The Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Adeyeye Ogunwusi has said traditional rulers need to be assigned constitutional roles in the security and governance architecture of the country, failure of which the country won’t effectively tackle emerging and contemporary security challenges confronting the country.
The Ooni made this call at the 2023 exercise Haski Hiyu lecture series organised by the Armed Forces command and staff college, Jaji Kaduna state.
Delivering a lecture with the theme: “Combating Internal Security Challenges through effective utilisation of traditional institution, the guest speaker, the Ooni stressed that the failure of the security agencies and the government to assign specific constitutional roles to traditional rulers was largely responsible for the lingering insecurity in the country.
Present at the event were senior military officers drawn from various units and formations across the country for the lecture
The lecture is an annual exercise organised by the military training institution to cross-fertilize ideas and strengthen inter-agency collaboration between civil-military and paramilitary organisations to tackle emerging and contemporary security threats within their domains.
He noted that the traditional institution has a vital role to play in the fight against insurgency, banditry and other related crimes in the society due to their closeness to the people, and therefore expresses the need to enshrine roles of traditional rulers in the constitution.
The royal father also bared his mind on how government can work closely with the traditional institution to tackle insecurity, a position that the commandant of the armed forces command and staff college, to which Air Vice Marshal Emmanuel Wunoh agreed.
