Sunday Ani

A strategic security expert and chief executive, Scutarii Advisory, Mr. Hilly Cookey-Gam has urged former Nigerian leaders to chart ways for a new nation, devoid of rising insecurity threats as well as social disorder.

Cookey-Gam noted that the growing insecurity in the country has brought to the fore, urgent need for an advanced form of statecraft, hence, past and present leaders are expected to champion the cause for a greater nation.

Describing some security threats like bomb blasts, Amotekun and the IPOB agitation as politically-motivated, he disclosed that a new national security strategy has been formulated to check significant threats like terrorism, illegal oil-bunkering, crude oil theft as well as illegal fishing.

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Other threats, according to him, include kidnapping, hostage-taking, armed robbery, cyber-crime and smuggling.

He said the most significant threat to any nation is that which threatens its existence and in the case of Nigeria, “there is no threat as significant as the current political order, which places personal, ethnic, religious and sectional interests above national interest’’.

Cookey-Gam said there is no national strategy to counter these existential threats, stressing that more independent research is required to determine the correlation between it and other threats listed in the new national security strategy document.

A possible strategy to combat the existential threat, he added, is the utilisation of secret intelligence to prevent any individual or group from exploiting any organ of government to promote personal, religious or ethnic interests.