ONSA's Forgotten NAP Silver Bullet to Eliminate Violent Extremism

Published in Daily Nigerian on April 28, 2020

"A little over a year after it was issued, the NSA’s office held a three-day training for NGOs, as reported by Today.ng and Legit.ng, which stated that the Presidency had approved special funding related to the Plan as part of the counterterrorism war. Yet, even in that report, the implementation was still futuristic, the language of “we will”. If a Steering Committee was inaugurated for this Plan, as envisaged, there is no indication of it in a cursory Google news search. Is there a Secretariat for PCVE NAP? I have no idea. The Counter Terrorism Centre, identified in the Plan as having a key responsibility, exists and its reasonably regularly updated website was, as at March 8 2020, still urging Federal MDAs to establish PCVE desks. Three whole years after the Plan was released, its potential remains unrealized, its coordinative power remains unharnessed in dealing a knockout combo to violent extremism in Nigeria. Most definitely, no state government in Nigeria has a State PCVE Coordinator and I’ll bet that this country’s 700+ odd local government councils have zero idea what the PCVE NAP is about or their own crucial roles in implementing it. Within civil society, there may be some knowledge of the Plan, especially amongst those who participated in the working group. Likely very little outside this group.

What is clear from all this is the fact that in Nigeria, generating the brain trust for maximum brilliance is not the problem. Not all of us have run to Canada or wherever else. Clearly also, synthesising this brain trust and coming up with thorough plans, be they strategic, tactical or even advisory, is equally not the problem as we have seen in the all-of-government and all-of-society sinews of the National Action Plan on PCVE. What we lack is implementation and this breaks my heart, for all the wasted opportunity to rebuild our ship of state against state failure, to rejig our administrative and social systems. We are thus like the doubly unfortunate person cast into the sea of violent extremism who has a lifebuoy but does not know, or pretends not to know, how to go about inflating it. Thus we continue this very unseemly business of drowning."

Read the full #EngagingBorders essay HERE