A former Chief of Defence Intelligence, Air Vice Marshal Monday Riku Morgan (rtd), has proposed a five-level integrated security architecture for the North-Central region to address the worsening insecurity in the area.

Morgan said the major security challenge confronting the region was not a shortage of security agencies, but poor coordination among them.

He made the proposal in his keynote address at a security summit organised by the Federal Ministry of Defence in collaboration with the Office of the Special Assistant to the President on Community Relations.

The summit was themed, “Collaborative Approaches to Strengthening Security in North-Central Nigeria.”

He said the proposed North-Central Integrated Security and Resilience Model (NCISRM) would combine intelligence fusion, inter-agency coordination, community participation, technology and local early-warning mechanisms.

Morgan said the region needed to make four major shifts: from agency-centric to system-centric security; from reaction to prevention; from isolated intelligence to intelligence fusion; and from government-only security to government-community partnership.

According to him, the first level of the proposed architecture should be a Regional Security Fusion Centre, linked to the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) and the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC).

He said the centre would fuse intelligence from various security and government agencies into a single regional threat picture.

The second level, he said, should comprise State Security Coordination Centres established in each North-Central state to provide 24-hour situational awareness and coordinate security information before attacks occur.

At the third level, Morgan proposed Local Security Networks in high-risk local government areas, linking security agencies, traditional rulers, local authorities, farmers, pastoralists, civil society groups and trained community observers.

He said the fourth level should focus on forest and rural security, arguing that the region’s vast forests and rural spaces must no longer remain “intelligence black holes.” (Daily Trust)