President Muhammadu Buhari
The local people know where the hideouts and camps of the outlaws are and with superior power power and the will to fight
By Yakubu Ahmed-BK
Time is of essence here, because it is ominously and very dangerously ticking away. We cannot deceive ourselves any more that the Nigerian security architecture is, as they want us to believe, on top of any situation.
The undeniable fact is that the entire gamut of strategy including the countless number of OPERATION THIS and OPERATION THAT have been
mere ineffectual rhetorics that have yielded no tangible results worthy of justifying the billions that have gone into the fight against both the Boko Haram insurgence in the North East or banditry in the North West.
The sad reality is that we are nowhere near solving this problem even when we have the resources and the men to deal with it.
Since every other strategy as proffered by different Chiefs of the Army, the Airforce and the Navy and some numbers of Inspectors General of Police, is it not time for the president and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria to, for the purpose of either rejigging it or simply to think out of the box, try a layman’s strategy?
What’s wrong if President Muhammadu Buhari mobilizes West Africa’s largest and most lethal, most ruthless and most fire-spitting military operation in history by putting together:
1. 20,000 soldiers from all the military services
2. 20,000 specially trained policemen
3. 10,000 Civil Defence personnel
4. 15,000 vigilante volunteers
With the right intelligence sourced through credible means including from local area knowledge and local area sources as well as the right equipment for both the land army, the air force and the police, you can unleash them to lock the bushes of the affected states down.
The local people know where the hideouts and camps of the outlaws are and with superior power power and the will to fight, the bandits can, in few weeks, be subdued very clinically.
Even if it will take double that number to organize this military operation and to make it successful, I cannot fathom why it is not doable. Give them a timeframe to deliver and breath down the neck of the commanders and you will see results.
The control or theatre command for this operation will be under the office of the C-in-C for effective supervision.
If the North is so unlucky that President Buhari finishes his second term in a matter of months without doing the needful to save the North, then we should know that we have, technically, forfeited the right to expect a President of Yoruba or Igbo extraction, as the pointers are showing, to save the North from itself.
How, for crying out loud, will a Katsina man for instance, harangued a President of Yoruba or any southern extraction if he or she refuses to show the needed concern or act accordingly to deal with the bandits in Katsina when a Muhammadu Buhari fiddled and drank tea when Katsina, ditto the whole North boiled and burnt? They will only watch us kill ourselves and before you know it an Oduduwa republic and a Biafra have arisen out of the ashes of the fire we ourselves put on.
Tell the President that even if it will take whatever billions or trillions to save the North from this madness, he should, for all we care, do it.
