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With the 2019 general elections a few months away, there are serious concerns about the activities of Nigerian security agencies which tend to suggest that they are being used by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to overawe the opposition

By Olu Ojewale

THE verdict of the United States, US, government is quite unambiguous: Nigeria is suffering from the reign of impunity. David Young, deputy chief of Mission and Charge de Affaires, US Embassy in Nigeria, who made the pronouncement also said that the killings increased because the perpetrators were not punished. “The Nigerian government should strengthen its laws to deal with killers,” Young advised in an interview with journalists on Sunday, August 19, in Jos, during his fellowship with church leaders in Plateau State.

Nevertheless, he also paid tribute to Abubakar Abdullahi, the 83-year-old Imam of Nghar village, Gashish District, who reportedly saved 300 persons, including Christians when suspected Fulani herdsmen struck on June 24.

Indeed, it appears as if the Fulani herdsmen under the auspices of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association are now law to themselves. On Tuesday, August 21, Miyetti Allah warned Bukola Saraki, the president of Senate, to resign his position immediately or be forced to do so.

Garus Gololo, the national coordinator of the association in Benue State, gave the warning in an interview with The Punch correspondent in Makurdi.

Gololo said Saraki had created numerous problems for the administration of President Buhari, which had affected the economic and social growth of the nation.

“It is on this note that we are saying that Saraki ought not to be in office again as Senate president. Moreso, Saraki has failed to coordinate and organise the National Assembly to offer quality legislation that Nigerians need…

“Miyetti Allah is looking for a leader that would preside over the affairs of the Senate with ultimate respect for the executive and the judiciary, not someone like Senator Saraki that would always scheme to outdo the Presidency,” he said.

Since Gololo made his threatening statement, no government official has disowned or cautioned him and neither has he been invited by any security agency to explain his threatening words.

While the security agencies could be blamed for inaction over Gololo’s threats, they were not absolved from the violence in the Rivers State by-election which held in the state on Saturday, August 18. Nyesom Wike, the state governor, stated that the action that saw the police interfere with the electoral process in the state was a declaration of war on the people.

Wike while speaking during a state broadcast on Sunday, August 19, described the Saturday’s House of Assembly bye-election for Port Harcourt State Constituency 3 as a failed exercise due to the interference of the Police and armed thugs. He alleged that the armed thugs were sent by the All Progressives Congress, APC, in the state, calling on the people of the state to stand against the antics of the police, unless they want to become slaves in their fatherland.

“The consistent sabotage of the electoral process by the police amounts to a declaration of war against the people of Rivers State and their solemn rights to freely and fairly choose their leaders and representatives,” he said.

Wike said despite assurances from the Rivers State commissioner of Police during the last State Security Council meeting that the police would remain neutral and act professionally, they on Saturday, August 18, joined forces with the APC thugs to disrupt the election.

He alleged: “Instead of providing security for voters and INEC officials, the police brazenly colluded with political thugs of the APC to subvert the democratic process and denied the people of Port Harcourt Constituency 3 their rights to free, fair and credible elections.

“It is important to note that Ojukaye Amachree, who led the thugs, is the same person facing multiple murder trial and instead of arresting him as ordered by the trial court, the Police have continued to aid and shield him from arrest and prosecution.”

He, however, recalled that on June 16, the local government election, which the APC did not participate in, was conducted peacefully without violence.

The governor also recalled the widespread violence that erupted in the 2016 legislative re-run election in Rivers State, the INEC Panel Report (on page 66) indicted the security agencies as “brazen election riggers” and singled out Akin Fakorede, the F-SARS commander, as the arrowhead of the violence and rigging that characterised those elections.

Addressing a press conference on the election in Port Harcourt, on Monday, August 20, Obo Effanga, the state resident electoral commissioner, REC, said the commission had no other option than to suspend the election because it did not meet the minimum standards because of the widespread violence and snatching of card readers and ballot boxes by politicians aided by armed uniformed security personnel.

While election violence was a big issue in Port Harcourt, in Abuja, it was a big blow to the Christian community as Michael Akawu, a reverend father, was brutally shot dead by identified gunmen in Gwagwalada, Abuja, while shopping on Saturday, August 18.

