I saw this treatise on national security last week on the social media, with the name of the author not stated, and find it very apt for the current discussion as to whether the seemingly-intractable security situation in the country is to be blamed on the intelligence services for what some news outlets have continued to term wrongly as “intelligence failure.”
At a time when all hands should be on deck, there is this deeply regrettable blame game ongoing between the action agencies, more popularly known as the security services, and the invisible hands feeding the action agencies with the right kind information about our national security situation. The treatise goes as follows: Anywhere on earth, once a group of citizens decides that there will be no peace, there is very little the security agents can do. The U.S., with all its defense and intelligence budgets, hasn’t found a solution to its around 30,000 annual fatalities from gun violence alone. It keeps increasing. In other climes around the world, once saboteurs hit a target, the citizens rally round and condemn the culprits/suspects and encourage state actors to do more. What I find strange in Nigeria is that almost all of us are united not in condemning attacks but in putting blames on state actors, thereby inspiring them as heroes to do more.
Politicians have discovered this misnomer and they naturally take advantage of it. A clear example was the January 15 , 2019, hotel siege in Nairobi, Kenya, by terrorists where foreigners and locals were massacred. Kenyans knew the perpetrators. They came out in support of their government and condemned the perpetrators. It is a common practice globally. I am not saying state actors shouldn’t be criticized or condemned whenever and wherever appropriate. But in times of crises it is not proper to attack or blame state actors for events that are beyond their control (the mind of a terrorist/saboteur/criminal).
Otherwise, we keep going round in circles. PMB will go , the next President will come and we will begin the same circle of blame games…. putting state actors under needless pressure, thereby hampering their work. I bet you, law enforcement officers work better when citizens boost their morale via patriotic calls and encouragement.
I also know that the next President of Nigeria will reap the benefit of the groundwork and designs done to our security architecture by PMB… just as Fashola and his successors reaped/still reaping from the groundwork laid by Tinubu.
It is not easy to build a security architecture. It is messy at the beginning (usually an incubation period that could be up to a decade) but it gets better afterwards.
We’re unfortunate to share the geographical space with wicked humans whose value for power and money outplay or supercede their value for human life.
If you ask me : why are they not apprehended by state actors and dealt with since they are known? A very popular mantra by civilians and mischievous retired security operators or security analyst. I will throw it back to you….why were the insurrectionists of January 6 at Capitol Hill not arrested and locked up in the US despite the volume of intelligence available to the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security? Most saboteurs are former and active state actors. They know the loopholes in the system (legal , bureaucratic, etc) which they explore. Go for them and appear like Idi Amin, Abacha, Mobutu , etc. There’s a wisdom in playing by the rules.
Once you want to clean up the Augean stable extra-judicially, you descend a slippery slope that takes you to a land of no return. At the end you stand to give account alone. And every country has her peculiarities .
So it’s very easy to write or go on radio and TV accusing state actors of nonchalance and not arresting sponsors or plotters of violence. Those in the driving seat know how complicated the strands are. It is even more difficult in a place like Nigeria where the centrifugal forces are both within and without . Many of us are an infinitely unpatriotic lot.
The treatise ends here
Now, If the social media were the rating agency for the intelligence community in Nigeria, chances are those holding sway in our various intelligence agencies would be scored very low marks. This is so because by the very nature of their work, the intelligence agencies engage in a lot of work other agencies of government take credit for. Obviously only few Nigerians know that inspite of our security challenges, virtually all the victories achieved and the progress even if slowly being made is on account of the work of these diligent agencies of government who operate mostly in the background.
For them, what matters is the result. They do not care or bother themselves with such cheap things as taking any credit. Someone might ask: if the intelligence agencies are working as optimally as they should be, why is our national security at a low ebb? The answer to that is simple: these agencies are not the action organs of government responsible for putting to use actionable intelligence gathered by them. If, for example, the Defence Intelligence Agency or the Department of State Services send a report exposing planned attacks on certain places, it will be up to the military to act on that information and stop it.
Sadly, owing to reasons that are not too distant from unnecessary rivalry, you find that in many cases the action agencies, such as the police or the military or any of the many para-military organisations, would also insist in investigating the intelligence, and more often than not, before they even start, the attack foretold by these intelligence agencies has taken place. One wonders how these unsung heroes feel when they see newspaper headlines suggesting intelligence failure most times Nigeria suffers one casualty or the other, in the war against banditry and terrorism.
Does that lower the morale of the personnel of these undercover institutions working very hard to ensure the rest of us operate in a peaceful and harmonious environment? Well, they are human, and will naturally feel bad when wrongly accused or misperceived. Perhaps because they do not want to heat the polity, and clearly because they care less about taking any credit, you hardly see them coming out to put the record straight, unless doing so would somewhat strengthen our national security. It is a sort of double jeopardy.
