by Abdullahi Abubakar

“Yes! We’ll find you and you’ll face justice – Obama warns Boston bombing perpetrators at interfaith service.

From his intonation, you’ll feel the remorsefulness, pangs of conscience,
self-reproach, empathy and above all – the zeal to fight terrorism. This is glaring in his speech where he said “Yes, we will find you And Yes, you will face justice. We will find you. We will hold you accountable, but, more than that, our fidelity to our way of life, to a free and open society, will only grow stronger — for God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity but one of power and love and self discipline”

Barely an hour after the Boston bomb explosions, Obama had gone on air to
pay ‘sincere condolence’ and had made out time to visit the state of incidence where three lives were lost and a hundred plus injured.

And has vowed to bring the perpetuators to face the wrath of law.

The FBI had since embarked on the biggest ever manhaunt – identified two
prime suspects to be brothers; Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev from
Checheniya and were able to capture one of them with the aid of surveillance cameras and quality militia-intelligentsia, the other, still on the run around Watertown.

Now, the lessons the Nigeria Government needs to take forte with are;

Firstly and most importantly, One of the fundamental essentials of security is the establishment of a comprehensive data base to capture relevant data which would aim documentation and monitoring of the population. Nigeria, as it is obtained in most countries of the world must have a computerized data base, not only for criminals but every body within the country including visiting foreigners. Such data base needs not to be in one single place, it could be established at both the state and federal levels by each security organization. What is important is for such data to be synchronized.

Many intelligence agencies rely substantially on data bases to do their work and use them to crack crime cases. The data base, ideally, need to capture the date of birth, death certificate, photograph, finger-print, car registration data, travelling passport number, tax identification number, and other important details, such as house address, details of owners of each house located in any local government area, records of building approval, and other details necessary for planning, monitoring and development. But what is of major interest to security agencies is the data base on criminals, those who have been convicted of various crimes in the past, those jailed for offences, as well as those of security interest to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

These data bases must be with or accessible to both the Police and State
Security Service, the two main agencies responsible for internal security. Availability of a current data base would go a long way in surmounting many of the security challenges confronting the country today.

Secondly, we need to spurt and burst forth our security agencies, especially the police and the army. Professionalism must be improved, recruitment and training need to be overhauled and the curricula reviewed to ensure that policemen and other security agents are in tune with modern technology and devices that can measure up to the standards of their counter-parts in more developed countries. Fight against terrorism has since gone beyond sand barricades and rolling motor cycles as you drive past checkpoints.

Thirdly, our Immigration officers needs to move above the horizons and
checkmate our borders appropriately. The implications of this porous
nature of our borders leads to revenue lost, small arms and light weight
weapons brought into the country and hence aid increased terrorism.

Finally, the President needs to attach some sort of value to Nigerian
lives by giving timely consolations and promptly visit victims of unprecedented attacks so that the cyberia – Nigeria cyber space, will at least know that we are not lesser humans and the whites – Americans are not superior beings.

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Follow Abubakar on Twitter @abubakar47i
 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.