The Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Integrity Watch (CeFTIW) has called for enhanced stakeholders’ actions to stem the rising terrorism and crimes following the release of the 2022 Global Terrorism Index (GTI) report.
The index developed by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) using data from Terrorism Tracker and other sources indicated a beehive of terrorism activities in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa, now seen as the epicenter of terrorism.
Mr. Victor Agi, the CeFTIW Public Relations Officer, in a press statement on Friday noted that the situation in sub-Saharan Africa needs urgent attention to forestall further escalation.
Agi said that escalation could descend to a state of statelessness in the worst affected countries.
Citing the report of the GTI, Agi said: “with an 8.065 percent score, Nigeria is now the eighth most terrorized country in the world.
He said this was as the bordering countries to Nigeria from the north, east, and west have also increasingly become notorious for terrorism, with Niger ranking 10th with 7.616 percent.
Agi noted that Cameroon and Chad took 11th (7.347 percent) and 19th (6.168 percent) positions respectively; and Benin 28th position (4.840 percent).
“Only Guinea to the east is safe as per the recently released index which analyzed the impact of terrorism across nations and covers 99.7 percent of the total world’s population,” he said.
Agi, therefore, called for an intergovernmental collaboration to address the rising cases of terrorism which he said had assumed a transnational dimension like every other organized crime.
“This empirical insight into terrorism activities means that countries in the region must, as a matter of necessity come together and proffer practical solutions that will address the aforementioned factors that continue to fuel terrorism.
“The situation in the tri-border area of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger needs to be swiftly subdued for the security of civilians and state security actors,” Agi said.
He called on the Nigerian government to strengthen the implementation of a legal framework, especially the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act which President Muhammad Buhari signed into law, in May 2022.
“For instance, Part X (Section 63-75) provide measures for investigating and prosecuting terrorism offenses; we are therefore calling for an aggressive implementation of the law.
“Although Nigeria’s 2022 ranking was considered an improvement in comparison with 2021, as it drops by two places, increasing terrorism activities in the Sahel region calls for concern.
“Islamic State of West Africa (ISWA), Boko Haram, and Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) also made it to the top 10 deadliest terrorist organizations in the world in 2022, ranking six, seven, and 10 respectively.
“Sahel region is accounting for more terrorism deaths in 2022 than both South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) combined.
“Terrorism-related death in the region accounted for 43 percent of the global figure, and a seven percent increase from 2021,” Agi said.
He urged regional leaders to tackle complex and systemic underlying issues of weak governance, ethnic polarization, ecological insecurity, abuses by state security, pastoral conflict, political instability, and transnational crime.
Agi also called on leaders to tackle food insecurity and the growth of transnational and geopolitical competition which were identified as causative factors to the rise of terrorism in the region.
