Abia State Governor, Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu, has called for the decentralisation of the nation’s security architecture and the creation of state police to enable states address their peculiar security challenges.
He also disclosed that contrary to views in some quarters, the five South-east states had in place one form of security arrangement or the other in their respective states before the joint security outfit, Ebubeagu, was unveiled by the geopolitical zone.
Ikpeazu stated that the launch of Ebubeagu was designed to ensure a collaborative and effective synergy between the different states to avoid criminals committing crime in one state and escaping to neighbouring states for refuge.
Speaking at a virtual interactive session with the Abia Media Forum (AMF), an assemblage of senior journalists from the state, the governor said the issue of security is a very dynamic and naughty problem.
He said: “I want to thank God that the South-east governors were able to come up with that platform called Ebubeagu. But I want to lay a background. The background is that before the announcement of Ebubeagu, all the states in the South-east had gone ahead to launch and roll out their respective security outfits.
“In Abia, we call it Homeland Security. In fact, we have a ministry which we call the Ministry of Homeland Security and we have trained the first batch of 500 youths, collaborating with the Department of State Services (DSS) as well as the Nigeria Police to train them. After training them, they were officially launched. Uniforms and vehicles were procured for them. Enugu State calls their own Forest Guards. So, the various states in the South-east had set up some resemblance of security outfits, but what was lacking was to have a unified template that would enable us to share intelligence because a state like Abia has seven borders — some with South-south states and most of them with South-east states.
“To that extent, there was the need to create a central intelligence platform that will be controlled from our regional headquarters at Enugu so that a criminal in Abia will be identified as a criminal in Ebonyi and also a criminal in Enugu and so on.”
Ikpeazu said his administration is working closely with sister states to address the issue of insecurity in the region, adding that the Ebubeagu security outfit would help address the security challenges faced in the region.
According to him, the idea behind the Ebubeagu security outfit is to collaborate and maximize the comparative advantage in each state of the region, enable the region procure modern technology to facilitate monitoring of movement of persons and to effectively tackle the challenges headlong.
Ikpeazu noted that the launch of the new security outfit couldn’t have come at a better time, stressing that the state was deepening the Ebubeagu security outfit by recruiting at the ward and community levels, citizens who would help in the area of information and intelligence gathering at the grassroots level.
He noted that the state will soon organise a stakeholders’ forum, which will have in attendance all stakeholders in the security sector, adding: “We are bringing together stakeholders in the security sector to help us evaluate the template we have. This will enable us tackle the security challenges we are faced with. Our target is to create a security architecture robust enough to secure our state.”
On the issue of criminal herdsmen in the state, the governor said his administration took proactive measures by enacting a bill through the state assembly to ban open grazing in the state, pointing out that this has helped the state in mitigating the issue of herders and farmers clashes in the state.
“We have a law on open grazing. Aside Benue State, Abia was the first to pass the Anti-Open Grazing law in the country. We are tackling criminal herdsmen from other parts of the country and sub-region. We are enforcing the law,” he said.