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Former Zamfara State governor and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, Senator Ahmed Yarima, speaks to select journalists, including TAIWO AMODU, on his objection to granting amnesty to bandits and terrorists and how the country can overcome its worsening security challenges. Excerpts
With all the problems bedevilling this country called Nigeria, how do you think we can overcome them?
First of all you need to improve the welfare of the security agencies, the police, the Department of State Security Services, the military, civil defence [corps] and all other people working to ensure peace and secure our people. You have to make sure that their welfare is improved. In fact, not wages and salaries, you have to make sure that their families are adequately taken care of; their future, their education, their health facilities, their retirement benefits. They have to be very comfortable so that they can give out their lives in the struggle to ensure that we are secure. You also have to give them equipment. When I was governor, I had an arrangement in Government House where the security, the commissioner of police and the director of DSS had some communication centres where from every corner of the state, security agencies could communicate with one another. But today, unfortunately from one checkpoint to another, the police can’t communicate themselves. I have been seeing it whenever I move around. I travel from here [Abuja] to Zamfara, Kaduna, you will see checkpoints that can’t communicate to the next checkpoint. This is terrible. They have to communicate. If there is any attack and the modern equipment that we have today, you can install facilities that you can even see movement of people around the country. You can detect where the bandits or insurgents are and communicate between themselves and surround them and take necessary actions. So we need to do a lot in the area of security.