<\/p>\n
By Emmanuel Oloniruha<\/p>\n
Director-General of National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS), Prof. Abubakar Sulaiman, has called for comprehensive security sector reforms and research-based solutions to tackling Nigeria\u2019s security challenges.<\/p>\n
Sulaiman made the call when he featured on the Personality Interview Series of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Sunday.<\/p>\n
According \u200c\u200c\u200d\u2060\u2060\u200d\u2060\u2060\u200c\u200d\u200d\u2060\u200d\u200c\u200c\u200cto him, relying solely on military hardware and deployment of troops without addressing the socio-economic dimensions to insecurity is unsustainable.<\/p>\n
He argued that the traditional perspective of evaluating security entirely through the lens of weapons and coercion was inadequate.<\/p>\n
The director-general said an effective security approach must be holistic, including environmental safety, economic stability and social justice.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecurity goes beyond somebody pointing an AK-47 at your head.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople die not only through the instrumentality of weapons. It\u2019s not only through the barrel of gun that people die. Danger does not emanate from instruments of coercion alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you don\u2019t take care of your environment, you dump refuse anywhere, people will die. That\u2019s threat to your life.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people are hungry, that is imminent danger. When people are jobless, that\u2019s a potential threat. If nothing is done, it becomes a real threat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have cases of injustice and people are pushed to the wall, they will react. When they react, there\u2019ll be crisis.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf that crisis is not well taken care of, it will degenerate into serious threat,\u2019\u2019 he stated.<\/p>\n
The director-general also advised government and policy makers to prioritise threat assessment and conflict prevention.<\/p>\n
He also urged policy makers and the National Assembly to base security legislation and budgetary allocations on empirical research rather than spontaneous responses to security breaches after lives and property worth billions of naira would have been lost.<\/p>\n
He said that through research, threat assessment and evaluation, insecurity could be prevented or addressed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wait till it happened; we now budget trillions to buy weapons, to mobilise troops. How do we prevent it? We should have been spending less in preventing insecurity than fighting insecurity.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, our position here in NILDS is that we need to do more in the areas of research, in the areas of evaluation, in the areas of assessment, in the areas of preventing insecurity than fighting insecurity.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs long as we keep on appropriating funds and we respond to security challenges spontaneously, with no holistic policy or legislation, backed by evidence-based research, it\u2019s like dropping water in a basket and that will produce no result.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re not getting results. If you can spend trillions on the military, on the army, on the air force, spend some billions on research institutions too,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
Sulaiman also stressed the urgent need for comprehensive security sector reforms to eliminate overlapping mandates and operational conflicts among security agencies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are duplications of responsibilities. When there is civil unrest, who takes charge between the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and the police?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have the National Security Adviser (NSA) in charge of rescue of kidnapped people. The NSA office has almost taken over the work of the Chief of Defence Staff and the Chief of Army Staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cNSA should not be a front-liner when it comes to security operations or defence operations. So, we have these overlapping mandates,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
To enhance accountability in defence spending, Sulaiman said that NILDS had developed a security sector oversight toolkit for the national assembly to properly scrutinise the huge money spent on security agencies annually.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen your policies, laws, acts are not evidence-based, they are not sustainable. They are bound to collapse,\u2019\u2019 he submitted.(NAN)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Director-General of National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS), Prof. Abubakar Sulaiman, has called for comprehensive security sector reforms and research-based solutions to tackling Nigeria\u2019s security challenges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[192,513,514,515],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-insecurity","tag-reforms","tag-research-basedsolutions","tag-securitychallenges"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-20260828-WA0056-2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/821\/revisions\/823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}