Insecurity threat to 2019 election, says DSS DG

The Director-General of the Department of State Service (DSS), Alhaji Lawal Daura, has identified insecurity as a major threat to the 2019 general elections.

Daura made this submission at a presentation he made before the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on the Review of the Current Security Infrastructure in Nigeria headed by Senate Leader, Senator Ahmad Lawan.

Presenting the Committee’s 38-page Report at Senate Plenary on Wednesday, Lawan said Daura while appearing before his committee sounded a note of warning about the bleak outlook of the 2019 general elections “with all the hate speeches and insecurity prevailing in the polity.”

He quoted the SSS boss as saying “the country is getting more divided like never before due to the lack of synergy between traditional institutions and security agencies, as well as hate speeches that have dominated the political space”.

Lawan further said that other security chiefs who appeared before the committee spoke in the same vein and explained that the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Yusuf Buratai, on his part, identified the nation’s major security challenges to include Boko Haram threats, militancy, cultism, secessionist and extremist groups (IPOB and IMN), inter-ethnic, religious and communal violence.

Buratai was also said to have identified impediments to combating internal security challenges to include absence of governance and ungoverned space, inadequate intelligence information sharing mechanisms among security agencies, inadequate resourcing of security agencies,administration of criminal justice system, porous borders and poor border controls, poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunities and cultural and social impediments.

Lawan said the committee observed that the security agencies require professional skills, equipment and technology to contain security issues adding that agencies lack critical equipment and where they exist they are obsolete.