2nd July, 2012
It hardly came as a surprise that President Goodluck Jonathan’s axe was brought into action on 26 June. And by the time he relaxed his muscles, two heads were rolling on the floor. The victims were his National Security Adviser, NSA, General Patrick Owoye Azazi (retd) and Defence Minister, Mohammed Bello Haliru. A statement issued by presidential spokesman, Dr. Reuben Abati, announced that Azazi would be replaced by Sambo Dasuki, a retired artillery officer and one time Aide-de-Camp, ADC, to former military president, Ibrahim Babangida.
It is safe to say that the President, who had attended the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, returned home in a foul mood. His anger, perhaps, was accentuated by the volley of verbal bullets that critics, especially in the opposition camps, joyfully aimed at him, implying that he had become the Nigerian version of Emperor Nero, who fiddled away while Rome was on fire. Nigeria was actually a boiling cauldron when Jonathan left for Brazil on 19 June. Prior to that, the terrorist group, Boko Haram, serially unleashed terror on churches during Sunday services in Kaduna and Zaria and, in the reprisal attacks by Christians, over 100 people died. Worse still, for two Sundays in a row, churches in Bauchi and Jos were attacked.
That was why the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, and Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, argued that Jonathan’s trip was ill-timed and that he was insensitive. “The decision by the President to travel two days after dozens of innocent Nigerians, including women and children, were killed or maimed by suicide bombers in Kaduna State, is a sign of insensitive and confused leadership,” the ACN said in a statement. The CPC joined in, branding the trip as a desertion of duty despite the “gloomy atmosphere pervading the country”.
The question, however, is: will the emergence of Dasuki bring terrorism and other forms of insecurity to a stop?
Colonel Tony Nyiam, a major actor in the aborted 1990 military coup, argued that there are a lot of misconceptions about the functions of the NSA. These, he said, raise expectations of the occupant to ridiculous levels. According to Nyiam, the NSA is not the chief of security agencies since the President is the commander-in-chief. He is also not the intelligence community or the nation’s spy master and neither is he the chief operations officer.
On the other hand, the NSA’s role, as Nyiam put, is advisory, and he is in charge of national security strategy and policy; he is in charge of monitoring to ensure implementation of the policy. This is to say that there is a difference between policy making and implementation, and the NSA is one of he watchdogs of the civilian authority to ensure accountability. Also, he is the interface between elected civilian leaders and national security agencies.
It follows, therefore, that tackling Boko Haram is not the function of the NSA alone, but also of the government.
Hurdles On Sambo’s Path
One of the challenges that Colonel Dasuki will face, according to his critics, is in his own personality. Since the position of NSA had always been occupied by army generals, people are wondering how he will relate with the service chiefs, divisional and brigade commanders that are higher in rank. Also, there is the argument that he has no experience in intelligence.
Dasuki, who is in his 50s and a prominent northerner and cousin to the Sultan of Sokoto, the most respected Muslim leader in Nigeria, was appointed ADC to Babangida after he overthrew the government of Major General Mohammadu Buhari on 27 August I985. However, at a point he was replaced by Lt. Col. U.K. Bello. Dasuki was further shoved into oblivion in September 1993 when the former Secretary of Defence, and later, Head of State, General Sani Abacha, retired him and other military officers believed to be loyal to IBB. Again, Abacha, in 1995, moved against him when his government accused Dasuki and Col. Lawan Gwadabe of trying to overthrow him. Dasuki fled to the United States, where stayed below the radar until 2001. A year after, Dasuki was appointed by former president Olusegun Obasanjo as Managing Director, Nigeria Security Printing and Minting Company, NSPMC, Limited. He left in 2003 after the crisis that attended that corporation’s privatisation.
Dasuki attended Nigeria Defence Academy and was commissioned into the Nigerian Army in 1971 as a regular combatant. He also obtained a BA in International Relations from the American University and MA in Security Policy Studies from George Washington University, both in Washington DC.
He trained further in the US Army School of Artillery, Oklahoma, and the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Dasuki was a director on the board of Regency Alliance, an insurance company.
