It amounts to an overkill when you beat up an obedient child and still refuse to allow him to cry. This, perhaps, summarizes the situation the Nigerian intelligence services have found themselves in today. By their training, they are not expected to go on national television to disclaim falsehood being propagated against them, especially when those responsible for the falsehood are some of their colleagues or superiors or desperadoes working to replace their heads.
The mantra these days is to heap every blame on the intelligence services whenever the enemies of the nation carry out a successful attack. The term “intelligence failure” has since gained a traction in the public space, especially the social media, where every Tom, Dick and Harry has turned themselves to security experts who claim knowledge of solutions more than those trained in the job do.
Only four days ago, the nation witnessed a series of attacks, firstly on an advance team of the presidential convoy driving to Daura, President Muhammadu Buhari’s hometown, where he is billed to spend the Sallah break. Then a diligent police officer was killed same day somewhere in Katsina State. And then the bigger one on the night of the same day: the massive attack on Kuje Prison, Abuja, which houses high-profile terrorists, politicians and other sundry criminals.
But who is to blame on such a massive attack? In situations of this kind, blame game is usually destructive because what is needed is a cohesive security architecture that leaves only very little room for error. When President Buhari visited the Kuje Prison on his way to Senegal, what he expressed was shock that the intelligence structure in the prisons could not foresee what happened and nip it in the bud. How he came to be reported by segments of the mainstream and social media to have expressed disappointment in the entire intelligence structure in the country remains a riddle to those who are privy to what he actually said, in expressing his disappointment.
Discerning Nigerians know for a fact that intelligence failure is definitely not the reason the prison in Kuje was attacked. It is a combination of factors, almost all of which should be rested in the doorstep of the prisons service itself.
Two days ago, the immediate past Minister of Interior and former Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Dambazau, was interviewed by a private television station, and he categorically rested the blame on the prison service, which has consistently refused to do what is right to safeguard the place and ensure nothing like that happened. He mentioned that, when he was the minister supervising the prisons service, he visited Kuje Prison twice and on the first visit, he observed that the security tower aimed at seeing persons approaching the facility from short and long distances was not manned at all.
Though he queried the controller as well as some other personnel concerned with the matter, he realized, to his chagrin, that the tower was still not manned during a second visit. And it is openly known that that tower was not manned on the day the Kuje prison was attacked.
A retired group captain that was interviewed by the same television station also said, after the prison was attacked, he paid a visit to the facility in Kuje and saw that the approach was overtaken by overgrown weeds such that it impairs visibility of those approaching the prison. He added that clear visibility at night was almost not possible. Yet, even this common problem was not solved by those in charge of the facility.
Thirdly, I know for a fact that when I visited a prison in a state in the North-Central, I saw that many prisoners were holding their cellphones and communicating freely with the outside world. That raised my curiosity and I decided to investigate further, only to find that the warders, most often in concert with their supervisors, were the ones providing the phones, as well as even hard drugs and other prohibited items to the inmates, including those condemned to death for murder and other high crimes.
It is not even a secret that, in almost all prisons in Nigeria, many prisoners communicate with their colleagues in the underworld freely. Only once a while would the authorities make a show of inspecting to snatch such phones and other dangerous items at the disposal of the inmates. And even when such inspections are carried out, only a few items get discovered because the warders, obviously because they are unpatriotic and very poorly paid, always alert the prisoners about it, and help them in hiding the prohibited items.
The report is out there that during the latest attack on Kuje Prison, the terrorists who carried it out were heard communicating with those they went to set free, the prisoners inside the facility. Before then, a clear map of the facility was sent by those inside to the ones set to free them, which made it pretty easy for the attackers to go straight to where their partners in crime were being kept, to whisk them away.
I know as a journalist interested in national security that some of the intelligence agencies have reported these malpractices to the prison authorities in Abuja. Obviously, apart from cosmetics, not much was done to curtail it. I also know for a fact that the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) had alerted the authorities as to the prison attack while it was being hatched, and the Department of State Services (DSS) is also reported to have alerted, in a security report, the prison authorities that the facility in Kuje was going to be attacked later the same day. Clearly, nothing was done by those in charge to stop the attack.
Now, it is important for us to understand that the work of intelligence services like the DSS or the DIA stops the moment they issue intelligence to a security agency, otherwise called action agencies. It is the action agency that is expected to act with dispatch on these pieces of intelligence and make sure the evil being planned is nipped in the bud.
My good friend and colleague Malam Tukur Mamu, the publisher of Kaduna based Desert Herald newspaper unambiguously said he supplied intelligence to the action agencies when he got wind of the planned attack on Kuje Prison, but that it was not acted upon. Mamu has since established himself as a patriot who is doing a whole lot in terms of assisting the security services resolve very difficult security problems afflicting the nation.
So, are we fair to the intelligence services when we open our mouths or pick our cellphones to castigate them for an offense they did not commit?
The reality on ground, which the authorities in Nigeria keep pushing aside, is that there is still bitter rivalry in the ranks of our security and intelligence services, and this column has drawn attention to that on countless occasions. I know, for example, an intelligence chief that is being antagonized by his supervisors simply because they want a Muslim in his place, and he is one of only two or three Christians in the entire security architecture of this country. I know for a fact also that this man is a core patriot who is doing his job to the best of his ability, inspite of several limitations placed on his way, but is being entangled for reasons that are irresponsibly parochial.
There is also the fact that intelligence, especially the top notch type that Nigerians envisage, does not come cheap. Now, there is need for us to ask the question as to whether all that the undercover services stand in need for diligent work have been provided for them. The answer definitely is a capital NO. Of course it is not in doubt that President Buhari has been up and doing in terms of ensuring items required by the security services are as much as possible provided to them. But owing to paucity of funds, this is very much a work in progress.
There are very many sensitive equipment some segments of the intelligence services urgently need, which have not been provided yet by the government, of course not deliberately. So what many of us don’t even know is that our intelligence personnel, more often than not, are working under very difficult situations, literally squeezing water out of stone in their determination to keep us safe.
There is also the issue I have repeated quite a number of times on these pages, which is that intelligence, and in fact security in general is everyone’s business. We cannot be failing to report evil in our midst and still blame the security or intelligence services for failure to detect it. They are human beings like us and are not magicians. There is a limit to what they can achieve unless we help them with timely and reliable information. Funnily, there are Nigerians who want the security situation to always get worse so that they could find reason to hang it on the government of the day.
Certainly the solution does not lie in firing the current crop of security and intelligence chiefs. We made that mistake last year and are still paying for it, when we rushed the president to fire the then service chiefs, some of who were excellently doing their job. The situation got worse because the new persons appointed took time to get acquainted with the realities on ground, and the terrorists cash in on the gap created to deepen their evil, at our collective expense.
Let’s remember that when America was attacked on September 11, it did not sack any of its intelligence or security chiefs. The attack led to a mass awakening that saw more Americans cooperating with those working to secure them, resulting in massive arrests of potential and hardened terrorists before they could strike.
Of course one is not saying the intelligence services in Nigeria are perfect, just as there is no human organisation that can lay claim to perfection anywhere. The reason is they are human and are prone to mistakes, which all of us commit one way or the other. But the fact remains that even where such mistakes exist, they are almost always of the head, not of the heart.
Let’s deepen our support for all of them, so that criminals in our midst will be left with no breathing space that they could leverage upon to wreck evil. And there is certainly no time to waste. All of this starts with you, not the next person. Only in so doing shall we have the secure Nigeria of our collective dream.