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| Navy Capt. (Rtd) Caleb Olubolade, Police Affairs Minister |
Police Affairs Minister Caleb Olubolade canvassed a point of
view I have always reiterated on this blog: You need the public to fight crime.
Hear the minister in Vanguard’s exclusive Front Page lead report
on security challenge in the country today.
“Nobody can secure any community without intelligence. Without
information, security agencies cannot succeed because they will be making wrong
deployments and will be acting in different directions which will not help.
Giving information is all that is needed and the security agencies will
overcome.”
The minister should know. He was a Navy Captain.
The question is, 'what is being done to make information
available to the forces? What is being done about inter-force cooperation and
sharing of resources for crime-fighting?'
A key tool is the Emergency Number. Elsewhere in the world,
it is the very first thing the government puts in place for efficient security.
When a citizen sees something strange, the next thing is to whip out his phone
and alert the police effortlessly and without spending a dime of his phone
credit.
More than a decade after access to phones has been
liberalised by the GSM operators, and two years into GEJ’s govt, we still await a national, toll-free emergency number.
Lagos State has had to take its fate in its own hands by
flagging off its own Emergency Numbers: 112 and 767. A more universally known
number, 911 was apparently added quietly, recently.
But this is a project that is better managed by the Federal
Government for uniformity. A single toll-free number should be used across
the country. That way, promoting it will be easy, and recall will be much better.
A more serious federal government needs only a few months to
make this functional. But a clueless one like we currently have will pussy-foot
forever, while precious lives are lost to terrorism and other forms
of crime.
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