ABUJA, Nigeria, Aug. 18 (UPI) — Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday announced plans to boost security and clamp down on crime in the West African nation, in part by recruiting an additional 10,000 police officers.
The president also laid out goals to implant a CCTV monitoring system in major cities and to create a multi-agency anti-terrorism task force to counter the threat of Boko Haram.
“The need for community input to policing and crime management in Nigeria has even become more imperative considering our current national security challenges in which kidnapping, armed robbery, murder, transnational crimes, terrorism and other organized crimes have evolved to threaten our national values and developmental strides,” Vanguard quoted Buhari as saying.
Buhari took office in May following March elections in which he vowed to crack down on corruption as well as Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram.
While the group has lost its major strongholds, suicide attacks in crowded locations, as well as coordinated assaults on remote towns, have been on the rise.
A blast at a market in the village of Sabon Gari, in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno state, killed at least 46 people last Tuesday, and assaults by suspected Boko Haram militants on villages in Nigeria and Cameroon two weeks ago killed at least 15 people.
The BBC’s Abuja editor, Bashir Sa’ad Abdullahi, said the Nigerian government would need more than 10,000 officers to make a dent in crime, and that existing police forces already lack adequate training and equipment. Some Nigerians, he added, are hopeful Buhari’s announcement will herald an overall reform of the country’s police.
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