What do NSAs advise presidents?
Some occurrences in our polity are absurd when we think through them. The fact that criminals abduct people, hide their victims in our forests and use mobile phones to communicate, yet security agencies can’t locate them, is one. The other is an observation on insecurity that the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, made lately. This observation was, for me, more profound for its absurdity. Kidnapping has been a regular occurrence in the past few years. But Wike said security personnel didn’t have equipment to track kidnappers. And we have been having National Security Advisers? What have past National Security Advisers been telling the presidents they served?
I leave the service chiefs out of this for now. I also leave the intelligence agencies. I shall return to them another day. What have NSAs in particular been doing in the office they occupy if they have never thought of equipment that could be used to bust crimes with ease? Adoption of appropriate technology to combat crime isn’t on the radar of NSAs. But they are security advisers to presidents. As Wike stated, “Many facilities were not provided. Vehicles for the security agencies are not there. You cannot believe that equipment to track criminals is not there… Mr President, by giving us approval for emergency procurement, we have been able to identify what each of the agencies needs, and we will be able to provide them now.” Wike went on to say that it was “identified that this is a lacuna that we have to cover.”
Lacuna? Cover? Thousands of our people have been either kidnapped or killed, yet there remains such a lacuna until now? Some have alleged that there is a deliberate effort by some to hold this nation in the bondage of insecurity and that some profit from insecurity. If I had any doubt before now, the revelation by Wike convinced me that it is true. People at the top just discovered such a lacuna after many years of terror unleashed by criminals. So, I ask again, what have the past NSAs been telling previous political leaders? I submit here that this is a deliberate act of sabotage against our nation.
Think of it, the kidnapping of over 200 girls happened in Chibok, Borno State. Dapchi happened. Many other kidnappings of public and private persons have followed. But the simplest way to locate criminals and their hideouts has been overlooked by security advisers, who should know the right thing to do and know the best practices in other climes. No wonder we couldn’t locate over 200 kidnapped Chibok girls on our own territory. Criminals stay in forests that we see around us with their victims, and as a nation, we can’t go in there and dislodge them. What has happened here is more than criminal negligence; it’s a deliberate act of criminality, and, for me, nothing short of prosecuting some past security advisers would do.
That after years of security challenges, lack of equipment is what we’re talking about is absurdity of immense proportion. What does this situation say about us as a nation? Where have all those funds allocated to the offices of NSAs been going? From the moment a series of security mishaps that should have been curtailed began to happen in our nation, I became suspicious of the NSAs. I didn’t trust them to have been doing the right set of things and I stated this on this page in my interventions regarding insecurity in the past. I’ve always suspected that each NSA desired the position only for the prestige of the office and nothing more. I believe each NSA wants the position just to control the huge funds and benefit from them. No past NSA has proved me wrong; if they did the chaos of insecurity that prevailed wouldn’t be there. And we won’t be where we are now.
I have been giving much thought, particularly to what NSAs advise their principals. I wonder if they advise anything at all. I think they sit in that office and enjoy the grandeur and nothing more. The thinking, strategic thinking, they should be doing for our nation they don’t do, and no one asks them questions. They have become ceremonial figures, not the security strategists that the Constitution envisages them to be. I state this because of other matters of strategic national interest that, I noticed, security advisers have allowed to fall through the cracks without any strategic handling of such. (I shall discuss some of them one day.). Each time a new NSA was appointed, I had high hopes. But the hope was ever disappointed with rising cases of criminality that should have been easy to take care of if the NSAs had appropriately advised the provision of exactly what the security agencies needed.
With the worsening state of insecurity, I have come to the conclusion that NSAs aren’t doing anything beyond administrative activities, pushing files, and sitting at meetings. They enjoy allocating all those huge funds in their office to everything and anything except the equipment that security agencies need to do their jobs. I had started this piece a few days before Mr Femi Adeshina, former Special Adviser to former President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, confirmed what I had always suspected. In his book, which he launched recently, Adeshina said that before they arrived in office, the NSA office had funded the offices of presidents’ media teams. But President Buhari stopped it. One cannot say what the other things are except security, which the office of the NSA has been funding. But we have another idea in the manner in which a now-apprehended former NSA under former President Goodluck Jonathan spread the largesse to politicians rather than purchasing equipment to combat criminals.
Under the same administration, we heard of security chiefs who had funds to construct privately-owned highrise buildings, at least one of which the FG has taken over at Wuse 2, Abuja, and handed over to a government agency to use. I watched the handover ceremony, and some government officials looked sombre, saying that if one security chief could have funds to construct such an edifice, then it was a big challenge for the nation. There must have been other strange uses to which the funds with the NSAs were put that one doesn’t know of. One thing I knew was that if NSAs were focused on what they were constitutionally assigned to do, the security of this nation wouldn’t be where it is.
Yet I am convinced that if any meaningful changes would happen to the nation’s security architecture, it would have to be with strong advice from NSAs. So, in the past, I had asked one NSA to advise the then president rightly. That didn’t seem to have been done with the things Wike was saying about the lack of equipment. So, do we mean to say NSAs sit over the huge funds under them, and they don’t realise they need to purchase equipment that could make locating criminals easier for the agencies saddled with the task? This question also occurred to me when, lately, northern groups had a summit over the state of insecurity in that part of the nation. It wasn’t the first meeting over insecurity. At the national level, too, we’ve had such summits.
Recently, some politicians still called for more national security summits to be held. But I ask: If we continue to have security summits yet devices as simple as what can easily be used to track kidnappers have never been suggested and procured, then what have we been discussing at those security summits? What have NSAs, too, been saying at such security summits? The questions are important because they speak to the pain our people are going through in the face of incessant attacks.
How have we arranged our security architecture such that security agencies don’t have the simplest equipment to curb kidnapping? How come advice from NSAs on how to combat insecurity has not included the procurement of such equipment? I came to the conclusion that, like the heads of other institutions, NSAs have become entangled in a system that doesn’t exhibit the will to adjust our security architecture to meet new and emerging challenges. Will this trajectory continue? What will it mean for our nation?
