The federal government said it has deployed more than 2000 members of the special armed elite border patrol corps unit of the Nigeria Immigration Service [NIS] to the most porous and vulnerable Nigerian borders to improve security in the areas.
Minister of Interior, Comrade Patrick Abba Moro who said this at the weekend in an interview said the new border patrol unit will greatly enhance the protection of open, unprotected border areas by reducing the number of illegal immigrants who sneak into the country through unofficial routes.
Moro said that the 2, 000 specially trained border corps members are the first batch of about 10,000 officers expected to be trained in unique border patrol techniques to effectively protect the nation’s land borders.
While stating that the number of officers and men would be steadily raised to beef-up the corps into a standard unit, in the New Year, the Minister said the border corps will be assisted by modern surveillance equipment, including tracker helicopters to ensure water-tight protection of borders to effectively reduce illegal immigrants entering the country.
He also used the opportunity to assess the performance of the agencies in the Ministry of Interior in 2014, said the federal government has approved new administrative policies and strict prison residency rules to reduce the number of jailbreaks in the country.
He assured that everything humanly possible would be done to enhance security in the prisons especially since it has been discovered that part of the major threats to prison safety have been “insider collaboration” with criminals to breach the security of prisons.
Moro declared that the breakdown of disciple and patriotism in various prison formations must be tackled before security can be improved in the prisons.
Efforts, he said, were in top gear to improve welfare conditions in prisons including the expansion of prison facilities and the provision of new structures to decongest over-crowded prisons.
The projects, he assured will receive priority attention in 2015 especially now that many foreign countries particularly Britain has offered assistance to Nigeria for quick completion of prison reforms and upgrade of facilities to facilitate prisoner exchange.
He also stated that efforts were made in the outgoing year to improve the operations of the Federal Fire Service [FFS] to make the agency more responsive in tackling fire disasters in the country.
The minister said some of the achievements in the fire agency included the introduction and domestication of the National Fire Safety Code which was not there before now.
