Most people have no confidence in the current government's plan to solve the problem of terrorism in Nigeria. However, it's important to try to find out whether the opposition has a better plan. For this reason, I went through General Buhari's recent interview with Thisday, and extracted the concrete statements he made about his plans to secure Nigeria and fight terrorism as the president of Nigeria.
Here they are, in his own words:
1. "What would I do differently? It is to make the military much more effective in their operations. If we get the opportunity, we will make the military capable again ... That is what we would do differently, to make Nigerian military capable again."
2. "Having known how the Boko Haram developed, what I would have personally done differently would be to get the Presidents of Cameroun, Chad and Niger together to say, ‘look our borders are porous and that we are not able to effectively protect them and monitor movements of people in and out of our territory, but please make sure that you do not provide training facilities or allow people to be coming into the county.’ "(technically, this is a statement about the past, but I'll allow it since he can do it when he gets into power)
3. "I think what I can do is appeal to the patriotic sense of the military."
4. "I think the situation needs a leadership that will give the military the backing in terms of sourcing the weapons and ammunition to fight. And Nigeria, no matter how oil prices have fallen, will source enough funds to fight the insurgents."
5. "This is what could be done differently, use intelligence, find out the leaders that are responsible and deal with them."
6. "Well, since they are stronger than the government, I think the government should negotiate with Boko Haram."
7. "If you do not cultivate a good relationship with your neighbours, it will cost you so much in terms of security and the economy. So you have to cultivate a friendship with your neighbours and then it goes on to ECOWAS, Africa and the rest of the world. I think this is a viable policy option."
8. "First of all it is important to debunk the notion being peddled by Boko Haram that Western education is ungodly. They go into schools and slaughter children both Christian and Muslim children. They go to mosques and explode devices, they also go to the churches and motor parks. So really, it is very easy to disabuse the minds of Nigerians on the wrong notion that Boko Haram is a religious enterprise. They are just simply terrorists. Having reduced them to that, then you can earn the support of the immediate communities for you to flush the insurgents out of the society. I believe that this will not take a long time."
9. "Then you discuss with your neighbours to make sure that weapons are not crossing the borders and that there are [no] training facilities for terrorists."
10. "I think that soldiers and police barracks and their armories must be strengthened to ensure that they are properly secured."
11. "I think that the air force has to be made more effective by acquiring more new aircraft and establishing a base in Kano so that the distance to cover is shorter and returning to base is made easier."
12. "You know there were problems with the Boko Haram leadership, there were some people that claimed to be leaders of Boko Haram and the sect disowned them. So we have to identify the real leaders of Boko Haram before you can negotiate with them."
13. "I am insisting on intelligence, which means gathering information and making sure that it is correct and you deal with it. Without intelligence you waste too much resources and lives."
The full interview (with numerous criticisms of the current government and stories about things that happened many years ago):
http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/buhari-in-quest-to-secure-nigeria/196454/
What do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment