Edo State Acting Governor, Philip Shaibu has called on the National Assembly to rework the security architecture of the country through legislation, adding that it was the only way out of the present security challenges facing the country.
Shaibu made the call when he paid a condolence visit to Ikabigbo, Uzauire, in Etsako West Local Government Area of Edo State. The Acting Governor who was in the company of heads of security agencies in the state was in Ikabigbo over the kidnapping and gruesome murder of Reverend Father Christopher Odia of the St Michael’s Catholic Church.
41-year-old Father Christopher was abducted by unknown gunmen at about 6:30 am on Sunday, June 26th and was later killed by his abductors following an exchange of gunfire between a vigilante group of the community and the abductors.
The Acting Governor while addressing key stakeholders of the community and the family of one of the members of the vigilante killed (Yusuf Nurudeen), said that the incident was disheartening, assuring that government will bring to book, the perpetrators who are currently being trailed by security operatives.
Shaibu, also disclosed that the time was ripe for the people to beef up security on their own even as the government keeps putting in more efforts to boost security in the state.
The Acting Governor harped on the need for the youths to always be the shield of their community, even as charged security operatives to redouble their efforts towards the safety of lives and property of the people of Uzauire and Edo State as a whole.
Shaibu however thanked the youths for their gallantry in apprehending some of the gunmen who allegedly carried out the crime.
“I believe the whole issue of security should be holistic and we cannot do it in isolation of the Federal Government and the local government.”
“What we have seen today is a sign of almost, I won’t say a failed state, but something close to it. And with this, I would say we need to rejig our local government system and the clamour for state police should be more now than ever before. I believe the National Assembly should go beyond mere motions and resolutions, we should amend our laws to have Federal security, state and local government security:
“We have seen what happened here and it’s obvious that we need to rejig our security architecture. We are not here just for condolence visits, we are here for an on-the-spot assessment of what went wrong. I must say that going by information gathered so far, we are going to improve on our present security architecture”.
“We are going to train and retrain our vigilantes, working with the police on how to go on rescue missions because we observed that there were some lapses on their part on the issues of rescuing.”
“And to the young man (vigilante) who was killed during the rescue mission, he was a Muslim, which means that the present security challenges have nothing to do with religion but just criminality which we must all rise against.”
“And all of us should be security men and women now when you see something report and don’t harbour anybody in your house without clearance from the community leaders and when we do this together we will drastically reduce these unholy acts.”
