The Comptroller General of the Nigeria Immigration Service (CGI), David Parradang has attributed the porous border across the country to poor funding.
He disclosed this while appearing before the Senate Committee on Interior on Wednesday, to defend the Service 2014 budget proposal.
According to him, there is need to introduce an integrated plazas with censors or radars that can pick movements across the nation’s borders at key entry points in North East, North Central, and Northwest and some South-South.
Parradang said, “Distinguished Senators, you would have gone round one or two of our borders and at best, they are open fields, there is no form of control that can be said to be effective because most of them are open.
“It is not right for us to leave them that way because a lot of illegal immigrant can come in and a lot of arms can be moved in and we have complained severally that there are many unmanned routes, illegal crossings, that no control post had been stationed in these areas and the more we keep them open without providing effective security in those areas, the most exposed the country is to security challenges so we felt that the budget should look squarely at these areas of border issues.
“We need plazas in some key areas of the border and what we have for border patrol here cannot even build a boys quarter in some areas.
“We feel that the issue of plaza should be put back in the front burner. We need to look at our key entry points in our North East, North Central, and Northwest and some South-South areas. We should look at bringing back plazas in those areas in an integrated manner that will be able to have censors or radars that can pick movements across.
“It is not too much to invest in security. If the first line is broken then we cannot be able to provide security. We were only given few amount of money for motorcycles, for operational vehicles, and we cannot do much.
“What we feel is most important thing to do is to get the communication equipment on ground. If we want to make an interception and arrest anyone that is coming in the country illegally, we must be picked him before he crosses the border. N160m for motorcycles which is really a far cry from what we requested.
“We need patrol jeeps in the north and boats in south-south. The budget did not take care of that. We have a lot illegal immigrants in Nigeria and they constitute insecurity in our land and where we cannot have complete data on them, where we cannot intercept, screen them and take them out of the country.
“We started the process of reconciliation when the board announced we got the approval to recruit 4, 000 and above but there was no budgetary provisions funding for that process if we recruit the people there will be no salaries for them, so we have approached the budget office, they said it was late and that it cannot make available that amount of money and we calculated that but N4bn would be able to pay those officers that are expected to be recruited for the year 2014.
“They said we have to wait for the results of the IPS programme to see whether there will be savings because they don’t want to spend additional money on overhead and that is the situation we are now. We have not stopped at that point, we received applications and I am sure the board will be in a better position to give further information,” Parradang explained.