However, those who believe that he is up to the task point to Robert McFarlane, who retired as a Lt Colonel in the US Marines. He was between 1983 and 1985, President Ronald Reagan’s NSA. He was not a general. Neither was Stephen Hadley, a naval officer. The US also had security advisors from the civil society: Thomas E. Donilon was NSA under President Barack Obama and Condoleezza Rice, a woman, was the 20th NSA in the US.
Nyiam also argued that in the US, some of those who occupied the position had applied social science background: Henry Kissinger, an historian was NSA between 1969 and 1975; Professor Zbignev Brzezinski, 1977 and 1981 and General Colin Powell, 1987 and 1989.
Nyiam told TheNEWS that he had known Dasuki since 1971 when he (Nyiam) was studying in the UK. That time, Nyiam used to spend his holidays with the Dasukis in Lagos. Like General Aliyu Gusau, Nyiam revealed, Dasuki’s friends cut across Nigeria: “In fact he has more friends in the South than his own area of origin.”
Nyiam added that Dasuki could also use his family/Caliphate background to reach out to Boko Haram.
The Larger Challenges On Ground
If an angel should peer down from the clouds at Nigeria, the images that will confront him are a scorched earth in the North, strewn with burnt corpses, cracked, ghostly buildings that are blackened with soot and charred automobiles; no thanks to the terrorist acts of Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad, commonly referred to as Boko Haram. And in the South, the celestial figure would see robbers and kidnappers in police uniform and other forms of disguise, oil thieves in speed boats and other nondescript vessels plying the honeycomb of creeks that adorn the coast of the Atlantic. Not left out in the tableau would be pirates that make maritime travellers gnash their teeth. Dasuki has a full plate.
Boko Haram Terror
The death toll from Boko Haram attacks has topped 1,000, according to Human Rights Watch in a recent report. The sect, which has since moved from drive-by shootings and petrol bombs to suicide attacks, using large and increasingly sophisticated explosives, initially directed its attacks at the police, military and government, but it is now targeting Christian institutions. On 20 January this year alone, it killed 186 people in Kano. “Boko Haram’s attacks show a complete and utter disregard for human life,” said Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, adding that the Nigerian authorities “need to call a halt to this campaign of terror and bring to justice those responsible for planning and carrying out these reprehensible crimes”.
In 2011, the report said, 550 people were killed in 115 separate attacks by the group in the far north-eastern state of Borno, where the sect was founded in 2002. It was also last year that a suicide car bomb killed 25 people at the United Nations building in Abuja. When, in July 2009, the sect launched an uprising in the North-east, more than 800 people were, according to the report, killed in five days of fighting with security forces.
Last month alone, Christians were, during church services on Sundays, attacked by Boko Haram in Kaduna and Zaria. And with the refusal of the victims to turn the other cheek, over 100 people lost their lives on both sides. Before these, churches in Bauchi and Jos were attacked.
That was why President Goodluck Jonathan has, within and outside the country, been severely criticised. “Jonathan’s inability to respond effectively or articulate a credible strategy, reinforces the growing perception of a deep leadership void in Abuja,” the London-based risk adviser, Eurasia Group, said in a recent research, adding that so far, “militarisation of the region and strict curfews have only had limited effect and huge (military) spending outlays in 2012 offer little hope for a credible broader strategy.”
Niger Delta Militancy
This started as a protest against environmental degradation as a result of oil exploration and the lopsided derivation principle.
According to Max Siollum, an analyst on the Niger Delta, when substantial amounts of oil first started being pumped in southern Nigeria in the late 1960s, 50 per cent of revenues from oil were remitted back to the state of origin. However, he argued, the increasingly powerful federal government and military regimes gradually decreased the derivation percentage until it fell to a miserly 2 per cent. He wrote further: “It was eventually raised to 13 per cent by the time civilian democratic rule returned in 1999. The oil-producing states of Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa and Akwa Ibom, receive twice as much oil revenue as the other states of the federation. Yet, those four states are no better off (and in many cases are worse off) than their counterparts elsewhere that survive on a fraction of the revenue.”
Two prominent figures championed this agitation – Jasper Adaka Boro, leader of the Niger Delta Volunteer Force and Ken Saro-Wiwa, who headed the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, MOSOP. Thereafter, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, and the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, followed suit.
