MONDAY EDITORIAL

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Thunder Blowers is one of the critical stakeholders invited to attend the public hearing on the bill for an act to establish Zamfara State Anti-Thuggery Agency held at the state house of assembly complex, Gusau last week.

The public hearing accorded the medium and indeed other stakeholders the opportunity to say their mind regarding what are supposed to be the cardinal point of view of the operation of the agency.

Though the leadership of the Nigerian Barr. Association, the Nigerian Police, State Security Services as well as other Non-Governmental organizations that attended the public hearing wanted the event to be postponed to enable them time to scrutinize the bill and forward their position the hearing went on considering the time frame left for the state assembly to consider sensitive bills like that of Anti-Thuggery before the commencement of the conduct of the 2023 elections.

These stakeholders were instead given up to today, Monday the 20th of February 2023 to submit their written memoranda regarding the proposed bill possible consolidation and inclusion.

But Thunder Blowers as well as others that have the opportunity to went through the draft bill were allow to proceed with their oral submissions before the house committee on Judiciary regarding the proposed bill, which were keenly noted by the Secretariat of the committee.

Surprisingly however, it has come to the notice of the stakeholders that the bill has been passed by the state house of assembly since last week without necessarily waiting for the memoranda expected from the stakeholders as agreed.

This is purely not honorable; hence there are critical issues that need to be clearly pegged to avoid having jurisdictional conflict between the bill and existing federal acts, especially those that relate to the operations of the conventional security agencies like the police SSS and rest.

But regardless of what trasnpired, the state government need to be applauded for taking the giant step of attempting to provide a “Gazette” for the formal operations of the Anti-Thuggery as a corporate agency so that it can sue and be sued by the citizens based on its statutory powers and functions.

Now back to the moral aspect of its existence as an agency, it is the candid views of the Thunder Blowers that as much as possible the agency should trade with caution when it came to aspect of how its operatives manages the use of arms; hence the bill provides that the operative of the agency should be allowed to bear any licensed arm without distinction.

It is our position that the agency should strictly be guided by the provisions of the Federal Fire Arms Act so that it can understand the “dos” and “don’t” expected of them while applying the use of fire arms in taming and managing thuggery in the state.

The agency should also be guided on the position of the law regarding arrest and detention of suspected thugs because before the provision of the bill, it was learned that the agency as a committee has set up a detention cell while in the entire bill sent to the house for consideration there was no where the agency was empowered to detain an arrested offender.

Instead, the provision of the bill stated that, the operatives of the agency may arrest but “shall” hand over to the appropriate security agencies, especially “police” for investigation and prosecution.

The statement made by the Commandant during the public hearing that they have already made provision for detention cell and that they even have some offenders in detention is actually scary since their law did not empower them to detain any arrested offender.

Another important thing worthy of notice is the aspect of synergy between the Anti Thuggery Agency and other conventional security agencies because from the look of things there may likely be a serious overlap in terms of corporate jurisdiction between the conduct of the operations of the agency and other security agencies, especially police.

The Agency need to reach out to these sister security agencies for serious interface so that there won’t be serious corporate crises at the end of the day.

Again, Thunder Blowers is also concern about the aspects of advisory council of the agency. During the public hearing the Managing Editor and Team Lead of the Medium Dr. Anas Sani Anka has raised a concern on the need to review the composition of the advisory council of the state Anti-Thuggery Agency to include representatives of all the conventional security agencies considering the unique nature of their operations with the new agency.

And lastly, the bill did not clearly spell out sources of funding of the agency. It is essential because that will help the agency to avoid having similar experience of agencies like ZAROTA where its operatives were recruited without clearly having a statutory mandate of where it will source its funds and pay the operatives their monthly salaries and other emoluments.

It was the unanimous concern of all stakeholders that there is need for the state government to always provide the law before establishing agencies to avoid conducting activities that are deemed to be illegal in the eyes of the people.

Furthermore, it is equally important for the members of the state house of assembly to always await for professional inputs of the stakeholders on sensitive bills like that of Anti Thuggery Agency so that we can avoid passing a bill with discrepancies and later be return for amendment or refilling.

May Allah assist Zamfara state and its people.