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Curbing criminality in Nigeria

By Maria Famakinwa

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Crime rate among Nigerian youths has assumed a worrisome dimension that needs urgent solutions otherwise, the future of the country will be in jeopardy.
Hardly will a week end without news relating to criminality. If people are not caught with drugs, abduction of school students or kidnappings would be reported even as internet fraud, ritual killings and rape continue unabated.
Recently, operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Ondo State Command arrested nine dealers of illicit drugs and seized from them 1,292 kilograms of Cannabis Sativa and its seeds. The State Commander of the anti-drug agency, Mr Haruna Gagara, disclosed that 711.5kg of cannabis was recovered from a forest in Ago Oyinbo area of Ogbese, in Akure North Local Government Area of the State. He said, “This seizure has thwarted the mass cultivation of an estimated 250 hectares of Cannabis Sativa farmland in Ondo State” Criminality in Nigeria is not peculiar to a particular state. Days ago, was the news of abducted students and staff of Government Science College, Kagara, in Niger State before they were released after ten days of agony and tortured. Also came another sad news of abduction of about 300 school girls of GSS Jangebe in Zamfara State. Likewise, operatives of the Ogun State Police Command recently arrested three suspected armed robbers who came from Lagos State to carry out robbery operation in Ogun State. In Kaduna State was another reported case of rampaging bandits who killed 18 people and kidnapped many in two Local Governments Areas of the State. Also, in Sokoto State, a transborder drug trafficker, Nkem Timothy, was recently arrested with N1b worth of cocaine by the state NDLEA. The list of crime related cases is endless and need holistic approach to curb it.
Reacting to the high crime rate across the country and way out of it, Chairman and Chief Executive of the NDLEA, Brig. Gen Buba Marwa, revealed that criminalities in the country will continue if the problem of drugs abuse is not addressed. He added that the use of drugs in Nigeria today is at an alarming proportion of approximately 15 million, nearly three times the global prevalence. His words,”No. wonder so much criminality everywhere in our land and it’s increasing instead of abating with such symptoms as kidnappings, insurgency, banditry, rape and assassinations. Behind it all is drug use. Criminals now ask for ransom in drugs and unless we get to this root cause, we will only be scratching the surface, as the criminalities will continue to flourish”. he said.
Sharing a similar sentiment, a Psychologist, Mrs Laurel Thompson, also stressed the need for government to curb drug abuse especially among the youth in order to record success in the fight against criminality and other social vices. She explained that drugs lower inhibitions, sharpen aggressive feelings and lead attackers and victims to misread one another’s signals in violent situations. She said,” Another problem is that drug interferes with the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobe, which can affect the ability to handle unexpected or threatening situations. Moreover, neurochemical system that mediate aggressive behaviour tends to be disrupted when people are under the influence of drug”.
To curb it, the Psychologist said that Psychological counselling is very important, because substance abuse and mental disorders often go hand in hand. Her words,”It has been estimated that 13 percent of the prison population have both a substance abuse and a mental health problems, often as the result of childhood physical or sexual abuse. Among State inmates who regularly use drugs, 45 percent of women and 13 percent of men had been victims of physical or sexual abuse, primarily when they were young. Offenders who have problems with drug have similar rates of prior abuse. To effectively treat such inmates, their mental health problems must be addressed. To reduce crime rates in the society, government must solve the problem of drug abuse because drugs are implicated in all types of crimes. “
To an economist, Mr Bamidele Olaniyi, curbing criminality cannot be achieved without an improved economy. The man who observed that in a contemporary Nigeria, systemic failure manifests in high rate of unemployment among graduates and non-graduates urged the government at all levels to prioritize employment if criminal acts is to be solved in the country.
While maintaining that unemployment is a correlate of poverty, crime and violent across the country hinted that white collar jobs which were the desired of every graduate was no longer available and that some of them who would have embraced vocational skills as an alternatives lack start-up capital. He said,”Most vocational trainings are not supplemented with loans and not targeted appropriately. Youth unemployment programmes have concentrated more on training than on other steps that can help participants actualise the skills learnt. This strategy has not yielded the desired results because trainings are not often accompanied by soft loans, that graduating trainees could use as start-up capital in order to facilitate their quick integration into the labour market.
“Past leaders and other concerns citizens of the country have written many times on the need for Federal and State governments to provide employment for our teeming youths without any positive response. Youth unemployment is what is manifesting in social vices like drug, rape banditry, robbery, kidnappings, internet fraud among others. We need to address economic inequality which I believe is central to reducing crime and violence in the country. No country pay lip service to high unemployment rate like ours and experience peace. 80 percent of those caught in one form of crime or the other are frustrated unemployed youth. Let’s Government do what it should to solve the problem, before the situation get out of hand. “

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