Surge in criminality in Nigeria blamed on security lapses abroad
Stephen Olufemi Oni, Ilorin
A member of the Board of Trustees of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), Engr. Nurudeen Adeyemi, has attributed recent surge in banditry and kidnappings in Nigeria to security lapses abroad, pointing out that instability especially in Libya has fuelled an upsurge of violent actors that are now operating inside the country.
Adeyemi, who spoke at the pMedia Parliament of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Kwara Council, noted that the successes recorded by past and present administrations in some theatres of insurgency only displaced the criminals, who had since migrated to other states, including Kwara.
He said: “Unfortunately, the success of the Buhari administration in the northeast, and that of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the northwest, is like having a room full of cockroaches and taking off the light. They scattered those places and now they are in Kwara.”
Adeyemi, however, said that the security agencies were determined to make Kwara safe. “We would make Kwara a safe place and we would find them and kill them by the Grace of God,” he added.
Expounding on the financial dynamics that sustain criminal networks, the TETFUND official argued that the monetary trails behind gun-running and ransom payments are often difficult to link to the final perpetrators.
“Our bastards have grown up. Even if we manage to capture some of these people through financial transaction, you cannot really link them to the end of result. Let’s say I’m making money from gun trading, they can see debit and credit. They can figure out where that money is going. And I’m just an armed robber and I have no idea where the guns are going. What I’m part of is criminality in that way, I’m part of the terrorism network whether knowingly or unknowingly,” he said.
Adeyemi urged authorities to target the financial capacity of criminal groups, saying denying them access to funds would discourage further criminality.
“There is a component of people the Nigerian law deal with quietly by stripping them of their financial resources in one way or the other so that they will not be able to perpetrate evil. If you deny them the ability to be able to use that money if they get it, they’ll say what’s the point of trying to labour themselves and not be able to spend the money. That’s why you find stack of cash around those guys,” he said.
He illustrated the point with a reference to the Babanla area, describing how kidnappers rely on limited local support for supplies and frequently move in large numbers to overwhelm communities.
“Those guys know people are around looking for them. So, they send out two of their guys to go to the bank and buy them food. That’s why most of this kidnapper ransom, they will put consumables in their demands. They know they can’t freely move around. They are denied that ability. Those guys they are resting in Babanla and after waiting for few hours and maybe they couldn’t find their ways anymore, they decide to run into town with like 50–100 bikes. If that much show up in a community they won’t be overpowered regardless of the vigilantes you have,” Adeyemi said.
He also described many attacks as “hit-and-run” operations carried out by groups struggling to survive because supply lines have been disrupted. “They are doing a lot of hit and run for survival sake. It’s because they are hungry and they can’t get supplies reaching them anymore,” he said.
Adeyemi closed with a call for stronger, less compromising leadership, stressing that national interest must supersede individual and partisan calculations. “The country is bigger than everybody. Leaders make a lot of compromising decisions,” he warned.