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By Uche Usim
As debates around restructuring the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) deepen, Non State Actors Consultative Forum (NOSACOF), a pressure group, has advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu not to assent to the Bill if it is transmitted to him.
The Forum said doing otherwise means he is willfully pandering to the desire of a few desperate Nigerians who are championing the cause to fatten their personal and political capital.
A Bill seeking to empower and restructure the ONSA, sponsored by Senator Buba Shehu, was first read on the floor of the Senate on November 7, 2023.
The Bill, which also seeks to allow the ONSA recruit its own staff like similar government agencies, sparked off a polarised debate at the upper legislative chamber. In the end, the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, threw the document back to the senators for further consultation with more stakeholders, in view of its sensitive nature.
However, NOSACOF, in a statement dated January 9, 2024 and signed by its Convener, Abdulrazaq Alkali, maintained that a restructured NSA poses grave security risks to the nation.
He explained that the move was selfish, ill-informed and totally injurious to the country.
Alkali also explained that the Bill, if passed, will make ONSA vulnerable to hurtful politicisation through biased and unjustified recruitments as witnessed in many government agencies (including some security agencies).
Part of the letter read: “The push for a Bill by some members of your government to make the National Assembly change the provision that establishes the ONSA and allow it to recruit and establish its own staff similar to existing government agencies and parastatals is ill-informed and can set a very bad precedence.
“First and foremost, passing this Bill will mean that the overall infrastructure of the ONSA will have to be overhauled to avoid conflict with the sections of the constitution that establishes it, or the section of the constitution will have to be changed to accommodate the Bill.
“Also, the end product of the Bill is restructuring the ONSA into an agency or parastatal with unlimited privileges over the already existing intelligence agencies such as National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Department of State Services (DSS), and military. This has the potential of creating many overlaps in the functions of these agencies and will further widen disunity, rivalry and lack of synergy between the various security agencies”.
The Forum added that currently, the NSA remains the outfit maintaining and ensuring cooperation between the security agencies, noting that one key component of its success is due to the fact that it derives staff and collaboration from the various security agencies, such that the agencies do not see the office of the NSA as a rival agency.
“Secondly, the normal practice is that the NSA can obtain trained and experienced staff from the security agencies to carry out national security roles. Thus, restructuring the Office of the NSA into an agency and allowing it to recruit its own staff at present will very much reduce the efficiency in the operations.
This is because the Office of the NSA will not be able to fill the roles with candidates of the desired expertise and speciality. It will end of spending years (may be decades) and billions of naira to train these staff to the desired level of competency and the other security agencies will be reluctant to share staff with the NSA as they will feel they are no longer stakeholders in the office of NSA”, NOSACOF explained.
The Forum reminded President Tinubu that the Office of the NSA is the only establishment that works with highly professional and skilled staff extracted from the various security agencies mainly based on merit, skills and capacity.
