I was alarmed when I stumbled on a news item credited to Nigeria’s military the other day that some politicians are collaborating with some foreign busybodies to put spanners in the works of our democratic experiment in Nigeria. I was alarmed not because of a threat of any coup (the silly idea which I’m convinced will fail if attempted by anyone), but by the way that scary news was disseminated.
What came to the fore is that there is the likelihood that there is no synergy or effective collaboration and coordination between our security and intelligence organisations. If that is true, then something pretty fast must be done to get that sorted in order to prevent the kind of national embarrassment that played out once or twice in the past, when the Nigerian Intelligence Agency (NIA) and the Department of State Security (DSS) were publicly flexing muscles and antagonising themselves over a little matter of arrest.
Security matters that border on national intelligence, to my mind, are serious enough not to be trivialised to the point of letting them get to public knowledge that petty politicking and rivalry are taking the better part of our security outfits. The dangers inherent are serious enough to demand the urgent intervention of the relevant federal authorities.
Are there no more clearly defined roles for these agencies? I ask because the line of demarcation between the security/intelligence organisations in this country is becoming so thin that it is now commonplace to see their works overlap as if this country is in a permanent period of emergency.
The most visible in any democracy is the police whose major assignment is the maintenance and/or enforcement of law and order. That institution should be strengthened to be able to deal with issues of civil unrest without the frequent recourse to using soldiers for such little matters.
Under a military regime, it was the norm to deliberately clamp down on the police and emasculate it in a way that it would be too weak to effectively play its natural role. When soldiers decide to topple a democratically elected government, they assault the political institutions as they equally deal with the police establishment, as if it was complicit in the many ‘crimes’ that necessitated the illegal change of government. The Constitution is immediately suspended to facilitate their commission of illegalities in perpetuating their rule of arbitrariness.
But under a democracy, such aberration should be discarded in its entirety. The first thing to do is to re-fit the police effectively to be able to perform its functions. When that is done, matters for which there’s quick recourse to inviting the military to help resolve will stop.
That unwholesome usurpation of police duties that was the fad in the era of the military in this country must perhaps have dulled logical reasoning to the extent that petty rivalry has crept into our security architecture to warrant the muscle flexing between the NIA and the DSS which occurred sometime ago under the Buhari civilian regime.
I pray that in the next legislature, Nigeria does not have the misfortune of having a National Assembly of the Bukola Saraki type, which literally constituted itself into an alternate executive arm. Otherwise, such legislative arm will attempt to be competing with the executive arm in the running of the security/intelligence apparatus of the nation.
It is to prevent such scenario from playing out that things should be tidied up such that the military will not be encroaching on the operational areas best reserved for the police. And it is this happening that makes this column worry that a statement like the one issued by the military recently should have been handled by the intelligence arm of the police or, at best, the intelligence outfit of the nation.
The military is reserved as the bulwark of the nation’s defence. It could be counterproductive to saddle it with mundane assignments that have the potential of sapping its energy and rendering it too weak to perform its main task of defending the nation against external aggression.
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