Inspector General of Police (IGP), Solomon Arase, has said Force personnel of 317,000 for a total area of 923,768 km2, and a population of 170 million, cannot effectively protect Nigeria.
He said this at the weekend in a meeting with the Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Danbatta, at the Force Headquarters in Abuja.
Responding to NCC request for police protection for telecoms infrastructure, Arase said, “Our numeric strength is not enough to police the country’s security space. We are just 317,000 officers and there is no way we can be everywhere.”
Danbatta had lamented that “Fibre optics cables are sometimes cut by miscreants, and in the process disrupt communications to huge population centres.”
Noting that NCC had proposed a bill to the National Assembly on how to safeguard critical telecommunications infrastructure, he said: “This law will require the Nigerian Police to monitor and protect such critical infrastructure, wherever they are located.
“While we seek your support for urgent actualisation of this law, we wish to implore you to see to the use of the current provisions of the law to ensure that individuals found to be engaging in such willful destruction of telecom infrastructure are timely obstructed.”
Arase, however, reiterated that the police “don’t have enough officers to man the security space as it were, the Nigeria Police and NCC can push for the deployment of CCTV cameras in all public places across the country.
“Since I came on board as IGP, I have tried to migrate from analogue to digital technology, that is the best way the modern police force can go
“In fighting crime you must be able to put the police on a technological platform that will be able to match the effectiveness and sophistication of criminals, wherever they are.”
“As you can see from the trends and patterns of crimes in the country, we have been able to set up an information database where we now say that every character clearance, tinted permit and fire alarm licence should be done online as this makes things easy for every Nigerian,” he said.
The Police and the NCC, however, concluded arrangement to constitute a team within the Force Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to brainstorm on the various telecommunication laws and how to apply them for the prosecution of offenders found contravening the provision of the Criminal Justice Miscellaneous Provisions Act, CAP C39 2004.
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