ten years that appointed a batch of security chiefs, sacked them and it’s been going on. So, something must be wrong. I said to him ‘Do something fresh’ That’s not happening yet. So I will say the policy on security isn’t working,” he added.
Nigeria is currently grappling with insecurity, as bandits and other criminals have increased kidnappings for ransom, as the recent Ekiti incident proved that Nigerian people are at the mercy of assailants.
Early in the week in Ekiti state, kidnappers ambushed a school bus and abducted five pupils, four teachers and a bus driver.
In the same state, two monarchs were ambushed and killed by the suspected bandits, but the security operatives have swung into action to find the killers.
