The Oyo State government has restated its commitment to the training and retraining of the officers and men of the State Western Nigeria Security Network Agency, codenamed Amotekun Corps.
Governor Seyi Makinde said this on Tuesday, while flagging off a 3-day training workshop on Crime Intelligence Gathering and Crime Analysis, held at the Amotekun State Headquarters, Moniya, Ibadan.
Governor Makinde said the effort is in line with the determination of his administration to improve the performance of the officers and men of the Corps.
He said it was packaged to sharpen the intelligence-gathering and investigative skills of the operatives and enhance their abilities to nip crime in the bud before it is committed.
Represented by his Chief of Staff, Segun Ogunwuyi, the Governor noted that intelligence remained the most potent tool to stop crimes before they are committed, saying “It had become imperative to apply intelligence-gathering and analysis to the conventional method of fighting crime.”
Governor Makinde said; “Security intelligence gathering is an act of collecting, standardizing, and analysing data. If we just go about with guns and cutlasses and say we are fighting crime, I am sorry, we have not done anything. If we put our minds to gathering intelligence, a lot of crimes will not even be committed in the first place.”
He commended the leadership and the men of the Amotekun Corps on their comportment and cooperation with other security agencies to secure the lives and property of the residents of the state.
He noted that with good leadership, the state had been able to prove to the whole world that “the conventional Police, DSS, and others can work with our own home-grown Amotekun Corps.”
Declaring that the government wanted safety across the board in the state, the Governor enjoined the participants, who were selected from the 33 Local Government Areas of the state, to use the opportunity the workshop would offer to learn from the experts, take the knowledge back home, become trainers of other Amotekun operatives and utilise it to make the state safer.
The Commandant, of Oyo State Amotekun Corps, Col. Olayinka Olayanju (rtd), said the training was packaged because the government realised the importance of enhancing the capacity of the Corps so that they could become more efficient in their operational engagement with the community.
Olayanju stated that the government brought facilitators with first-hand experiences in local security intelligence-gathering across different African countries with criminal activities.
He noted that preventing and solving crimes would become easier when the information collection method is very high and effective.
Olayanju said: “If you have observed, we started a series of training last month, which was aimed at empowering the capacity of our men for operational efficiency. We started with how to engage with the community and time analysis. And for you to be able to effectively perform those roles, we consider it to be very important to enhance the capacity of our men in intelligence gathering.”
He urged participants to ensure they make use of the knowledge garnered in the course of the workshop for their effectiveness and efficiency during operations.
He stressed that at the end of the training, the Amotekun Corps’ approach to doing their jobs would be different.
Olayanju stated: “I expect that, after this training, when they hear there are cases of kidnapping in a particular area, they should be able to go out there, sieve and process such information and come out with an intelligence, which would be used to plan how to intercept the kidnappers.”
He explained that another importance of the training is that the Amotekun Corps did not want to be reactive by allowing a crime to take place before taking action.
Olayanju affirmed that it is cost-effective to prevent crime and the only way to do it, is to detect the crime before it takes place.
Mercy Chukwudiebere
