By: Tunji Okunlola
Pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation Afenifere has called on South-West governors to urgently rearm and reinforce the Amotekun Corps, warning that the regional security outfit is critically outgunned by the bandits it is tasked with confronting.
The group dismissed claims that poor intelligence gathering lay behind recent security failures, arguing that the problem was not a lack of intelligence but a failure to act on it. Afenifere’s National Publicity Secretary, Jare Ajayi, said the situation on the ground was stark: Amotekun operatives are less well-armed than the criminals they face.
Speaking with our correspondence, Ajayi pointed to an earlier warning the group issued after five forest guards were killed in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. “We warned then that the incident was a clear indication of what the bandits were planning, but nobody took us seriously,” he said.
Ajayi pressed governors on several fronts: expanding Amotekun’s personnel, improving welfare packages, and introducing comprehensive life insurance for operatives. He also questioned whether last month’s South-West Security Summit in Ibadan had produced any concrete results, and suggested that surveillance equipment Governor Seyi Makinde procured could have prevented some recent incidents had it been properly deployed.
He further called for closer coordination between Amotekun and conventional security agencies, particularly the police, citing repeated cases in which suspected bandits were arrested travelling into Yorubaland in lorries loaded with weapons only for their prosecution to quietly disappear. “Little or nothing was heard about what happened to them,” Ajayi said.
The broader picture, he argued, made the case for state policing harder to ignore. “The worsening insecurity across Yorubaland and Nigeria as a whole has once again underscored the need for state police,” he said.
The alarm from Afenifere echoes warnings sounded two years ago by the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland, Gani Adams, who wrote to South-West governors, traditional rulers and key stakeholders in February 2024 warning that the region faced an unprecedented threat from kidnappers, bandits and armed criminal networks. The letter followed the killing of traditional rulers in Ekiti and Kwara states – attacks that sent shockwaves across the South-West and exposed the growing boldness of criminal gangs.
Adams described the situation as a direct threat to the survival of the Yoruba people. Farmers were abandoning their land. Residents were afraid to travel on major roads. “Darkness looms,” he warned.
Two years on, those fears remain largely unaddressed.
Tags: #Afenifere #Jare Ajayi #Gani Adams #Amotekun