Towards A Comprehensive National Security Strategy By Dr Kayode Fayemi

Paper by

His Excellency Dr. Kayode FAYEMI   

Governor, Ekiti State, Nigeria

at the

Nigerian Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS)

Kuru, Plateau State, Nigeria

 

Protocols

 

I am delighted to be here today to share my thoughts on an aspect of our national life that is most central to Nigeria’s unity and progress. I must however start by paying due respect to the board and management of this great institution which since 1979 has been at the forefront of advancing progressive policy direction for our great nation through robust and actionable researches and publications as well as the training of the top echelon of our intelligentsia in the bureaucracy, security establishments, civil society e.t.c. I must also commend my good friend, Professor Tijani Bande and his team for the great work they’re doing in this great institution.

 

Review of National Security Architecture

The spectrum of threats to law, order and public safety in parts of Nigeria calls for a comprehensive review of the conceptual and operational assumptions at the heart of our national security architecture, and a redesign where necessary, to build institutional capacities to meet current threats.

The institutional orientation of our security establishment has long been characterised by a tension between two differing conceptions of national security. To begin with, it must be understood that the foundations of the security and intelligence community lie in the long history of military governance. The Nigerian Security Organization (NSO) was created by the regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo in the aftermath of the February 1976 assassination of the then head of state, General Murtala Mohammed. Prior to its establishment, security and intelligence gathering fell under the purview of the Police Special Branch which shared overlapping jurisdiction with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the police. Although, the three branches of the armed forces, the army, the navy and the air force each had their own intelligence outfits, they were primarily concerned with military security and military preparedness.

Following the assassination of General Muhammed during the abortive coup d’etat staged by dissidents in the military, the Supreme Military Council promulgated Decree 26 – the Nigeria Security Organization Decree 1976 – establishing the agency on March 24, 1976. The primary functions of the NSO as spelt out by the decree, were “the prevention and detection of any crime against the security of Nigeria; protection and preservation of all classified materials concerning or relating to the security of Nigeria; and the employment of the organization for such other purposes, whether within or without Nigeria, as the head of the federal military government (or president) may deem necessary with a view to securing the maintenance of the security of Nigeria.” Thus, its remit covered both internal and external security.

Within a decade, particularly after the Second Republic and the regime of Muhammadu Buhari, the consensus emerged that NSO had become too powerful. Its excesses and abuses had created serious credibility deficiencies both in terms of public relations and operational efficiency. Consequently, the NSO was abolished in 1986. General Ibrahim Babangida split it into three units – the State Security Service (SSS) for domestic intelligence gathering, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) for external intelligence gathering and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) to oversee defence-related intelligence issues both at home and abroad. These agencies have endured till the present day.

This brief excursion into the origins of the security establishment is necessary to understand the institutional orientation of the services. Under military rule, the dominant principle was that of regime security. The security of the regime, specifically, the personal wellbeing of the head of state was articulated as being the same as the security of the nation. The security of the state was deemed exclusively synonymous with the personal safety of the Head of State and the stability of his regime. The only national security threats recognized as such by security czars were primarily those that directly threatened the Head of State. Our security bureaucracy is designed to pre-empt and counter subversive activities aimed at state capture e.g. through coup d’etat or through overt military aggression that violates the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of the federation.

Based on this paradigm, only three types of occurrences in our history have had the requisite nature and magnitude to be accurately described as security threats, namely: the military putsches, the civil war, the spate of militia activities around the Niger-Delta region and to a somewhat lesser extent, eruptions of violence rooted in ethno-religious tension in Northern Nigeria. But the undisputed focus of the security establishment under military rule was to detect and disrupt all threats against the person of head of state especially through coup d’etat but also through other media of dissent.

This in no small measure intensified the already adversarial relationship between the military state and civil society. Because a free and vibrant civil society is anathema to a totalitarian state, the security establishment viewed all sources of dissent as potential threats. Institutions of civil society such as the media, the trade unions, the universities, and students’ unions were all pacified. Critiques of government policies were interpreted as treasonable and draconian decrees were fashioned and wielded to intimidate civil society into submission. This approach to security management ought not to be surprising given that military dictatorships run hyper-authoritarian states and that their absolutism necessarily prescribes the suppression of dissent in any form. However, this approach is utterly insufficient in the context of a democratic environment and the challenges confronting our nation at present.