As if that was not bad enough, on Sunday, August 19, at about 1.00am, according to informed sources, some hoodlums suspected to be Fulani terrorists attacked Nasara Baptist Church in Guguwa near Rigasa in Kaduna, and shot dead Hosea Akuchi, a reverend. The attackers reportedly took away Talatu Akuchi, his wife.

“Her whereabouts remain unknown and the criminals have demanded for the sum of five million naira for her release,” the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, said in a statement on Wednesday, August 22.

Samson Ayokunle, the CAN president, while condoling with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and that of the Nigerian Baptist Convention over the demise of two clerics, condemned the killings. Ayokunle, a reverend, in a statement signed by Adebayo Oladeji, a pastor and special assistant, Media and Communications to the CAN president, prayed to God to comfort and console the Roman Catholic Church in Nigeria and the Nigerian Baptist Convention, the churches where they were serving with their immediate families.

He, however, called on the Nigeria Police and other relevant security agencies to do whatever it takes to bring the culprits to book and rescue the widow of the Akuchi as soon as practicable.

“We once again call on our security agencies to be more proactive and invest more on intelligence gathering with a view to preventing many of these crimes that are being committed before their watches undetected,” he stressed.

The CAN president noted that the security agencies seemed busy with elections and forgot that leaders were elected to rule over the living souls.

“Nigeria’s security situation is reprehensible, unacceptable and condemnable. We once again call on President Muhammadu Buhari to work on the security system of the country.

“Let there be a visible improvement in our security system, as the governed are not satisfied with their performances in ensuring the security of lives and property…Enough of the senseless killings, these killings must stop in the country,’’ Ayokunle said.

Senseless killings are not the only crimes being perpetuated in the country. Nigerians are equally concerned about the way security agencies sometimes conduct their activities.

For instance, the Department of State Services, DSS, raided the Abuja residence of Eyinnaya Abaribe, senator representing Abia South, on Friday evening, June 22, 2018. The secret police had arrested him early in the day without disclosing the reasons, though it was believed to be in connection with the surety he stood for Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB.

Alongside Tochukwu Uchendu and Emmanuel Shallom Ben, Abaribe signed a bond for the bail granted the IPOB leader in April 2017. But Kanu has not been seen in public since September when soldiers invaded his residence, while Abaribe has been under pressure to produce him.

What made the arrest of Abaribe suspicious is that the senator is also a fierce critic of Buhari. During a Senate debate on the president’s declaration of June 12 as Democracy Day, he said December 31, should be declared as “democracy destruction day” because that was the day the Buhari military government ousted ex-President Shehu Shagari in a coup in 1983.

It was the turn of Bukola Saraki, Senate president, and Ike Ekweremadu, his deputy, when the Police and Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, agents besieged their Abuja homes in early morning operations on Tuesday, July 24.

Interestingly, Saraki managed to evade the siege, but Ekweremadu could not make it to the National Assembly that day. The Senate president was able to preside over the plenary in which, 14 senators of the All Progressives Congress, APC, defected to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and the African Democratic Party, ADC. A similar gale of defection occurred simultaneously in the House of Representatives involving 37 lawmakers.

Similarly, Benue State was on edge after the Police allegedly aided a faction of the House of Assembly in a move to remove Governor Samuel Ortom. For one week, the police locked down the state Assembly. Incidentally, Ortom had just defected from the APC to the PDP. But the plan to remove him failed.

In the aftermath, on July 16, a coalition of Southern and Middle Belt Forum elders accused the Nigerian Air Force of denying landing rights to the plane ferrying them to Makurdi for a conference on restructuring Nigeria. The NAF, in any case, denied the allegations.

In May, the Police took over the Kano State Assembly at the height of the crisis of impeachment of Abdullahi Ata, the speaker. Ata was eventually impeached on July 30, a week after Rabiu Kwankwaso, a former governor and a Kano senator, defected from the APC to the PDP.

Although the Presidency has denied culpability in all the cases of security agencies’ harassments, Nigerians can be forgiven for seeing the hands of Esau and the voice of Jacob in the various matters.

