Deployment of surveillance cameras in the war against insecurity in Plateau State, by Ayuba Ahmad

At a meeting with heads of security agencies, traditional rulers and other stakeholders of Plateau State following the last Palm Sunday massacre at Ungwan Rukuba, Jos, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu issued an order for the immediate installation of 5000 surveillance cameras across the state with the aim of enhancing security.

With a directive to security agencies to ensure that, “those responsible for the attacks are apprehended”, President Tinubu also said that as part of long-term safeguards against future occurrences, “we are going to install immediately, a network of cameras that will help law enforcement agencies to identify trouble makers instantly, over 5000 of them.”

Speaking further on the proposed project, the Minister for Communications, Bosun Tijani explained that the surveillance cameras which he described as, “practical” and which have “proved effective in Lagos and Enugu states”, will be deployed “across the state beginning with Jos.”

The Minister expressed confidence that the strategy will “enable real-time monitoring and quicker response to security threats.”

The incessant outbreak of violence in the forms of invasions, killings and wanton destruction of properties especially in Plateau State, has since crossed the borderlines of tolerance or something to be regarded as incidental and transient.

Last Palm Sunday’s enactment of the gory act at Angwan Rukuba was literally, a crescendo in what had become an unceasing rhythms and macabre dance of anarchists. Angwan Rukuba stridently called for real, drastic and urgent actions of the government. It demanded thinking out of the box. President Bola Tinubu’s actions were therefore, steps taken in the right direction.

Our nation’s political history is unfortunately replete with grandiose proclamations by leaders that soon afterwards, turned out to be highfalutins, or actions that were deceptively taken merely, “to fulfill all righteousness.” On this issue at hand, it is very pertinent that the President’s Jos pronouncements do not end up like the many such high octane remarks made by presidents in previous similar unfortunate calamities.

Nigeria is, literally, sitting on a tinder box. The country can no longer afford to continue in the old ways of handling fratricidal conflicts lackadaisically. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must walk his talk by seeing to it that “those responsible for the attacks are apprehended,” and brought to justice!

There is no gainsaying the fact that Angwan Rukuba and other recent mayhems such as those that occured in Bokkos, Mangu, Mikang, Langtang among others, could have been averted if necessary measures had been been taken with regards to preceding incidents. In the absence of punishment to serve as deterrents, impunity is bound to take roots.

For instance, no persons were ever prosecuted and penalised in the aftermath of the 2010 Dogo Nahawa and Nasarawa Gwom crises which consumed several lives and left trails of horrific destruction of properties; the earlier incidents of 2004 in Yelwa in which over eight hundred people were reportedly killed and the turmoil that attended the Jos North local government council elections of 1994 and 2008.

The prevailing atmosphere in the country’s firmament is particularly gloomy, precarious and portentous. There are too many opportunistic, unpatriotic citizens who, consciously or unconsciously, are working as agents in the service of external interests who are keen on the destabilisation of the country.

Unfortunately, these forces have greatly succeeded in portraying the regularity of violence in Plateau State in the colours of ethnic and religious divides.

The deployment of technology, in this case the AI powered surveillance camera, has become a standard global practice in the combat against criminals. The extensive use of surveillance cameras is known to be central in the prevention and control of crimes in China, in spite of its huge land mass that is larger than Africa, and a population of over 1.5 billion people.

However, achieving the presidential order for surveillance cameras in a comparatively small enclave like Plateau State may very well encounter the notoriously peculiar challenges in the implementation in Nigeria of beneficial projects that are working in other countries.

The nation’s entrenched culture of red tape and bureaucratic bottlenecks will be there to stall the project from seeing the light of the day. If it does become a reality, it is very likely to be the usual roughshod job that would only have swollen the bloated financial fortunes of the contractors and their collaborators in the bureaucracy.

In finding enduring solutions to the insecurity in Plateau State, and of course in other states in the central region of the country, it is also very significant that the government should as well, consider other feasible solutions besides the kinetic.

As many sane and objective analysts have postulated, the simmering clashes between the pastoralist and farming communities especially in the North-central region of the country are more the results of conflicts of economic interests of the two groups.

This fact explains the occurrence of similar clashes between famers and herders in the Northwestern states of Katsina, Zamfara and Kebbi where members of the two groups share the same Islamic faith and in most cases, speak Hausa as a common language.

If properly executed, the deployment of surveillance cameras as ordered by the President, is a novel idea with the prospects of advancing the fight against insecurity in Plateau State or in any other state. Its success however, will ultimately depend on getting to the root causative factors of insecurity in the first place.