Foreign aid on Boko Haram: Security matters should not  be exposed – Pat Utomi
One of the reasons that security is not usually discussed on the newspapers pages is to ensure that security is not something you expose to everybody.

So, it is best not to get into a discussion involving general policy on matters of security on the pages of newspapers. I can assure you that there are few countries in the world that do not have collaboration with any entity outside of their borders for the purpose of security.

When it is discussed in the dichotomy of you subscribing to foreigners coming in, you find the polarised discussion in which polemics of sovereignty becomes the issue, but the truth of the matter is that the Soviet Union even in those days had collaborations even with the United State on matters of security.

*Prof Utomi

So, I don’t think that it should be reduced to foreign or non-foreign. I can assure you that somehow, Nigerian intelligence services must have collaboration with the American intelligence services in one form or the other. I can tell you that even in apartheid days,  there was collaboration between Nigerian intelligence and the South African Apartheid Intelligence Service.  It is just in the nature of security and national survival that collaboration take place, it is not a matter of newspapers debate about should we or should we not invite the foreigners.

Clearly, if enough is being done, the problem will not be escalating. A lots more need to be done.

My idea is that you don’t solve security problems with the police or military police. Fundamentally, there are problems with the very structure of stakeholder engagements in Nigeria.  There are too many stakehlders in Nigeria who feel ‘left out’ of the Nigerian state and so, they think they don’t have anything to lose.  They go out of their ways to pee into the house because they are not inside the house.

There is a political engagement, (I don’t mean political appeasement) something I have tried to explain and sometimes hard in the general Nigerian discussion to understand; it is that the coalition for acquiring power is different from the coalition of governing. Power is the matter of achieving an electoral majority whether spurious (as in the case of Nigeria with rigging) or it’s real.

But if you just get a majority, say 51% of the votes, you’ve acquired power. Governing had to do with; if you seriously exclude some people that they dont matter, then they will pee into the house and the house will smell too bad. That is one law I think the emergency politician in the last couple of years don’t understand.  They don’t understand the political process and the nature of power.

If they do, they will know that a day after election, a real leader  would look into the new engagement different from whatever it is that made him get the majority of the votes.

The second issue is economics. There are so many people who think that Nigeria has not provided the opportunity for them to advance themselves as human beings. So, they think, all their dignity could be crushed by poverty and so, those kind of people are easy to recruit into the disorder.

So, what you do is create economic condition that will take more people out of poverty before you get to the issue of intelligence.  We have to build enough knowledge to anticipate the problem and move before they take place and finally, you begin to get the law enforcement agents involved.  Our challenges will then be to focus on enforcement which is the last thing in the order of what should  be done.

Yes! Let them come and help us out –  Ayo Adebanjo

All we are saying is that we are in the country, we want the problem to be solved and then, come and help me. It is wrong to say the international communities are coming to interfere in the issues concerning the country. They said, they want to help on the issues concerning terrorism and we are pretending to know it all, whereas we cannot cope. We cannot be poor and proud. If they are genuine, why not allow them.

At least Nigerians should accept that they should help us. The fact is that it is their security that trained our security experts and therefore there is nothing special for them to come and help us.  What are we doing here in Nigeria that the Americans do not know about?  They know everything about our finances and because they know that the country is going down, they said, they want to help us.

Americans don’t have interest in what has happened. If there is a question of colonial domination, it would have been a different case. Here is a situation where we are killing ourselves and we can’t help it. The American are saying they don’t want the country to go into blazes and we are ignoring it whereas, we can’t help ourselves. I don’t see anything wrong in Americans coming to help us. If they can come and help us so that we don’t disintegrate, it will be beautiful. The causes of terrorism are different all over the world.

We are having an internal terrorism, people who believe that they cannot be under you when Boko Haram says Western civilisation is an anathema, which is retrogressive, they are killing everybody irrespective of religion. There is no point to be sentimental about foreign aid. Nigerians want foreigners to invest and they (foreigners) are saying that if Nigerians kill themselves, there is nothing to invest, and they are saying, let us help you not to kill yourselves.

No! We don’t want a Greek gift – Tunji Braithwaite

We do not want Ameri cans to help at this stage. We do not want a Greek gift.  International interference at this stage could only exacerbate our national problem and we would like them to keep out for now until we are able to sort ourselves out.

We will manage our affairs ourselves. We do not want foreign interference at this stage . We know that the driving force is the oil which is the natural resources. But it is for Jonathan to free himself from the PDP captivity so that he can move forward with Nigerians.

Before Boko Haram, many well meaning Nigerians had expressed concern about the constitution, bad governance and had called for Sovereign National Conference but if the government had maintained a deaf ear to such a stringent call, now is the time to urgently summon a national conference.

It is our national problem and every Nigerian of all shades and opinion should find solution to our national problem especially the Boko Haram issue.

If Labour had not compromised the interest of the Civil Society Groups, perhaps, we would have gone some distance in the resolution of some weighty difficulties that we have. We are saddened by the massive loss of lives in Kano and other parts of the North. Whilst we are not condoling terrorism which hitherto was not known in this country on this scale, we fear that the act of terrorism might be escalating in Nigeria.

The Boko Haram situation cannot be religious, it goes deeper than religion and so, we want to sound a note of warning to the religious leaders not to look at Boko Haram as a religious issue by which there may be dichotomy between the two major religions. In Nigeria, we live side by side regardless of our religious differences. I think the religious dimension put to it by some people is a diversion. The issue is deeper.

It is political, it is about corruption and bad governance. Corruption has been the king in Nigeria and this king must be dethroned.  Let the world be told that it is corruption in Nigeria that is being sought to be dethroned.

We also heard that the international communities especially the United States are saying that they are prepared to work with the Nigerian government. We take that with a pinch of salt. The oil exploration that has attracted the international community for their economic interest could easily bring international interference that would exacerbate our national problem.

We warn international communities to stay off because the issue is corruption which they fueled themselves. The second issue is defective constitution in this country. Unless the constitution is surgically dissected; not reform, the government is talking about reformation, there is nothing to reform and we have said that times without number, that Nigerian constitution is decree 24 put together by Abdulsallami military junta.

The National Assembly as it is constituted cannot do much about that constitution. The constitution is a prescription to chaos. It is a prescription for treasury looting, the constitution deters development in this country.  We cannot allow the next election to be conducted before the constitutional dissection of decree 24.

We believe that there an urgent need for national conference, independent of the National Assembly. The modus operandi of member of the National Assembly as constituted, are  part of the national problem and that is why it is unqualified to give the people’s constitution.

Therefore, the following is urgently needed: the conveyance of   National Conference to attend to the myriads of our national problems before it develop into catastrophic burden for us.  Secondly, we call on the president himself to seriously begin to see himself as not a captive of his party, the PDP, since all we have been doing in this country is a government of exclusion and he should not continue on the part of running a government of exclusion.

There can be no enemies amongst genuine patriots of this country in voicing their disaffection against all or some of these government policies.