Kebbi Senator Blames Shortage Of Police Personnel For School Abduction

The Senator Representing Kebbi North and Senate Majority Leader, Yahaya Abdullahi, has blamed poor security arrangements in the country for the Kebbi School abduction.

The Senator, who appeared on Channels Television’s ‘Sunday Politics’, said the number of security personnel, particularly policemen across the country, is grossly insufficient to fight the level of insecurity in the country.

Abdullahi added that Nigeria only has 350,000 policemen across the country, adding that a good solution would be to allow more community policing.

 “What we are saying is that the troops on the ground in the security architecture of this country are inadequate so we have to sit down and rebuild the security architecture in such a way that we allow local communities to do community policing so that we can have enough men on the ground for any mass attack,” he said.

“If there were enough men on the ground like about 100 well-armed policemen, this kind of thing would not be happening”.

The Senate Majority Leader believes that “banditry in the country has become a recurring decimal and we should not look at it as something that is just happening today”.

“These things have their roots in the very serious security architecture that we inherited over a long period of time. We have to look at these issues from a historical perspective,” he added.

However, Senator Abdullahi, noted that the issue did not start with the All Progressives Congress (APC), and expressed optimism that it will end with the party.

Bandits in the early hours of Thursday morning, invaded the Federal Government College Birnin Yawuri, in Kebbi State and whisked away from a yet to be confirmed number of students and teachers.

The incident is the latest in a series of increasing school abductions across the country.

The Deputy Force Commander of the Joint Taskforce in the Northwest zone, Air Commodore Abubakar Abdulkadir, in a communique on Friday said the troops came in contact with the bandits in the early hours of the day and engaged them in a gun duel which forced them to abandon five students, and a teacher.

One of the abducted students of the college, unfortunately, died.

Earlier today, a statement signed by the Director Army Public Relations, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu, disclosed that another teacher and three students were rescued on Saturday at Makuku as the search and rescue operations continue.