Politicians Are Taking Advantage Of Insecurity In Nigeria – Gen. Lucky Irabor

Lucky Irabor

Former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Lucky Irabor (retd.), has said that some Nigerian politicians are exploiting insecurity in Nigeria. He recently revealed that the politicians are constantly fuelling insecurity across the country to gain political advantage.

Speaking during an interview on Channels Television, Irabor broke down the layers of criminality driving violence across different parts of the nation.

According to him, Nigeria’s security challenges are way too complex to be attributed to a single cause because the country battles several forms of security threats, including ideological, criminal, political and economic.

He stated that placing all violent incidents under one categorisation could not be further away from the truth.

“You can’t hold people for their views, but the reality is that our issues in terms of security challenges are multifaceted.

Just as we have terrorists who have an ideology, we equally have those who are bent on targeting Christians, and there are also those who are targeting communities, desiring to displace communities and wanting to stay in those communities to be able to have a voice,” he said.

Irabor further noted that several violent sects, including terrorists, bandits, community displacers and economic criminals, operate with different motives, and that makes the crisis very hard to simplify.

He concluded by saying that while insecurity is being politicized in Nigeria, it is not purely political.

“If you lump the entire thing into one, the analysis would be wrong.

Those who say it is political, that would also be lumping all the issues to say all other issues do not matter — that’s also not correct.

That does not mean some politicians have not taken advantage of the insecurity to perhaps gain some sort of leverage; to give the impression that they can do better.

Others perhaps want to score a point that there’s poor governance; they could also instigate crisis in one way or the other,” he added.