Governor: Bandits live with us in Katsina

Bandits imposing terror on Katsina State live among residents, Governor Dikko Radda has said.

“They are neither strangers nor outsiders,” he said . “These are not alien criminals. They are from among us, we know their fathers and their grandfathers. That is why local solutions like the community watch corps are effective. They understand the terrain and the people.”

He called for the adoption of state police as panacea to the insecurity in the Northwest state.

The governor who spoke on a television programme, explained that insecurity remained a major obstacle to meaningful development in the Northwest state.

Mirroring the call by other governor’s for constitutional reforms to enable state policing, Radda noted the army and the police operate independently of governors, who serve as security chiefs in their states of deployment.

The governor, who decried the limitations of working with federal security agencies that are not directly accountable to the state government, said: “If you ask a federal security unit to move and they refuse, there is nothing you can do. But, if you are their employer and you can take punitive action, it’s a different story.”

On what his administration is doing to bolster security of lives and properties, he said: “Our position in Katsina State is very clear – we need state police. When I came in, we had to create the Katsina Community Watch Corps because conventional security agencies were overstretched and under-resourced.

“These boys know the terrain better, they know those people better. Most of the perpetrators of this banditry are from our own area. They are not aliens – more than 90 per cent of them; we know their fathers; their grandfathers and they are living with us.”

Emphasizing the imperative of involving locals in the fight against insurgents, Radda said: “This situation requires local involvement and that was why we created this outfit – that people at the local level can provide us with information.

“They can lead the fight to the enclaves of the bandits because they know the terrain better, and they can fish out informants living among us, giving information to the bandits and those that provide logistic support to the bandits.

“Without unbundling that, you would not be able to fight insecurity successfully.”