NIGERIA’S efforts to curb terrorist activities in some parts of the country will soon be boosted as a collaborative endeavour with Israel comes alive.
Israeli’s Ambassador to Nigeria, Moshe Ram disclosed this yesterday in a lecture organised by Centre for International Education University of Ilorin and entitled: Nigeria-Israel Relations: Harnessing Opportunities for Capacity Development in Tertiary Education.
He noted that Israel had to battle terror attacks over its land and its people for over 20 years before getting the relevant solutions to the menace.
Israel, he added, had already commenced a relationship with Nigeria “which we cannot say more than that here”, to help minimize the terror attacks in the country.
For Ram, two factors are germane in fighting terrorism. These he identified as the will of the people being attacked and the potency of the intelligence and data gathering mechanisms of the security operatives of the country under the siege of the terrorists.
“The most effective weapons against terrorism are intelligence and data collation of the base of the terrorists and the will to fight against it. Our hands are always open to our friends and partners, Nigeria is one of them. Efforts are on the way over this, we cannot say more than that now. It falls under a bi-lateral arrangement and relationship.
“We know how to deal with terrors in Israel. We put up a good intelligence base. You must prevent terror attack at the level of its conception, because when a terrorist is on his way to carry out his mission, you cannot stop him. We have offered our assistance to Nigeria.”
The envoy traced the history of the Jewish race and reminisced on the holocaust and its impact on the people, just as he proposed a new order for a new nation where the youth must be made to play a major role in the scientific development of their nations.
According to Ram, the present seven million population of Jews in Israel apart from other six million in the Diaspora are dependent for survival on the skill and technology know how of two per cent of the seven million who are farmers.
Ram added: “We are able to supply the needs of all our population and still export substantial quantity of food for the consumption of other people outside Israel. Our agric is not seasonal, we have made it attractive to the youth, modernize it and make it a profession for would be farmers.”
He urged the Federal Government of Nigeria to pursue to a logical conclusion its recent policies on agricultural revolution but with a caveat that the youth should be encouraged to take farming as a profession “via incentives from the government”.
Besides, while emphasising the inherent danger in adopting mono-economic policies, the envoy who believed that the Nigerian oil basement would dry in future, proposed the inculcation of modern agricultural technologies into the curricular of primary and post-primary schools in Nigeria, towards imbibing in the youth the importance of “modern agric practices for the growth of the nation’s economy.”