“The militants’ cause has also been hijacked by criminal gangs, who kidnap the wives and infant children of civilian officials. Being tainted and associated with such elements makes the militants appear like bandits,” wrote Siollum.
As a result of the crisis in the region, the Federal Government, according to the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta Affairs, Kingsley Kuku, lost over N3 trillion between 2008 and 2010. “When the hostilities in the Niger Delta was on, crude oil exploration for export dropped from 2.3 millions barrel per day to 700,000 barrels per day,” he said.
Oil Theft
Closely associated with criminalisation of Niger Delta militancy is the theft of the country’s oil, a vice that, in the words of the Executive Secretary of Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, is undermining Nigeria’s oil industry.
According to the former Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mr Austin Oniwon, Nigeria was losing almost 180,000 barrels of oil per day (valued $16.3 million or N2.47 billion) to oil theft. “These people drill into the pipeline, take what they want, and at the end of the day, they just leave the pipeline to gush out its content into the environment,” he explained.
Also, the Petroleum Resources Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, revealed that the nation has lost over $12bn to oil theft and pipeline vandalisation in the past one year. Worse still, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited suspended the supply of about 60,000 barrels per day of Bonny Light crude, estimated at N952.5m per day. According to a newspaper report, this followed the company’s “declaration of a force majeure – when a company cannot fulfil its contracts due to unforeseeable circumstances – on outstanding cargoes of Bonny Light from 4 May 2012”. This has further exposed the Nembe Creek Trunkline to crude theft and illegal bunkering.
However, the security operatives have stepped up activities. Recently, the Lagos State Task Force on Environmental and Special Offences (Enforcement) Unit, stumbled on vandalised pipeline site in Ikorodu, where oil thieves had been having a field day. Although some of the culprits absconded, the force, led by Dele Laleye, arrested two of them and confiscated 300 jerry cans.
Last month, security men arrested 21 Ghanaians and five Nigerians for the same offence. They were stealing oil with two vessels with a combined capacity of 650,000 metric tonnes. Also in the period, the Joint Military Task Force called Operation Pulo Shield arrested 33 suspected oil thieves in Rivers State. They also destroyed 772 drums of diesel, 150 empty drums, 121 cooking points, 15 surface tanks, 12 illegal refineries and 137 jerry cans.
Piracy
Nigeria loses over N470bn annually to piracy or sea robbery, according to the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA. In fact, the International Maritime Bureau has, for two years now, declared the Nigerian waters as the most unsafe after Somalia.
Patrick Akpobolokemi, Director-General of the agency, revealed this in Port Harcourt when presenting a draft Bill on Piracy and Other Unlawful Acts At Sea to stakeholders. It will give legal teeth to the fight against piracy.
In its global piracy report, the International Maritime Bureau, IMB, and the International Chamber of Commerce, ICC, wrote that 11 cases were received from Nigeria at the beginning of this year. These reports include the hijacking of one product and one chemical tanker, resulting in a total of 42 crew members taken hostage.
In the words of Pottengal Mukundan, IMB Piracy Reporting Centre director, “Nigerian piracy is increasing in incidence and extending in range. At least six of the 11 reported incidents in Nigeria occurred at distances greater than 70 nautical miles from the coast, which suggests that fishing vessels are being used as mother ships to attack ships further at sea.”
He added that while the number of reported incidents in Nigeria is still less than Somalia and hijacked vessels are under control of the pirates for days rather than months, “the level of violence against crew is dangerously high.”
Robbery
In April, 42 pupils of Holy Rosary College, Enugu, Enugu State were attacked by armed robbers and some of them were allegedly raped when their luxury bus developed fault at Ogere area of Ogun State. This put in bold relief the notoriety of the Lagos-Benin and Lagos-Ibadan expressways for robbery.
Other notorious spots in the country are Akwanga grove between Abuja and Nasarawa State, Abuja-Lokoja highway; Ilesha-Akure road, Aba-Port Harcourt and others.
Porous Borders
This year, the Federal Government said it had discovered 1,497 irregular routes being used by illegal immigrants to gain entry into the country. This was disclosed last month by the Minister of Interior, Mr. Abba Moro. “There is no doubt that in any country, foreigners come in. There is no exception to that but when criminally-minded foreigners come into the country with legitimate papers, without proper travel documents, it becomes a concern for the government. More so, when these foreigners are alleged to be part of insecurity by participating in suicide bombings and some of the conflicts that we have on our hands, certainly it is a serious concern for the Federal Republic of Nigeria,” he said.
