Wake-Up Call: How prepared are Nigerians to protect their shopping malls and other crowded places?

Wake-Up Call: How prepared are Nigerians to protect their shopping malls and other crowded places?

Wednesday, April 23, 2014 11:00 am


President Jonathan (C) looks at an injured victim. AFP

President Jonathan (C) looks at an injured victim. AFP

STEPHEN ONI
It is highly disturbing that terrorism has today assumed a global phenomenon, leaving no part of the world safe from terrorists’ attacks. The 21 September 2013 attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya by the Somalian Al-Shabaab militants, which claimed the lives of 67 people including the Ghanaian poet, Professor Kofi Awoonor, raises some posers.

The question is, why did it take the Kenyan security forces, including the police, so long to rein in the attackers who were left free to continue their slaughter for some three days. Incompetence and in-fighting among the authorities, based on interviews with survivors, their relatives and members of the Kenyan security agencies, have been adduced as reason for the shoddy and lacklustre response. The emerging picture is of “a woefully disorganised response from authorities, where in-fighting and a class of egos left a handful of Kenyan officers, an off-duty British soldier and an Israeli security agent, backed by Kenyan-Indian vigilance groups, to fight heavily armed militants in a bid to rescue hundreds of shoppers”.

While claiming responsibility for the attack, Al-shabaab said it expanded its activity into Kenya in retaliation for Kenyan forces intervening in the Somalian crisis. By 2012, it was gathered that one-quarter of the group’s 550 terrorist attacks took place throughout Kenya while such attacks are often characterised by assaults on military targets leading to extended clashes or mass-casualty bombings like that in 2010 that killed scores of civilians gathered to watch a World Cup soccer game in Kampala, Uganda.

From the gory picture, the question is, has Nigeria learnt any lesson? And how prepared is the country against terrorist attacks vis-a-vis the current Boko Haram insurgency in the North-east part of the country? The former Service Chiefs were said to have been given the boot by President Goodluck Jonathan as a result of in-fighting among them which made the insurgents hold sway, among other factors like it happened among security forces in Kenya. It is hoped that the current Service Chiefs would put their house in order and work as a team while the federal government should continually provide the needed wherewithal for security agencies in order to quickly win the war against Boko Haram insurgents.

With all the shopping malls, stadia and all crowded places like campaign grounds, scattered all over the places, how prepared are our security forces? All hands must, according to analysts, therefore be on deck toward ensuring that the country is not caught napping any time by insurgents as is the case now. The populace should provide information that would lead to the arrest of unscrupulous people like members of the civilian joint force are doing in the North-east.


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