EDITORIAL: Nigeria’s security conundrum and the new NIA/SSS chiefs

At the behest of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a minister and defence chiefs relocated to Sokoto State penultimate week to restore law and order, following the worsening security situation there. The directive was complied with last Tuesday, a day after the 34 victims of Boko Haram’s 2 September massacre in Mafa, Yobe State, were buried.

Bandits had, last month, kidnapped the Emir of Gobir, Isa Bawa, in Sokoto, killed and buried him in a forest, where he was held captive for days, prompting youths to go on the rampage. Women, children, the aged, traders, and rural farmers, are routine victims of violence, which is spiralling out of control.

The Emir of Sabon Birni in Sokoto State, Isa Bawa,[PHOTO CREDIT@Leadership News]

In neighbouring Zamfara State, two Armoured Personnel Carriers of the army, stuck in the mud at Kwashabawa village in Zurmi Local Government Area, were seized and set ablaze. The bandits’ video of this act has gone viral; brandished seemingly as a victory trophy over the Nigerian state.

These weird developments coincided with the president’s appointments of Mohammed Mohammed as the new Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) and Ademola Ajayi as the Director-General of State Security Service (SSS). They replaced Ahmed Abubakar and Yusuf Bichi respectively, who had stayed long in those positions.

Whether in Sokoto, Zamfara or Yobe states, or indeed in other parts of the country, Nigerians are going through a nightmare with bandits, kidnappers, arsonists and mass murderers. Clearly, therefore, the jobs of the two intelligence chiefs seem cut out for them. The president charged them to reposition their agencies for better results. Such transformation is never a happenstance but a product of strategic thinking and synergy among the intelligence agencies. Lack of these have resulted in unhealthy rivalries among the armed services, which non-state actors usually exploit, and in the process, endanger the lives of Nigerians.

Time has, therefore, come for the president to go beyond merely giving directives to the agencies, to demanding concrete plans of action and results from them. The Office of the National Security Adviser, where Nuhu Ribadu calls the shots, coordinates the work of the intelligence services. It is a no-brainer that cleavages in the counterintelligence security template will not deliver the expected results. The Senate, which once assessed this dim reality, said, “The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and NSA belong to one group, and the NIA and SSS belong to another.” As a result, a new model in intelligence gathering and sharing is imperative.

NSA Nuhu Ribadu

Inputs of the SSS in the Sokoto mission of the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle, and Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa, are critical and should lead to the wanted underworld kingpin, Bello Turji, being taken out. If they return to Abuja, without closing the Turji security drama, the mission would have been a complete failure. Matawalle, a former governor of Zamfara State, and the Minister of Defence, Mohammed Abubakar, also an erstwhile governor of Jigawa State, should make their appointments count as the North-West, where both hail from, has become the country’s epicentre of banditry and kidnapping.

Nigerians are tired of being victims of security agencies working at cross-purposes. As it seemed during the Boko Haram abduction of 276 Chibok school girls in 2014, and also the kidnapping of 110 Dapchi schoolgirls in 2018. Besides, we have had too many other embarrassing acts of criminality, without any inkling of intelligence that would have helped in nipping them in the bud. These lapses do not happen too often where security operatives are on top of their games.

The NIA deals with external intelligence. It is an indictment of the agency that foreign elements, especially killer herders, flood into the country and make some states ungovernable. Nasir El-Rufai had noted that security reports available to him while he was governor of Kaduna State indicated that some armed herdsmen from “Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Senegal” were the masterminds of the grim harvest of deaths and burning of villages in southern Kaduna. He reached out to beg them to stop their nefarious activities.

With the nature or pattern of invasion of rural communities to abduct, kill, main and burn people’s houses, these criminal elements are still embedded in so many villages. This accounts for the killing of 50 persons on 10 August in Ayati community, Ukum Local Government Area of Benue State, by unknown invaders. In July, 18 people were slaughtered in Katsina-Ala, with 17 also killed by herders in Mbaikyor, Gwer-East Local Government Area of the state. The country’s six geo-political zones are practically under the siege of insecurity.

Under Tinubu’s presidency, 4,556 people were killed and 7086 others kidnapped within his first year in office, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) – a global data hub, specialised in real-time conflict-related data collection. These statistics evoke sobering realities, as they run against the grain of the president’s promise during his inauguration. He said and, rightly so, that neither prosperity nor justice would prevail amid insecurity and violence.

President Tinubu

Starkly, Nigerians have watched the SSS drop the ball, such as when its operatives openly engaged in fisticuffs with prison personnel in court, over Nnamdi Kanu’s re-arrest. Equally, acts of repression and the violation of human rights of citizens are not remits of service-oriented secret service agencies. Nigerians would like to see these operatives embedded in communities that serve as flash points of criminality and rendezvous of suspects, to get their jobs done.

Sixteen months into Tinubu’s presidency is enough time for him to “reform our security doctrine and architecture,” as pledged. Deaths, sorrows and pains that pervade the country’s landscape from the havoc unleashed by non-state actors, are no signs that this overhaul has been executed. When the IDPs, purportedly under government’s custody, are abducted, as Boko Haram did in May, which affected an estimated 200 of them in Gamboru-Ngala, Borno State, with 101 being females, this points to wrong approaches in our containment strategies.

One of these is the predilection for prior announcements of offensives against bandits. The open presidential directive for the defence chiefs to move to Sokoto, might inform the relocation of these non-state actors to other states, or deeper into the forests beyond the reach of military operations. Or they might even cross over the border into Niger Republic before the onslaught begins.

Beyond the concerns over insecurity, closer attention should be paid to the socio-economic conditions that fuel criminality, such as unemployment, poverty, scant regard for education, the looting of the treasury by public officials that hinders the provision of basic amenities to the masses, our porous borders and the proliferation of firearms.

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Sadly, this war of attrition between Nigeria and non-state actors will not end anytime soon, with large swathes of our territory under the latter’s control. It is an aberration, which the police have accentuated with their shameless barricades on every mile on Nigerian roads, where they collect bribes from motorists; while also serving as escorts to the elite who can afford to pay for this, rather than protecting the larger society.