“to prevent other Kagara-like kidnaps, Nigeria’s defence forces need to display genuine commitments to Nigeria’s security. This necessitates employing best practices such as Geo-location Intelligence (GIS).”
Armed bandits struck Kagara town, headquarters of Rafi Local Government Area of Niger State about 2.00 am last week Wednesday. They abducted 27 students and 15 others, including staff and their children, from the State-owned Government Science College. Reports indicate one student was killed during the criminal operation.
Kagara, believed to have more government presence, had been the safe haven for residents of Rafi Local government who fled their respective towns and villages after experiencing multiple fatal attacks from bandits in recent times. However, the Kagara incident was particularly alarming because there is a police station just 83 metres away from the school, a global positioning system (GPS) tracking by Dataphyte reveals.
The GPS tracking system identifies, locates and records a person’s precise location, weapons, buildings, vehicles, etc. With GPS tracking, the activities of suspected/known terrorist groups can be monitored.
President Buhari said during his campaign six years ago, “We believe that there are faulty intelligence and analysis. They ought to know [the location of] the Chibok girls, who have been abducted for more than 10 months now.”
Six years later, Mr Buhari’s government can neither locate various insurgents, bandits and kidnappers on the prowl all over the country nor employ geospatial intelligence that tracks their movement before people fall, victim, as in the Kagara incident.
Dilemma: Funding Security and also funding Insecurity
Mary Noel-Berje, the Niger State Governor’s spokesperson, confirmed that the government is aware of an arrangement by the traumatised parents of the Kagara schoolboys to pay ransom to the kidnappers but denies involvement in the payment bid. The suspected leader of the kidnap ring in Niger State, Dogo Gide was reported to have demanded ransom from each parent.
In an audio recording, one of the abductors who spoke in Hausa was heard conversing with a negotiator, identified by Gumi as a top official of the school, Punch reported. The bandit rejected the N2.7m offered to him as a ransom for the 27 abductees, insisting he wants to bargain with each parent individually.
He threatened instead: “I don’t have food for them. If anybody dies among them, we will tell you where to go and pick the corpse. You know these children are hungry. I don’t have food to give them, only water if they are going to die, let them die.”
In Kagara, as in other cases, failure at geolocation intelligence among other strategies has compelled governments to negotiate with outlaws under duress rather than track them down before they strike. Over time, an absence of genuine commitments to subdue insurgents translates to funding criminality instead of finding criminals out of their hideouts.
Speaking with a negotiator for the kidnapped students, Mr Gide said “In the rainy season, we attacked Kagara and robbed a bank and kidnapped many residents and what did you do? You cannot do anything. And for these schoolboys, I can continue to hold them hostage till next year,”
Gide’s audacious claim that he is invincible, as with terrorists in Nigeria, stems from a feeling that he is also invisible while in the forest and fringes of civilisation. Governments in Nigeria routinely bargain with terrorists, insurgents and bandits, even though they spend fortunes as well on state security resources. A previous article by Dataphyte shows that Nigeria spent ₦8.05 trillion on national security in the last six years. There has also been a significant increase in military expenditures in recent years, with barely any improvement in the insurgency problem. Instead, there has been an increasing number of violent deaths and audacious kidnap incidents.
In 2020 alone, Nigeria allocated ₦1.78 trillion on security, yet the country lost 9,694 lives to violent deaths, data from Nigeria Security Tracker reveals.
Similarly, analysis of SIPRI’s data shows the ever-increasing military spendings on the procurement of arms. A research published on The Conversation to determine why there is a mismatch between funding for Nigeria’s military and its performance placed the blame not on insufficient defence funding but on a lack of transparency in military procurement and the absence of monitoring and control mechanisms.
Diligence: Genuine Commitments employing Geolocation Intelligence
There were 39 different instances of kidnapping, less than three months into 2021, data from Nigeria Security Tracker reveals. Due to sustained public disapproval, the president replaced all his four defence chiefs on January 26. The tenure of the service chiefs was marred with corruption and complacency about the protracted state of insecurity, a Transparency International (TI) defence and security report showed.
TI submitted, “Corruption within the Nigeria defence sector arguably inhibited the ability of Nigerian armed forces to effectively tackle the insurgent threat in the North East as well as respond to the oil bunkering in the Niger Delta, the conflict in the Middle Belt, and the threat of maritime piracy in the Gulf of Guinea – reports of ghost soldiers, the skimming of soldiers’ salaries, and the procurement of faulty and outdated weaponry suggest misconduct within the armed forces that affected operational effectiveness.”
Thus, to prevent other Kagara-like kidnaps, Nigeria’s defence forces need to display genuine commitments to Nigeria’s security. This necessitates employing best practices such as Geo-location Intelligence (GIS).
The US Department of Defense states: “The military developed GPS to meet its critical need to determine precise locations in any battlespace — on land, sea or in the air. GPS remains an indispensable asset to U.S. forces at home and deployed around the globe. Our military uses GPS in operations ranging from search and rescue missions to missile launches, reconnaissance and guiding unmanned systems.”
To reference Sheikh Gumi’s meeting with the kidnappers of the kagara students as an instance – while he was there, defence intelligence could have tracked his geographical coordinates via GPS tracking. On getting the coordinates, drone surveillance can be conducted to estimate the number of bandits via their heat signature while helping the military formulate the rescue strategy.
A genuine intent to fish out insurgents backed up by GIS allows the security analyst to identify patterns in crime data, detect crime hotspots from the previous incidents, and approximate the location of terrorists so that the criminal is tracked before the crime is carried out.
In a twist of irony, one of the abductors of the 42 persons in the school at Kagara boasts of knowing the location of Nigeria’s security forces: “You think I don’t know what you people are doing? I can tell you how many security vehicles are in Kagara as we speak. It is with the help of the people of the city that intruders can overrun the city. Don’t you know that? The person who gave us this business is there among you. He is there with you. Wherever you go, he is watching you.”
Relying on intelligence, he brags: “Even if you put together the entire security forces of Nigeria in Kagara, I have eyes all over Kagara. Whichever step you take in Nigeria, I swear, I will know.”
Where terrorists and bandits rely heavily on location intelligence like this to thrive, the Nigerian security forces will do well not to jettison geolocation intelligence in its strategy to solve Nigeria’s protracted insecurity problem.