The Commander in Chief needs to demonstrate leadership on this matter.
A safe and secure Nigeria is the overarching objective of all the country's security agencies. But their operations are too often besmirched with rivalries, leading to working at cross-purposes to the peril of national security. When these activities take violent and fatal dimensions, they breed gangrene that must be excised to restore discipline and professionalism in the services. Achieving this imperative requires decisive action from President Bola Tinubu as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
In November, a spat between some policemen and soldiers in Yola, the Adamawa State capital, left Inspector Jacob David dead in a fatal shooting at a police station. A spiky exchange between the two agencies during a stop-and-search operation at a checkpoint had allegedly left a soldier wounded. His other colleagues then purportedly ran to their barracks, mobilised heavily and invaded the State Police Headquarters in a reprisal. A total of 12 armoured personnel carriers were reportedly deployed for the misguided mission. This triggered pandemonium in Jimeta.
A similar crass exhibition of lawlessness happened about the same period in Kaduna State when Nigeria Air Force personnel stormed the office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to rescue their officers, who had illegally attempted to free five fraud suspects. It is curious how the forcible release of criminal suspects in custody has become part of the remit of NAF officials. The affected are not fit to be security officers and should be disengaged from service.
The President was confronted with this misdemeanour when on 30 May, just a day after he was sworn in, he ordered State Security Service (SSS) operatives to vacate the Awolowo, Ikoyi, Lagos office of the EFCC, which they seized without recourse to due process. Officers of the anti-graft commission had earlier been prevented from accessing their offices, leading to palpable tension and anxiety among residents of the area.
As horrible as these episodes of misconduct are, perhaps more worrisome are the cheeky and irrational handling of the crises by the leadership of these agencies, which sadly indicates the absence of effective channels of dealing with them to avoid their degeneration. This fact is underpinned by the response of Gambo Muhammed, the Commander of the 23rd Armoured Brigade of the Nigerian Army in Yola, to the fracas that: "The police shot at our men at a checkpoint. Our men went to rescue him, and they fired at those too."
Such a reckless response does not show leadership and capacity in crisis management. The deployment of 12 APCs could not have been for the rescue of a soldier at a Police headquarters but was for other purposes - assault, intimidation, harassment and ultimately to kill. The death of Inspector David was collateral damage in the performative military action. In the same vein, instead of addressing why its operatives laid siege to the Ikoyi office of EFCC, the SSS spokesman, Peter Afunanya, waffled about the irrelevance of which agency originally owns the building.
It did not occur to the SSS image-maker that the EFCC did not catapult itself into the office complex, but the federal authorities had undoubtedly allocated the space for the Commission to operate from, for the good of the country. If there was any need whatsoever for the agency to reclaim the building for operational reasons, going beyond the realm of official channels to do so was injurious to esprit de corps and unity of purpose in crime-fighting.
Service chiefs have also exhibited symptoms of this malady, perhaps in a heightened dimension, given their enormous powers. A former Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, for instance, demonstrated this in 2019 in a case that involved soldiers of the 93 Battalion. The troops opened fire on a police team at a checkpoint in Jalingo, in Taraba State, killing three police officers and a civilian in a determined criminal effort to set free Hamisu Wadume, a notorious kingpin of the underworld in the Benue-Taraba territory. Wadume was being taken to the state capital by a special police squad saddled with the responsibility of apprehending him to face justice.He had earlier implicated some soldiers as his confederates in the criminal enterprise of kidnapping and robbery. His confession, when he was finally nabbed, was telling. He said: "The soldiers then took me to their headquarters and cut off the handcuff from my hands and set me free. I have been hiding since then until now that police arrested me again." The then Inspector-General, Muhammed Adamu, tried as much as he could to get the Chief of Army Staff to release the 10 military men who killed the police officers at the checkpoint, in order to set a manacled felon free, to face the full wrath of the law, but to no avail.
An order of Justice Binta Nyako of a Federal High Court for the army authorities to release the suspects for trial was flagrantly disobeyed. The Inspector General of Police charged Wadume on 16 counts in February 2020, which bordered on murder, terrorism, kidnapping and illegal arms running. As usual, Muhammadu Buhari, the president at that time, remained aloof while the two armed services danced naked in the public square.
When security agencies work at cross-purposes, the sharing of intelligence among them becomes difficult, if not impossible, amid festering insecurity in all parts of the country. Nigeria cannot afford to be giving a carte blanche to Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists, kidnappers, bandits and other non-state criminal actors, due to the ego of some military personnel who see themselves as being above the law. Military officers appear to consider police personnel as inferior security officers of the state whom they could easily trample upon. This is intriguing because police personnel are statutorily charged with internal security or maintenance of law and order in the federation.More often than not, the violations of traffic regulations and police demand for compliance provide the tinderbox for some of these unfortunate occurrences. That was why ASP Hezekiah Abiona was stabbed to death by a naval officer in December 2020 in Lagos. However, the Police are not without blemish. This was evident in the 2005 fracas at Ojuelegba, Lagos, which claimed the lives of three persons and led to the burning of over 40 vehicles. Soldiers who boarded a commercial vehicle for free had prevented the alleged payment of a N20 bribe by the driver to corrupt and irresponsible policemen, which led to the unpleasant situation that followed.
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To be clear, these absurdities permeate security services when discipline and professionalism have taken flight. It is hoped that the assault on the Yola police headquarters by soldiers; the NAF personnel's criminal bid to free fraudsters; and soldiers' entanglement in Wadume's skein are sour grapes the services should have nothing to do with any more. The President and Service Chiefs have the duty to put an end to the episodes of embarrassment of officials of national security agencies in full public glare. The Commander in Chief needs to demonstrate leadership on this matter.