With these and more, there is no doubt that Dasuki and his employers have a lot of work to do. To enable him offer effective service, analysts have suggested a number of steps that he, in concert with his principal and other agencies of government, could take. In other words, since the matter goes beyond Dasuki, who is not in charge of operations but policy and technical advice, government, the larger umbrella, has to do certain things.
Dialogue
Nyiam told TheNEWS that since soldiering is about defending or attacking a fixed or moving object, the same principle cannot be applied to Boko Haram which, as he put it in military parlance, is fighting an asymmetrical war. In other words, a conventional approach cannot be applied to unconventional warfare. “That is why the US is now talking to the Taliban,” he reasoned.
Another aspect to this negotiation, as Nyiam put it, is that it must be kept in confidentiality. “This is an area that the government has made Boko Haram angry,” Nyiam argued.
“That is why I think people like Datti Ahmed and Shehu Sani should be part of the negotiations,” Nyiam argued.
Others argued that those who put down their weapons or desert the sect should be properly rehabilitated and, if possible, kept in safe houses by the Federal Government.
Self Determination, True Federalism and A New Constitution
Since force cannot solve the problem, Nyiam advised that the Nigerian government should apply a political solution. Boko Haram, as Nyiam put it, are fighting for self determination – making their part of the North Islamic – then “government can carry out a plebiscite”..
Nyiam extended this further by suggesting that Nigerians have to sit down and negotiate their togetherness and in the process, they will fashion out a true constitution, different from the military diktat that was handed over to Nigerians in 1999.
State Police
Last week, the Governors Forum, members of which are just chief security officers of their states in name but not in deed, made a united demand for state police. “The forum identified the increasing need for state police as a strategy for combating rising insecurity in the country,” said Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, chairman of the forum.
This restructuring will facilitate the operation of community policing which will make crime detection, prevention and fighting considerably better.
National Data Bank
The starting point is the proposed renewal of the N30.066 billion National Identity Card project. Last October, Information Minister, Labaran Maku, said there was a great need for the proposed comprehensive, unified national identity management system recently approved by the Federal Executive Council for the country. He added that it would be helpful to the management and operation of several key national institutions and security services across the country. He, however, maintained that in the course of the new project, the recent data captured by INEC in the voter registration exercise will be useful. This will be networked with the new central identity data bank, which will be updated and developed by Galaxy Backbone, a government-owned ICT company.
The point is, since Maku revealed this almost one year ago, nothing concrete has happened. Analysts advise that government should expedite action on it so that it will be used to fight crime.
In the interim, Dasuki and his team can use all the data captured by INEC and other government organs.
For example, the Federal Road Safety Commission, FRSC, is issuing new biometric driver’s licence. So also are the Police, through their Biometric Central Motor Registry, BCMR, to check crime rate. It will, as revealed by the Police, serve as a data base for car, tricycle and motorcycle owners and would “provide the police with ample information on crimes committed as well as an avenue to prevent crime in whatever form”. With the process, the Police will use technological means of attaching automobile owners’ special unique biological features (biometrics) and personal data to their vehicles, motorcycles and tricycles for authentication and easy identification purposes.
Moreover, Moro revealed recently, government would introduce electronic components to the surveillance of the Nigerian borders with a central post in Abuja. If other countries are able to fight crime with data bank, nothing stops Nigeria from doing the same.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, makes use of this effectively. According to its website: “Over the years, biometrics has been incredibly useful to the FBI and its partners in the law enforcement and intelligence communities—not only to authenticate an individual’s identity, but more importantly, to figure out who someone is (by a fingerprint left on a murder weapon or a bomb, for example), typically by scanning a database of records for a match.”
The FBI boasts of being a leader in biometrics. It claims to have used various forms of biometric identification since its earliest days, including assuming responsibility for managing the national fingerprint collection in 1924. However, FBI has not relented. It is undertaking additional biometrics-related work in its laboratory such as DNA activities, while voice and face recognition initiatives are being pursued in its Operational Technology Division.
