Nigerians who read spy thrillers and watch the adventures of James Bond (007) can be forgiven in their romantic if mythical image of undercover security organizations. The shock is that there are just too many Nigerians who, for that reason, seem to believe the spin by and for the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) that it is the owner of the huge cash haul recovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from Ikoyi’s Osborne Towers.
And even much worse is their belief that the NIA can keep that amount of cash in a private unoccupied flat for years, the only dependable guard being the wife of the DG of the NIA to whom the money literally had become part of the family jewels. Nigerians seem so pre-disposed to give the agency a benefit of the doubt in what would likely go down in history as one of the worst incidents of corruption and money laundering in the intelligence world. All because Nigerians wish to believe anything sold them in the name of ‘intelligence’ and ‘national security,’ even when their instincts are telling them they are being scammed.
Anonymous NIA spinners say the nearly US$50 million was for covert operations. What covert operations? Covert operations which Nigeria’s Commander-in-chief was not told about? Talking of covert operations, following the Al Queda attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, the CIA moved agents and cash into Afghanistan. How would it not? The United States needed to ventilate the popular anger against a sudden, unprovoked and murderous attack. The CIA’s Special Activities Division linked up with the Northern Alliance which was then at war with the ruling Taliban. Two 12-man Green Berets teams were inserted to strengthen the Northern Alliance, backed by US Air Force combat controllers which after a few weeks fighting, captured several key Afghan cities, driving the Taliban from power. Cash was imperative because the field was a war theatre. The Northern Alliance needed cash help to pay its forces which then acted in lieu of US ground forces. And from all reliable accounts, the CIA did not spend half of the cash found at the Osborne Towers before the Taliban regime was overthrown.
Nigeria did not invent the intelligence services. These services are designed to serve the people, to protect lives and property and serve the interest of citizens. We are now being told that Nigerians should not know to what their $50 million is deployed because “intelligence quarters warn (it) could expose the underbelly of the nation’s foremost spy organization, the National Intelligence Agency.”
Now, arguments like the above are designed to inoculate the agencies against committing illegal acts, or corruption, or torture, or other criminal acts, because you don’t want to “expose the underbelly of the nation’s foremost spy organization.” It is an argument that has worked in Nigeria for the agencies but one that you would not hear in other countries. So, our spy organizations load $9.5 million in cash in a private jet to South Africa, for a ‘covert’ operation, and the cash is seized because it violates the currency regulations and a South African court decrees forfeiture, to recall a recent publicly reported example.
Our security and intelligence organizations operate as if they are above the law. The Nigerian Army opens fire on defenceless citizens killing hundreds and says it is following some rules of engagement. The Special Armed Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police maintains a notorious network of torture chambers all over the country, and no questions are asked. The Department of State Services invades the Federal Government Girls College, Calabar, and shoots its way through the school, terrorizing the teachers and students, because a girl was disciplined in the school, and she has an aunt who is an operative of the DSS.
Now if an organization acts as if it is above the law, how do you even begin to hold it accountable for its actions, performance and for the public investments made in it? The result is that no one ever raises any question about how the spy organizations are working. No one seems concerned with their output. Yet intelligence failures in Nigeria are legion. Boko Haram posed a national security threat since the 1990s, exploded into a menace since 2004, and turned into a threat to world peace since 2009. Its continued existence is a testimony to the miserable failure of our intelligence organizations. Boko Haram made the agencies look like boy scouts — the Chibok girls, the bombing of the UN Mission in Abuja, the ceasefire declared by the then Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh. After a dozen years, and over a billion dollars spent on intelligence, the agencies still can’t figure out how Boko Haram works, and no one seems to be demanding results.
Indeed, in a long newspaper article earlier in the week rationalizing everything the spy agencies do, an anonymous defender of the DG NIA stated that “because of the security implications of the operations of intelligence agencies, they operate largely under cover making their modus operandi unusual, clumsy and, in fact, sometimes illegal.”
So in the end, the NIA white-wash blamed President Buhari and his National Security Adviser, Monguno, for the scandal. The NIA DG, it said, filed the required report but his bosses, the President and the NSA, failed to read the report. NSA Gen. Monguno “is said to loath reading,” the NIA ghost writer alleged. Indeed the DIA white-wash said the scandal was the fault of the EFCC for ignoring “the NIA DG when…they owned up the billions discovered in the flat.”
The DG NIA reports directly to the President and owes an official responsibility to seek audience with the President to brief him comprehensively about activities in the foremost intelligence spy network in his government. That briefing should have happened on 29th or 30th of May 2015 if not earlier, so the President can be on top of the security situation in the country, so he can even make an input into the so-called covert operation, to decide if he wants it to continue, modified or even cancelled.
It is not only the President that ought to be briefed about a covert operation. The President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives in addition to the Chairman and ranking member of the Senate and House Committees on Intelligence must be briefed. It is not optional. It is a responsibility.
The DG is an ambassador. He ought to know. In every democracy these rules hold.
Briefing the President is not something the DG NIA can do through a third party such as the NSA. Failure to do so meant the DG intended to keep the President in the dark and out of the loop, mark his time, until his exit day just six months away in November, when he picks up the cash from the unoccupied flat in Ikoyi and retires.