Legal Practitioner Cautions Buhari Against Withdrawal Of Troops

A Kaduna based legal practitioner, Barrister John Achimugu, has cautioned the Buhari-led government against the withdrawal of military personnel from insecurity prone communities and replacing them with policemen.
He said: “The type of guns banditry have are superior than the ones the military have and so it’s like throwing off the protection of the people and asking them how do you have police in every community?
“For the police to cover the security of these communities without the aid of the military, l look forward to a better 2020, but if what l see or what has been pronounced is what is going to happen, there will be better insecurity in 2020.”
Bearing his mind on national issues, the legal practitioner noted that 2019 witnessed greater bloodshed than the country has ever experienced.
In his words: “2019 witnessed greater bloodshed than we have ever seen in the life of our nation. We had attacks from bandits who kidnapped along our major highways, nobody felt secured to travel out anywhere in this country with the hope to return in safety.
“Insurgency we were told have been degraded, whatever degraded means, we find them more operative in the country particularly in the northeast in the year 2019. If the extent of the activities of insurgency reported is the degraded government wants us to believe then we still have to look into the books to see what degraded means.
“Degraded to me means that we would have heard nothing about the operations of insurgency in the country again. But we heard of operations and they are still active, then the word degraded is a deception. Then l think the earlier we sit down and assess the level of security challenges we have, the better for us all.
But again, looking at the economic environment, the level of unemployment, l do not know what can really be done to improve the level of insecurity without laying a solid foundation for our economy recovery and for our economic well being so long as the level of hunger, depression and frustrations in the lives of our people continues, where there is high tension everywhere and everybody is disgruntled or dissatisfied with the economy of our country, it will be difficult to have a secured environment of hungry people.”
Looking at the year 2019, Barrister John Achimugu said, “We did not do well in 2019; there wasn’t free and fair elections in an environment with insecurity.