That notwithstanding, the Presidency is believed to equally concerned about the security situation in the North East. Briefing journalists at the end of a meeting of security chiefs with Buhari in Abuja, on Monday, August 20, Mansur Dan-Ali, the minister of Defence, stated: “In the North-East, we are having worrisome report, we have looked into it critically and we have taken absolute decision.” He did not elaborate on the “absolute decisions” taken.

Besides, he said: “The decision that has been taken is that we have seen that there is a lot of improvement in the security situation in the country more especially in Zamfara and Benue states and in the Niger Delta.”

However, Dan-Ali said the meeting was a routine security briefing with Buhari, and an update of the August 2, meeting held before the president’s departure to London, for vacation. Buhari returned from London, on Saturday, August 18.

The North-East is the part of Nigeria most affected by the Boko Haram insurgency and despite the efforts of the military, the terror group is still able to carry out attacks on military forces and civilians in the area.

One of the latest attacks was reported by Reuters was on Sunday, August 19. In the attack at least 19 people were reportedly killed in the early hours of Sunday. The attack was said to have occurred in Mailari village in the Guzamala region of Borno State. An aid worker at a camp who received some survivors, and who declined to be identified, put the death toll at 63, Reuters reports.

Nevertheless, at the end of Monday’s meeting with the president, Gabriel Olonisakin, the chief of Defence Staff, said the president asked security agencies to up their game to ensure that the nation is safe and people go about their daily activities without fear. “We just had two and half hours meeting with the president and commander-in-chief. We reviewed the security situation across the country in all the geopolitical zones and of course, we made all our comments, especially the new operations in Benue, Zamfara, Taraba ‘Operation Whirl Stroke’ and Operation Saradaji. We gave the extent of successes in these operations and we are to continue in this line of action in these operations.

“All the operations were reviewed and all the issues concerning the operations were dealt with. And he directed that we should continue to step up our game to ensure that the nation is safe and people go about their daily activities in a very safe manner,” Olonisakin said.

Indeed, the security concern for every Nigerian to go about his or her own daily activities safely must have motivated the consideration that the Nigeria Police be decentralised. On Thursday, August 16, the National Economic Council, NEC, approved plans for the decentralisation of the Nigeria Police Force. The council backed the plan during its meeting, which was chaired by acting President Yemi Osinbajo inside the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Babagana Monguno, the national security adviser, told journalists after the meeting that it was important to the police because of the security threats in the country. “These threats are increasingly asymmetric in nature and I stressed upon the need the deal with these problems in a more collective manner,” Monguno said.

“It is true that it is the responsibility of the security agencies to deal with these threats, but the complexities of insecurity in the 21st century are such that you need a whole of government and society to approach in dealing with these issues.” According to Monguno, the decentralisation will also enable states to play a more significant role in ensuring security.

To achieve the objective, the NEC set up a committee to be chaired by Ibrahim Idris, inspector-general of police. The committee is to come up with recommendations on how the planned decentralisation can be achieved.

Abubakar Tsav, retired police commissioner and staunch supporter of Buhari administration, who recently invoked the wrath of Benue State politicians when he opposed the enactment of anti-grazing law, refused to speak with Realnews for an interview. Tsav had promised to give this reporter an interview, claiming that he was in a meeting with some chiefs, but the Reanlnews called back, refused to pick his calls.

The former police boss had said in the Channels TV interview that he believed that the anti-grazing law was made to prevent herdsmen from accessing any part of the state for their livestock to freely graze.

Femi Fani-Kayode, former Aviation minister, on Monday, July 30, said the many killings of innocent Nigerians, destruction, poverty, sorrow, division among others were enough reasons to believe that Buhari was “a plague and a curse” to Nigeria.

In a series of tweets, Fani-Kayode wrote: “How many more innocent people have to be slaughtered before we acknowledge the fact that Buhari is a plague and a curse? Death, destruction, devastation, sorrow, poverty, division, misery, strife and failure follow him wherever he goes. He has killed Nigeria with his bad spirit.

