Insecurity: Minister tasks female military officers on critical roles

The Minister of Women Affairs, Mrs Pauline Tallen, has urged female officers in military and paramilitary organisations to play critical roles in the fight against insecurity in the country.

She made the call at a two-day workshop on “Emotional Intelligence”, organised by the ministry in collaboration with the Prime Unique Women Initiative (PUWI) for female security officers on Thursday in Abuja.

According to her, the challenge of insecurity has been giving everybody sleepless nights and this problem cannot be left to men alone to handle because women have strategic and critical roles to play in this regard.

“In the entire security architecture, we have a great role to play and I strongly believe that this workshop will help our women in uniform, both military and paramilitary and officers’ wives, by equipping them to perform better,” she said.

Tallen noted that women’s position paper had been presented to the national assembly and all the political parties to ensure that the National Gender Policy was further strengthened in the current move to review the constitution.

On the importance of emotional intelligence in ensuring security, the President of PUWI and Convener of the event, Mrs Folake Yobah, stressed the need for security agents to be emotionally stable and balanced to enable them to discharge their duties effectively.

She said “security and emotional intelligence are like siamese twins such that we cannot take one away from the other, for security and peace to reign.

“We have seen that friction between security agents and civilians often result to issues like poor anger management and low tolerance to provocation, among others.”

Yobah said if security officers were impacted, the knowledge of emotional intelligence and friction between officers and civilians would greatly reduce.

A participant at the workshop, Mrs Jane Kayode, said that the major lessons she learnt from the workshop was the ability to relate and impact positively on others through thoughts and actions.

It was reported that participants at the workshop include officers of the Nigeria Army, Nigeria Police and Nigeria Immigration Service.

Some others were; Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, Nigeria Army Officers Wives’ Association and representative from the defence headquarters.