Former Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, has suggested that long-standing governance failures at all levels are at the root of Nigeria’s worsening insecurity, adding that leaders have neglected citizens and taken them for granted for too long.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Monday, Irabor said years of weak governance structures, particularly at the local government level, have created a vacuum that allows crises to escalate unchecked.
He noted that during his service, he discovered that some local governments had no functional governance presence, leaving communities without officials to manage conflicts or respond to emergencies.
Irabor said this prolonged neglect has fuelled various forms of crises often labelled as religious, ethnic or tribal conflicts, stressing that these are symptoms of deeper governance problems.
According to him, Nigeria’s current economic hardship has further pushed some citizens into criminal activities as a means of survival. Insecurity, he stressed, now stems from a combination of governance failure and economic pressures.
He said: “Now, first and foremost, over the years, we have had governance failures and it’s across levels.
“In fact, my experience, especially from it, was quite mind blowing for me, learning that some local governments have no representation of governance.
So sometimes you see that all this local government is just by name so so you don’t have the government officials at that level to mitigate crisis, completely absent.
“So meaning that over a long period of time we actually may have perhaps taken the people for granted. And I think that it is something that everybody in Nigeria must understand and come to grips with, not to apportion blame, not to point fingers, because pointing fingers will certainly not solve a problem.
“But then for you to know the problem, because a problem that you do not know is a problem you can never solve. So if you have that life back in mind, the next question to ask is, what then do we do? And then getting to know what you would do is to now begin to talk about what resources that are necessary to be able to do that.
“So for me, it’s failure of governance over a long period now, because even what we also term as religious crises, what we also term as tribal and ethnic crisis, is also a result of governance failures. So it’s the aggregate of all this that has given rise to it.
“And then, of course, with the economic crisis, the economic situation that we find ourselves in currently, has also made it such that people now look for different avenues to make a living, and some have taken up the criminal enterprise as a means of meeting that need. So a mix of factors, if you like, has given rise to this.”