New Telegraph

Insecurity: Farmers have abandoned farms in the N’West –el-Rufai

…calls for inter-agency cooperation

Kaduna State Governor Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, yesterday, raised the alarm that farmers have abandoned their farms in the North West due to insecurity, warning that unless something is done, there will be a food crisis in the country. Speaking at the Second Quarter 2021 meeting of Directors of the State Commands of the Directorate of State Security (DSS) in the North West in Kaduna yesterday, el Rufai also said tackling insecurity requires cooperation of the various states and for security managers as well as intelligence agencies to share information.

El Rufai further noted that any plan that seeks to address the problem of insecurity only in one state will at best yield a temporary respite as the criminals will retreat to safe havens. According to el-Rufai, ‘’The security agencies need to strengthen intelligence gathering, to establish not just the identities, plans and locations of these criminals, but to actively disrupt their capacity to organise and mount attacks on our citizens. “But it is also very important to ensure that prompt and coordinated action becomes the default response of the Armed Forces and the Police to the profusion of actionable intelligence that is already available,’’ he added.

El Rufai said that the governors of the North West states and Niger State appreciated the salient fact of inter-state cooperation as far back as 2015. ‘’They came together to fund simultaneous operations by the federal military and security agencies across the largely ungoverned Kamuku-Kuyambana forest swathes that straddle about seven of our states up to Dajin Rugu. “These operations disrupted the cattle rustling gangs, but were unfortunately not sustained as a continuous exercise to dominate these spaces and assert within them the authority of the Nigerian state,’’ he recalled.

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