Amid the worsening security crisis in Nigeria, the Minister of Women Affairs, Pauline Tallen, has urged female officers in military and paramilitary organisations to use emotional intelligence to 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, insecurity is giving Nigerians sleepless nights, pointing out that the country cannot leave the crisis to men alone.

“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.

Ms Tallen noted that the 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, Folake Yobah, stressed the need for security agents to be emotionally stable and balanced 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.”

The participants at the workshop included officers of the Nigerian Army, Nigeria Police, and Nigeria Immigration Service.

(NAN)