On June 5, 1986, almost 35 years ago, the government of the day took a bold step that has continued to serve this country greatly. It was on that day that the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) was born and saddled with the task of serving as the primary military intelligence agency of Nigeria. In specific terms, it was charged to provide an efficient system of obtaining military intelligence for the Nigerian armed forces and the Defence structure in general. The agency’s role also include promoting Nigeria’s defence policy, enhancing military cooperation with other countries and maintaining the territorial integrity of Nigeria. At any time, the head of the agency is the Chief of Defence Intelligence (CDI), who is appointed by the President of the country and no one else.
For the Muhammadu Buhari Administration, one of the smartest moves it has made towards curtailing our insecurity is the appointment of Samuel Adebayo, a Major-General of the Nigerian Army, as Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Intelligence and Chief Executive Officer of the DIA.
Just like Yusuf Magaji Bichi of the Department of State Services (DSS) and Ahmed Rufa’i Abubakar of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Adebayo is a foremost intelligence-czar whose major attributes include being a heavily-detribalised and loyal patriot whose focus has consistently been a peaceful and harmonious Nigeria.
When he held sway as the Chief of Military Intelligence in charge of the Nigerian Army, a position he held until February this year when, in appreciation of his selflessness and hardwork, President Buhari promoted him to his current post of CDI, General Adebayo played a key role in degrading Boko Haram (a word some cynical Nigerians don’t want to hear) to the level where the late leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau in 2020 cried openly, begging his soldiers not to abandon the fight, though they were being severely decimated.
A lot of Nigerians do not know that it was the trio of these intelligence chiefs, even more so General Samuel Adebayo, whose work made it possible for Abubakar Shekau to be killed. Though there are things that should not be said in the public domain, but it is because they succeeded in planting moles in the ranks of Boko Haram that only two out of twenty top commanders of the terror group remained truly loyal to Shekau, making it possible for ISWAP terrorists to penetrate the terror leader’s hideout and smoked him out.
General Adebayo in particular made the capture of Abubakar Shekau a top priority since his appointment as head of the DIA. He started even when he was holding the lesser post of Chief of Military Intelligence for the Army.
It is to the credit of Nigeria that the DSS and the DIA are working round the clock, deepening their partnership in a bid to crack the most difficult issues affecting our national security. Adebayo and Bichi now work and relate so closely, like twins. Of course I am not excluding the DG of NIA Ahmed Rufa’i. The trio work closely together silently, with a raw determination to shame Nigeria’s enemies and make the country work for all of us.
One interesting thing about the unprecedented achievements recorded by these patriots is that they are doing so under a very hostile environment. Nigerians that should support them are somewhat opposed to them. They are almost always misreported and undermined by ill-informed commentators who take pleasure in denigrating Nigerians once they are in government. We forget that these individuals are our brothers and compatriots staking their lives for us all.
Owing to consistent negative commentaries, majority of Nigerians hardly care to cooperate with the intelligence services in driving intelligence. All over the world, the locals provide information that the intelligence services process for the use of the military, the police and other security services.
Many experts wonder how those chaps in the intelligence community manage to record unprecedented achievements against this backdrop. It is like squeezing water out of stone. The good thing is that they have remained undeterred, in very clear determination to succeed and return Nigeria to peace.
With Adebayo of DIA, Bichi of DSS, Rufa’i of NIA and now Farouk Yahaya as Army Chief, there is no way Nigeria’s national security would not be turned around for the best, inspite of the setbacks of late. There is one condition though, which is that these patriots must work closely together with the other service chiefs and shun all other negative considerations. We are positive they are going to do so. The Army Chief should in particular shun politics in all its ramifications, and not allow some senior appointees of government or any minister to mislead him. He must remain focused and serve Nigeria as a whole, and not engage in proxy war against his predecessors and subordinates. The task ahead of him requires the cooperation of all, and definitely cheap politics or blackmail shall not have room in his brief.
It is the task of the National Orientation Agency to help our security and intelligence services galvanize support of all Nigerians. Without all of us agreeing to help these patriots, their achievements can only be limited, as not even the best intelligence networks anywhere in the world have ever succeeded without the people driving intelligence.
In concluding this piece, it is apt to add that no human endeavor has ever achieved perfection anywhere in the world. So since we as citizens have also failed in the responsibility of helping the intelligence services, we should be fair to acknowledge the fact that without their efforts, things will have been much worse. Let’s remember that several thousands of terrorists keep surrendering to our troops almost on daily basis. Only yesterday, Saleh Mustapha, a very notorious terrorist who was the Qaid of Garun Ba-Abba, surrendered to the Nigerian troops in Bama,
The reality is that unless our politicians, particularly state governors improve on selfless governance and reduce the unprecedented rate of greed in many states of the federation, our security situation will simply keep getting worse, and there is absolutely nothing any security or intelligence agency can do about it. So it is time we learnt as a nation to place the blame where it belongs, unless all we want is the sound of our complaints, not desired result.