Even China is embarking on its first DNA data bank to help police track down violent criminals like rapists and murderers. “In about 60 per cent of violent crime cases, the perpetrators leave behind genetic evidence,” an unnamed expert told the Beijing Morning Post. “In rapes, the figure is 95 per cent.”
War On Poverty
Poverty and social inequality is an argument that those opposed to the description of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation have always raised. The Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and the Niger State Governor, Babangida Aliyu, belong to this school. Their argument is further strengthened by some northern lobby groups in the United States.
When Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, spoke before the US House of Representatives Sub-Committe, the Nigerian Tribune reported him as arguing that Boko Haram was not an organised, ideologically-driven movement like al-Qaeda and that “the violence attributed to Boko Haram was the result of natural social dynamics driven by poverty, social inequality and police and government brutality as well as corruption.”
He claimed that this conflict was driven not by religion, but by “social inequities”, urging the United States to step up development assistance to “Nigeria’s restive Muslim-majority North”. Also, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Wendy Sherman, repeated this when she visited Nigeria. As she put it: “In northern Nigeria, it is critical that the government address the social and economic disparities that have contributed to the Boko Haram crisis. Many of the challenges facing the continent know no borders. Despite our best efforts through Feed the Future and other programmes, food insecurity remains widespread across the continent and the effects of climate change risk undercutting the tremendous progress we have made on this front.”
The Chicago Tribune also puts it this way: “A sense of alienation permeates the North, which is the poorest part of Nigeria. The anger is deepened by a federal-state deal that provides Southern oil-producing states a generous share of oil revenue to compensate for past neglect, a formula that could be a recipe for greater Northern poverty, alienation and extremism.”
Thus, the Federal and state governments in the North need to do something about poverty in the region.
Anti-Terrorist Law
A move towards this started on 10 December 2010, with the Anti-Terrorism Bill, sponsored by the executive arm of government. It was overwhelmingly passed by the Senate on 17 February 2011. The House of Representatives did same on 22 February 2011 and President Jonathan signed it into law on 2 June 2011.
However, due to some defects discovered in it, some amendments were, in May this year, proposed by the Federal Government to “compel the trial of terror suspects, their sponsors and others suspected of aiding and abetting terror suspects under military law”.
A report by ThisDay recently said President Goodluck Jonathan would soon send a bill to the National Assembly to amend the Act, which when passed, would “preclude members of Boko Haram, their sponsors and others involved in terrorist activities in the country from being tried in regular courts”. In other words, they will face military trial. This will also affect the Niger Delta militants and other militias. If government moves fast on this, it will go a long way towards fighting crime.
New Border Posts
Given the seriousness of cross-border movement and its negative effect on terrorism, the Federal Government plans to build about 84 border plazas. To complement this, electronic surveillance of Nigeria’s borders will be introduced. According to Moro, these are aimed at ensuring that the nation’s borders are secured enough so as to guarantee the security of the nation.
That it is important to properly man the borders stems out of the fact that there are areas of cooperation among major terrorist organisations in Africa: Boko Haram, al-Shabaab in East Africa, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. This was revealed by the Commander of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, General Carter Ham. He said the two other groups had been sharing explosives and funds with Nigeria’s Boko Haram.
“What really concerns me are the indications that the three organisations are seeking to coordinate and synchronise their efforts. That is a real problem for us and for African security in general.”
Cutting The Terrorists’ Supply Lines
Recently, the United States tagged three Boko Haram leaders as ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorists’ and blocked their assets.
They are Abubakar Shekau, Abubakar Adam Kambar, aged roughly 35; and Khalid al-Barnawi.
According to the U.S Department of State: “The designation under E.O. 13224 blocks all of Shekau’s, Kambar’s and al-Barnawi’s property interests subject to US jurisdiction and prohibits US persons from engaging in transactions with or for the benefit of these individuals. These designations demonstrate the United States’ resolve in diminishing the capacity of Boko Haram to execute violent attacks. The State Department took these actions in consultation with the Departments of Justice and Treasury.”
In cooperation with the US, the Nigerian security agents, through effective patrol of the borders and the Central Bank of Nigeria, can help cut Boko Haram supply lines.
—Ademola Adegbamigbe
First Published in THENEWS Magazine