“Anyone that refuses to condemn the killings that are going on in the north can never enjoy my respect, support or friendship. Those that turn a blind-eye to mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide are as guilty of crimes against humanity as those that actually do the killing.

“Eighty-three-year-old former Head of State Gen. Yakubu Gowon says Miyetti Allah must be questioned by security agencies for the mass murder being perpetrated by Fulani terrorists in the Middle Belt. In response Miyetti Allah says”old age is worrying Gowon”. Wither Nigeria?

“Eighty-year-old former chief of Army Staff and former minister of defence, Gen. T.Y. Danjuma says the Middle Belt is being subjected to ethnic cleansing by Fulani terrorists in collusion with the Army. In response Miyetti Allah threatens, insults and tries to rubbish him. Wither Nigeria?”

In a temperate manner, Edwin Clark, an elder statesman, on Wednesday, August 22, said that the solution to the prevailing security challenges in the country lay only in restructuring of the country. Clark, a former minister of Information, who gave the recommendation in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria, said the centralised security architecture in the country could not avert or respond swiftly to security issues in all parts of the country.

Clark said the country must, therefore, restructure to allow for the creation of state police and other grassroots policing options to tame the security issues in the country.

“The security challenges the country is currently facing will be overcome if we adopt restructuring. This is because the issue of security is local and we cannot have effective security cover when everything is done from the centre. A major ingredient of restructuring is state police and it is when we have this and other community policing options that we can have proper security,” he said.

In its editorial titled ‘FG’s abuse of security agencies’ published on August 7, the Punch noted that with the 2019 general election around the corner “the penchant of the federal government for harassing, intimidating and oppressing rival politicians by deploying security agencies against them is fouling up the political mood of the nation.”

The newspaper in arriving at that conclusion enumerated some events involving security agencies that have taken place in the country from siege on houses of Saraki and Ekweremadu to the removal of Ata as speaker of the Kano State House of Assembly.

The newspaper, however, said the current abuse is not peculiar to the Buhari administration alone. It reminiscences: “Throughout the Fourth Republic, Nigeria has witnessed crude politicking and abuse of state power. It is absurd, however, that the misuse of power is still rampant in Buhari’s second coming. The president campaigned for change in the last election, perhaps on the strength of the abuse he had suffered from past governments. In the build-up to 2015, the Goodluck Jonathan administration openly deployed state police/military power to undermine the coalition of opposition politicians, who fused into the APC. In a reckless abuse of military power, the Nigerian Army told a bewildered nation that Buhari had no secondary school certificate and, therefore, was not qualified to contest the presidential election. It nearly tipped the country overboard.

“So, these abuses speak ill of the Buhari government. Buhari had tasted the abuse of power in 2003, when he was battling to prove that the 2003 presidential poll was rigged in favour of Olusegun Obasanjo of the PDP. The police invaded the All Nigeria Peoples Party solidarity rally in Kano, firing tear gas to disrupt it. His running mate, Chuba Okadigbo, who attended the rally, died the following day. It is incomprehensible that a man who went through this experience has not taken steps to stamp out the current abuse.”

The Punch, however, said that the September governorship election in Osun State will give a hint of whether Buhari and his officials can hold a free and fair election without intimidations from security services. It recalled that in the election held in the state in 2014, under former President Goodluck Jonathan some DSS operatives invaded the state and whisked away people.

It, therefore, argued that for Nigeria to witness true democracy, government must have to give the security agencies the independence to operate professionally. “In the United States, all candidates are accorded police protection, no matter their party affiliations. Therefore, Nigeria’s security agencies should be accountable to the people, not to the incumbent government alone. All laws that give public officials the wiggle room to abuse the security agencies should be expunged from the books. Buhari, perceived by Nigerians as upright, should use his perceived integrity to eradicate the abuse by security agencies,” the editorial said.

It is hoped that if the government allows the security agencies to do their jobs professionally without meddling, the impunity being experienced in the country will be eradicated. A word, as the saying goes, is good for the wise.

– Aug. 24, 2018 @ 17:35 GMT |

Tags: 2019 Elections: FG's Abuse of Security Agencies worry Nigerians