The Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo (SAN), says the disbandment of the notorious Special Anti-robbery Squad (SARS) was responsible for the worsening insecurity in the country.
Naija news recall that the squad was scrapped last year by President Muhammadu Buhari after series of #EndSARS protests across the country.
The protests called for total disbandment of the squad over several reports of human rights violations, extortion, and extra-judicial killings.
However, while delivering a lecture at the Nile University of Nigeria, Abuja on Friday, Keyamo said the scrapping of the squad has given criminals more confidence to operate succesfully.
He said: “Can anyone now say #EndOperationLifeDole? Who can end it? I’m sure Boko Haram will March into Abuja. There was a time Boko Haram entered Abuja. So that’s the challenge, to maintain that security is fully maintained.
“That was the same thing we saw between SARS and human rights then, we have seen the porosity of removing security now because we wanted human rights at all cost. We ended SARS, we now see the problems we are facing.”
Meanwhile, in spite of massive backlash from Nigerians, the Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government has begun moves to retrace and recover grazing routes across the country.
TrackNews Online recalls that 17 southern governors had after a meeting in Delta State imposed a ban on open grazing in the region.
But President Muhammadu Buhari had directed states to revive cattle grazing routes across the country.
The president stated this during an interview with Arise Television which was aired on Thursday.
He disclosed that he has asked Nigeria’s Attorney General, Abubakar Malami to begin the process of recovering land from persons who have converted cattle grazing routes for their personal use.
Buhari said the grazing routes were designated in the 1st Republic when “Nigerians use to obey laws” but those routes had been converted.
Many Nigerians including governors from northern and southern parts of the country have kicked against the federal government’s plan.
Undeterred, the federal government has begun tracing and recovering stock routes, popularly called grazing routes for herders to graze their cattle.
The Federal Government said this was meant to address the clashes between herdsmen and farmers.
Although some of the routes are believed to have been encroached upon due to human activities, the government had embarked on a process of identifying monuments along the routes in order to get them back as locations for cattle grazing.
Officials of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on Friday confirmed to The PUNCH that the routes’ recovery would go on.
They also stated that routes that had been encroached upon as a result of the development of public infrastructure might be left out of the recovery exercise.
The acting Director, Animal Husbandry Department, FMARD, Winnie Lai-Solarin, stated that while cattle ranching had been one of the major options canvassed for herders, not every pastoralist would be able to afford ranching at the moment.
