By AbdulRaheem Aodu
Kaduna
The Commandant, Airforce Institute of Technology, Kaduna, Air Commodore Musibau Soladoye, has suggested that more collaboration with general public will improve intelligence gathering to curtail insurgency and terrorism in Northern Nigeria as December deadline given by President Muhamadu Buhari approaches.
The Airforce boss said this while fielding questions from newsmen shortly after the 2015 interactive session with professional bodies with the theme: ‘Overcoming insurgency in Nigeria: The role of professionals’, organised by Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Kaduna branch over the weekend in Kaduna.
He said, “on how far we have gone in intelligence gathering as regarding the ongoing operation, I think it speaks for itself. When you look at the successes being recorded by the Armed Forces of Nigeria, in the current fight against insurgency and terrorism in Northern Nigeria, you could see that we are making very good progress and the progress is solely base on the level of intelligence being gathered.
“Terrorists do not discriminate between combatant and non combatant. Whenever they discovered that the combatant is too strong for them, they target what we call soft target which is the civilian population. This is why all of us have to change our attitude. All of us must agree that we have individual role to play in the ongoing fight against terrorism and insurgency. You can have a terrorist as your neighbor; you may have one or two pieces of information that could assist security agencies. Do not hesitate to divulge.
“The only way you can save yourself and others is to give out information that you have at hand. The era of people afraid of turning to first suspect after giving security agents information has been taken care of long time ago. Nobody discloses sources of his information. Since the onset of the war against insurgency in Nigeria, we have not been revealing our sources of information. So, no one should be scared of given out information,” he said.
