The Serving Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has said Nigeria's security problems stem from fundamental structural defects designed into the Nigerian constitution since the return to democracy in 1999.

He lamented that the defects have been sustained by leaders who have, over the years, failed to demonstrate the political will needed for bold and innovative reforms.

He said the situation has escalated to the point that citizens have lost faith in the capacity of the government to guarantee their security due to gruesome reports of killings in several parts of the country, including Edo, Benue Plateau, Zamfara and Borno states.

Bakare said this in his State of the Nation Broadcast shared on his church's social media page on June 12, Democracy Day.

He said, "Communities are forming poorly trained, poorly equipped and unprofessional militaries, with some taking the law into their own hands, tightening the risk of inter ethnic crisis. This is a dangerous trajectory.

"In a recent reaction to these developments, former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar faulted the security architecture of President Bola Tinubu. However, our national security problems stem from fundamental structural defects designed into the Nigerian constitution since the return to democracy in 1999, defects that have been sustained by leaders who have, over the years, failed to demonstrate the political will needed for bold and innovative reforms."

Further speaking, Bakare listed the defects in Nigeria's security system to include a faulty national security philosophy, multiple levels of unpreparedness for national security, organisational inadequacy, security structure dissonance, security infrastructure deficit, security architecture dysfunction and security infrastructure conflicts.

He called for a change of national security philosophy from one that is primarily designed to protect government officials to one that primarily protects the Nigerian people.

"We must then reinstate national security federalism by activating constitutional procedures for multi-level policing, including local, state and zonal policy systems.

"Against this backdrop, we must redesign our security architecture by facilitating the formation of zonal security council shared by a governor from the respective zone on a retreating basis such zonal security councils, which will be formed by state and local policy system within respective zones was managed by non partisan security experts while the chairperson at each point in time, we represent the zone, and the national security council," he said.

ASA