Ikpeazu Calls for Decentralisation of Security Architecture

Ndubuisi Francis in Abuja

The Abia State Governor, Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu, has called for the decentralisation of the nation’s security architecture and the creation of state police that would enable state governments to address peculiar security challenges in their domain.

Ikpeazu also disclosed that the five South-east states had one form of security arrangement or the other in place for their respective states before they unveiled the “Ebubeagu” as the joint security outfit for the entire geopolitical zone.

He stated that the launch of the “Ebubeagu” was designed to ensure a collaborative and effective synergy between the states in the zone to avoid criminals committing crime in one state and taking refuge in another state.

The governor described the issue of security as a very dynamic and naughty problem during a virtual interactive session with the Abia Media Forum (AMF), an assemblage of senior journalists from the state.

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 provide a background to it. 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 the 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 with the collaboration of the Department of State Services (DSS) as well as the Nigeria Police. After training them, they were officially launched. Uniforms and vehicles were procured for them.

“In addition, Enugu State calls theirs the 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 maximise the comparative advantage in each state of the region to enable the region procure modern technology to facilitate monitoring of movement of persons and to effectively tackle the challenges headlong.

He 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” by recruiting citizens that would help in the area of information and intelligence gathering at the grassroots level.

He noted that Abia State would soon organise a stakeholders’ forum, which would bring “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 security architecture that is robust enough to secure our state.”

The governor also said his administration took proactive measures by enacting a law that banned open grazing in the state, which has helped the state government 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.