INSECURITY: ASTONISHING GAPS IN SCENARIO PLANNING
Ayo Olukotun
Hype and hoopla have predictably trailed the indictment of the Major General Muhammadu Buhari (Retd.) regime on its failure to tackle insecurity by The Economist (London) in its publication issued a fortnight ago. Though sharp-tenored, there is hardly anything the paper said regarding insecurity which Nigerian journalists have not commented previously. Those who have decided to make the publication a national issue often do not remember that the same paper endorsed presidential candidate, Muhammudu Buhari, in 2015 and even went so far as to call former president, Goodluck Jonathan, "an ineffectual buffoon". What are important are less the style or motives of The Economist than whether there is a clear message that our leaders need to take seriously.
Hardly anyone will dispute, given the escalating and occasionally terrifying scale of insecurity, that the country, as the journal said, has become "a crime scene of destructive magnitude". This is especially so if we take into account continuing incidences of banditry as well as the recent detonation of explosives on the Abuja-Kaduna train track and the break-in into the Nigerian Correctional Service center at Oyo, forcibly freeing about 392 inmates. Those recent activities of the ubiquitous "unknown gunmen" were preceded by such events as the attack on the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna and assaults on Correctional Service centers around the country numbering about 10 in the last 5 months. That is a way of saying that those terrorist raids that happened last week are not in the least new, and perhaps the only question to be asked is: which target will the terrorists strike next?
This brings us to a remarkable gap in our counter-terrorism agenda, if indeed we can be said to have one. Let me illustrate. The Abuja-Kaduna Rail Service became hugely popular with rising numbers of customers seeking to bypass the heavily endangered road travel, several portions of which were occupied by bandits. Passengers who could not afford to go by air–and they are in the majority–took advantage of the emergent railway service escaping the dungeon of multiplying deaths and kidnappings on the highway. It would appear then that the bandits had been put out of their murderous business, at least temporarily. Was it difficult to imagine then that sooner than later those bandits, unless they were routed, would attempt to strike at the railways which had taken off the source of their lucrative business? To project even further, someone doing scenario planning, which really is about crafting narratives with several possible conclusions, would have projected that unless diligent care was taken, even the air routes could become endangered if banditry waxed stronger.
Granted, with pandemic upsets around the globe, economic dislocations, social and physical tornadoes; life and governance have become more and more unpredictable. There is talk in some quarters that we are in an age of bewilderment marked by rank uncertainty and the demystification of established ideas. That notwithstanding, governments that wish to get ahead still do and manage to push up governance by scenario planning which simply implies that they take time to think through challenges and take anticipatory measures concerning them.
The British Government, to take an example, in the wake of increasing deaths through COVID-19 crafted two scenarios which it called a Plan A and a Plan B, anticipating a fair amount of normalcy and escalation respectively, regarding the pandemic. Plan A seeks to encourage more people to be vaccinated including offering vaccines to people between 12 and 15 years. It would also administer booster jabs to millions in order to increase their immunity among other steps. Plan B is a stricter version of Plan A and would legally mandate the wearing of face covers as well as guidance on working from home, if required. Part of the strategy in Plan B is to take off pressure off the National Health Service should more deaths occur as a result of the pandemic. As many would know, events in the last few weeks have led to the increasing suggestion of a need to shift policy to Plan B as winter approaches with the associated onset of flus and viruses related to COVID-19.
Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, may not be much of a hero or popular politician. Nonetheless, he heads a cabinet that has taken time to consider the nature of the health challenge faced by his country and had engaged in a measure of scenario planning by anticipating possible trajectories including grow-worse ones. Of course, businesses that intend on staying at the cutting and competitive edges engage in building scenarios in order to better plan and ameliorate looming disasters as do countries.
Indeed, a serious counter-terrorism agenda will include alert systems, a cartography of high-risk populations, soft and easy targets and a ranking of threats with a view to determining how best to meet perils or outbreaks of violence. A situation where bandits take whole populations captive at will or sometimes even warn that they are visiting certain territories and carry out the threats is a far different one from what we see in countries which make public announcements when they realize that citizens in some areas are at risk. To put it bluntly, is anyone up there doing any threat analysis? A related question is: when these analyses are done, are there any follow-ups? The latter question is raised in the context of revelations made by intelligence experts that alerts sent were not acted upon until disaster struck. A particular instance which occurred about 2 years ago in Zamfara State was a statement made by a professor who was the Secretary to the Government that tomes of literature were sent to the central authorities concerning the growth and development of banditry in that state but that he got no response. A few months ago, the Governor of Niger State, Abubakar Sani Bello, lamented that he had raised several alerts concerning the occupation of part of the state by Boko Haram insurgents to no avail. There are even now recent reports that some parts of the NorthWest are at risk of occupation by bandits who have had the temerity of collecting taxes from hapless local populace.
In the same connection, does it take much intelligence to predict that if bandits, as they are called, have raided with outstanding success a number of Correctional Service centers that several other ones are sitting ducks for future raids? This columnist listened on Channels Television a few days ago to the Special Adviser on Security to the Governor of Oyo State, Mr Fatai Owoseni, where he described the Correctional Service Center at Oyo as an almost abandoned site in the midst of nowhere with overgrown weeds and the roads leading to the place virtually impassable. So, are they not crocodile tears therefore to make so much fuss about the ease with which bandits overran the place?
All hope is not lost, however. If Nigeria must overcome its security travails, it is compulsory for it to revitalize its counter-terrorism efforts making use of credible intelligence gathering as well as galvanizing local communities, many of them in the throes of desperate poverty, behind government efforts to rally back. That would be a vantage point of regaining the capacity to rout bandits and insurgents.
Professor Ayo Olukotun is a director at the Oba (Dr.) S. K. Adetona Institute of Governance Studies, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye.
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