The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) has reiterated the need for Nigerians to invest in training that would improve their security knowledge for a secured and criminally-reduced country.
Dr Hammed Abodunrin, the Commandant of NSCDC in Ondo State, made the emphasis on Sunday during a chat with the News Agency of Nigeria in Akure.
Abodunrin explained that the best form of security was personal security, saying that without knowledge of security, it would be difficult to know when dangers were looming.
He said that the deployment of technology and knowledge was an important factor to curb and reduce criminality in the country.
“If we don’t give security education, people won’t know. The best form of security is the one you provide for yourself. It is a reflex action. If you touch a hot object, you remove your hand. Nobody will tell you. That is what security is.
“If you feel that a place is not safe, you don’t go there. Nobody needs to tell you that. If there is any happening in the street of UK, within some minutes, security operatives will arrive.
“Not only because they have technology alone, but because they have a conscious population who can really tell the story and how it happened. Here, we don’t have such knolwedge.
“We can be saying slogan that when you see something, say something, but before you can say something, you must identify what you have seen. If you don’t know that what you have seen is dangerous, you won’t say anything.
“l don’t know how many journalists that can recognise an IED when they see it. That is why we want to also train media operators to know that their job is also risky.
“We will carry them along and see how we can protect them on the field. We have lost many of them.
“There are positions you should be when you are hearing gunshots. Except someone points a gun at you, you cannot be crippled by gunshots if are in such positions,” he stated.
On Ondo State Security Awareness for Everybody (OSSAE), the commandant said that the Commandant General of NSCDC had initiated the children’s version whereby school children would be taught security tips.
“The school security project is ongoing. We are succeeding in Ondo State, especially in the area of keeping people informed on personal security. The children version is the initiative of the commandant general.
“It’s to look at security threats around our schools all over Nigeria and how we can reduce such security threats.
“We want these children to know and when they know, they can talk. How can they sense rape when coming and how do they avoid it? Many of them fall victim because of their ignorance.
“So, we can know how we come in and fill in the gap, not that we will deploy our personnel there. We don’t even have enough personnel to do that.
“We are starting from secondary schools because we are looking at categories of children that can grasp what we are doing. We will still go back to primary schools, and of course, our target is also higher institutions,” he said.
According to him, the school security programme will be in phases.
“We have trained our own personnel. The second one is training of teachers and another phase is the teachers’ training the remaining teachers in the school.
“The training is going to be extra-curricular activities spanning weeks and it will also make security agents look friendly to our children so that they can access them when in danger or being threatened.
“They will not see security personnel as oppressors but a particular set of people that can be of help as being done in other climes,” he said.
He decried the wrong notion about security opearives, saying such notion had also been passed to children who were scared by the uniform as they grew up.
“Personally, I did a reserach. I gathered about 100 children asking them if they had ever shaken hands with a policeman before, only two of them said yes. One of them is a child of a policeman and the other was in a Boys’ Brigade in his church.
“And I asked them about shaking hands with a soldier and they all chorused no. Some of them said they felt like entering the ground if they sight a soldier,” he stated.
Abodunrin also said that benefits of friendliness and good collaborations between security operatives and members of the public could not be over-emphasised.
He tasked parents and guardians on a time-table to teach their children and wards weekly security lessons, saying that only moral lessons would not suffice.
Abodunrin cited an eight-year-old girl being violated by her headmaster, saying the girl did not talk until she was taught that she should not allow anybody to touch her “‘red area’, which is from neck to knee”.
He added that an enquiry was made and the “said headmaster confessed that he was just trying to be friendly with the girl.”
(NAN)