Malik Yahya/
Former military Head of State, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (Rtd) has faulted the establishment of the regional security outfit codenamed Operation Amotekun by South-West governors.
While featuring on Channels TV interview programme, Newsnight, Babangida said the governors lacked the financial resources to sustain the security outfit.
The former military ruler believed the governors may not be able to mobilise the needed expenses to sustain the operations of the outfit in the longer term.
His words: “They must equip them, you must pay them salaries. You must give them all the welfare they need. That is going to be a problem for the states. Where will they get the money to foot those bills?
“If they have succeeded in convincing the federal government to put out some part of the revenue for the purposes of that, I can understand that, but if they take it on themselves, it is going to be a problem.
“What we need to do is to have a closer look. We have a lot of security outfits; we have the army, the mobile police, the National Defence security, we have a whole load of them.
“I think they should be assigned specific responsibilities to lessen the financial burden this initiative would cost the government of the states in the long run.”
The governors of Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, and Lagos States had last Thursday in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, launched the security outfit with a mandate to curb insecurity in the region.
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