PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari’s home state, Katsina, has hired dogs to guard its public schools.
In a video published by CLIQQ TV and seen by The ICIR on Sunday, the state government said the decision was part of local solutions to tackling rising wave of insecurity in the state.
The state Commissioner for Education Badamasi Charanchi said in the video that dogs were capable of differentiating people with good intentions from those with evil plans. He noted that the dogs were capable of achieving the purpose for which the government hired their services.
“By their nature or build-in capacity or mechanism and by their performance worldwide, they can smell far away (more) than humans, especially objects and persons,” he said.
Asked if the dogs were trained for security such as manning school environment where there were people from different backgrounds not known to the dogs, or whether they would be eventually trained, he responded: “What people don’t understand is that when something is in it, you’re born of it, it’s part and parcel of you, that is why we looked at physiology. Whether our dog is trained or not, it has the powers to do what we want it to do. But, if you have particular training for particular thing you want dog to do, you can as well enhance the dog.”
He said what was most important to the government was for the dogs to secure the schools.
“We are not saying they should go and fight the bandits. Don’t mistake us that (we send them to be) fighting. No. They are to alert,” he stated.
The ICIR reports that bandits and terrorists in Nigeria use lethal weapons, namely AK-47, rocket-propelled grenade, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, squad automatic weapon, drones, light machines, among others. They have fallen many of the nation’s soldiers, though the nation’s military have neutralised thousands of them.
Dogs are known to bark at every strange object. It is not clear whether they are capable of scaring gun-toting bandits or not.
A public affairs analyst and security expert Danjuma Katsina, however, said in the video that the initiative was dead on arrival.
He said the initiative should not have been exposed to the public.
According to him, the local solution should have been known to only teachers, pupils and other stakeholders within the school setting.
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The video shows a couple of dogs barking and guided by some aged men within some of the public schools premises in the state.
Katsina State government shut all its boarding schools in December 2020, following mass abductions in the state.
The ICIR reported how scores of children were abducted at Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, in Kankara Local Government Area of the state in December 2020.
The attack was carried out hours after President Buhari arrived at the state for official visit.
Kaduna, Zamfara, Niger states have been at the mercy of bandits in recent months, as the criminals make fortunes from ransoms of their victims, killing many of them.
The ICIR had reported on April 23 how three of the many students kidnapped at Greenfield University in Kaduna State were killed by their captors.
Efforts by the Nigerian government to arrest insecurity in the nation appears to have been yielding minimal results, with cases of abductions, kidnappings, banditry and other criminalities increasing by the day.
There have been calls on President Buhari to rejig the nation’s security architecture by restructuring the military and sacking heads of the security formations who have overstayed in office.
Despite yielding to pressures after two years, there has been no respite as the situation remains worse, nationwide.
Several attempts have been made by leading private security network, Peace Corps, to be co-opted by the Federal Government to protect public schools and other critical public facilities as well as boost the nation’s security, but the Buhari’s administration in February 2018 declined assent to the bill passed by the National Assembly to this effect, citing inability of the Federal Government to fund the organisation.
Marcus bears the light, and he beams it everywhere. He's a good governance and decent society advocate. He's The ICIR Reporter of the Year 2022 and has been the organisation's News Editor since September 2022. Contact him via email @ [email protected].