Insecurity: FG employs hunters, vigilantes, pledges to put an end to school attacks

Mrs Halima Iliya, the National Coordinator of the Financing Safe Schools Initiative, said plans are in the works to actively engage hunters and vigilantes in intelligence collection in order to reduce school-related attacks nationwide.

The National Coordinator stated this in an interview with NAN on Sunday in Abuja.

She stated that aggressive community engagement and sensitization of children, parents, and teachers will begin in the second quarter of the year.

“As a component of the plan, for states with local vigilantes, we intend to train their hunters, vigilantes and volunteers while for states without registered vigilantes, we intend to advocate the use of youths.

“Youths will volunteer to protect their communities because we cannot achieve anything within a community without their involvement.

“We will bring them to the security architecture for them to defend and protect their communities in the areas of intelligence gathering, prevention and detection deterrent capabilities,” Iliya said.

Iliya disclosed that there are plans to also use the platform of the National Orientation Agency, NOA because of their presence in all the local governments.

She said they will be used to reach out to the grassroots by developing some training manuals that could be converted to local dialects of communities for efficient communication.

“We are done with the second phase of the implementation of the safe schools national plan where all security agencies involved have trained their personnel on safe schooling which has been streamed into their operations.

“We have also written to all states, including the FCT, to furnish us with information on the most at-risk schools in the three senatorial zones and one tertiary institution.

“We want states to take ownership, then we tailor the intervention towards this as these are the ways to make a significant impact,” she said.