Today, most of the priority and talking points in our country is how to counter the growing terrorists and insurgents groups in our country and make our people safe. Countering terrorism has becomed without any doubt, the top national security priority of the Buhari administration.
The nation has committed huge national resources to countering terrorists and insurgents as it has not done before and things has continued to get worse.
This pattern has never occurred before in our Nationals history. Nigeria is facing a sudden crisis and summons a tremendous amount of national energy with the rise of the Boko Haram crisis and militia group scattered around the nook and crannies of our nation. Then, as the surge transforms the landscape of our nation then comes the time for reflections and reevaluations.
Some programmes and even agencies are discarded, others needs to be invented or redesigned. Now is the time for that inventions and revaluations and many citizens are now proposing to the government the need to turn to the space satelite technology as a veritable tool for tracking and containing this malaise.
In the world today, threats are defined by the fault lines rather than by the boundaries between them. From terrorism to global diseases or environment degradation, the challenges has become transnational rather than international. That is the defining quality of world politics in the 21st century.
As stated before, the country needs to reinvents its strategy of countering this criminals groups and elements. Today it is generally agreed that for the strategy of countering to be successful, we need to device a means of tracking this terrorists through satellite technology.
As it stands today, Nigeria needs four additional satellites to successfully track insurgents.
How do you trace or track the movements of terrorists, bandits and insurgents who have acclimatized themselves in the many enclaves of bandits scattered across the nooks and crannies of Nigeria?. The answer is for our country to turn to satellite technology as the only panacea to help us trace and track the movements of this terrorists.
It is true that the agency,s helmsman Dr. Halilu Ahmad Shaba has consistently voiced out that the numbers of satellites currently deployed into space by the country is not enough to trace and track the movements of insurgents in our effort to fight the menace of terrorism and banditry across the country.
The inability of the Buhari administration to successfully and quickly clamp down on this criminal elements by tracking their movements can be attributed to inadequate satellites provisions.
The Director General of National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) who is an advocate of synergy through inter agencies cooperations has consistently appealed for more satellites for the country as this would go a long way in making the movements of this criminal elements easier to locate.
The activities of this insurgents are not properly monitored because Nigeria has two satellites doing two different things at the same time. This insurgents who now even uses walkie-talkie now carry out their activities when the satellites are away from Nigeria.
Nigeria today could only boasts of a high resolution imaging satellites and a medium resolution imaging satellites and this is not enough as it is on record that this insurgents who do not use GSM because of the fear of being tracked now carryout this nefarious activities when the satellites are away from the border.
Now Nigeria needs the satellite to combat crimes and no country can live in denial of the potential and capabilities of the satellites as a veritable tool to locate and decimate criminal elements quickly. We have to deploy the Ngcomsat-r1 in the fight against terrorism and we can do more as a country to assist its efficacies more by adding more satellites.
It is worrying also that Nigeria’s satellite is outdated and working only by grace. The one which was installed in 2011 have a life span of seven year life span. This is the time in the annals of our country that security is first. The government therefore needs not spare any effort in making sure that our people are safe by investing in the lives and future of the country by getting new satellites for the country.
Though the administration has highlighted having or building new satellite to change the old one as a priority, but the dwindling resources of the country as a factor for the delay in building and having new ones as a valid excuse based on facts on ground, the challenges around us at this time makes the call for having new ones inevitable. The government must think out of the box.
As the security challenges confronting our country becomes complex, more questions about the security of the country comes to mind. What is the role and use of NASRDA in the security echelon of the country?.The government needs to assist the NASDRA to synergise with the security agencies by getting more satellites for the agency.
– Musa Wada writes from Abuja.