The New National Security Threat Environment   

Fourteen years into the Fourth Republic, Nigeria is confronted by a new, more complex and treacherous threat environment. The orientation that governs the operation of our security agencies, having been tailored to address the perceived dangers of yesteryears, is now out of date. The new national security threat environment calls for the design and application of innovative metrics in assessing threats, as well as new analytical models and policy initiatives. What follows is an overview of the features of this new environment. Equally, the dawn of the new century has occasioned a paradigm shift in the notion and understanding of security. In 1994, the UNDP Human Development Report for the first time drew an inextricable linkage between security and development, underscoring the necessity for the security of people rather than territories and individuals rather than states. This became known in academic and policy circles as human security.  Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General was to later define the concept of human security as encompassing ‘human rights, good governance, access to education and healthcare, and ensuring that each individual has opportunities and choices to fulfill his or her potential. Every step in this direction is also a step towards reducing poverty, achieving economic growth, and preventing conflict…freedom from want, freedom from fear and the freedom of future generations to inherit a healthy natural environment…’ As if taking a cue from the above postulation of the concept of human security, Nigeria’s 1999 constitution unequivocally states in Section 14(2b) that ‘the security (freedom from fear) and welfare (freedom from want) shall be the primary purpose of government’, in other words placing governance at the epicenter of security and development complex in Nigeria.

If we take the above as a broad definition of contemporary security situation in Nigeria, then perhaps the first security concern that must be factored into any matrix of security is governance or the lack of it in the Nigerian context. The inability of the Nigerian state to guarantee the inalienable rights enshrined in the constitution which forms the very basis of the social contract between the governed and the governors is a primary security threat in contemporary Nigeria.  Poor and bad governance continue to constitute a major security threat to the Nigerian state. The crisis is not only fueled by blatant corruption, but also by the impunity that accompanies it. In its recently released 2013 report, TI ranks Nigeria 144^th out of 177 countries with 25/100 points in its corruption perception index. The impact of corruption in Nigeria is more deep seated. According to TI, corruption remains ‘a major threat facing humanity…because it destroys lives and communities, and undermines countries and institutions…generates popular resentment and anger that threatens to further exacerbate violent conflicts…it amounts to dirty tax and the poor and most vulnerable are its primary victims…’ The very obvious response to this crisis of governance and lack of delivery of public goods is good, accountable, transparent and democratic governance broadly defined.

The specific security challenges that this paper also focuses on spring from the general democratic and governance deficit that the country has experienced over the past few decades. The rise of Jamaatu Ahlis Sunna Liddaawati Wal Jihad otherwise known as Boko Haram represents the most potent threat to national security posed by local militarized non-state actors committed not to state capture but to the control of specifically defined areas or turfs and the absolute rejection of constituted authority. These organizations are primarily concerned with establishing states within the state. They are characteristically of asymmetrical structure, and organized along flat lines and diffuse cells, rather than with orthodox pyramidal hierarchies and clearly defined chains of command and control. Although their objectives are local, they enjoy linkages with global fraternities that pursue similar goals. In other words, their aims are local but their perspective is transnational. The response to Boko-Haram has been largely characterized by the use of force to drive it aground.  Even though it is clear that the crisis itself is multi-dimensional, it is obvious that the solution cannot be uni-dimensional. The challenge clearly remains the accurate prognosis of the threat (intelligence), a clear articulation as well as clinical implementation of the strategy to adopt. As a distant but keen watcher of developments in the North East, it seems crystal clear to me that the almost uni-dimensional concentration on the use of military force is at best a palliative, at worse counter-productive in response to violent extremism. Experience elsewhere in countering violent extremism requires a multi-dimensional strategy. Indeed, a pioneering study of 648 terrorist groups (1968-2006) by the Rand Corporation found that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist due to military defeat – indeed only 7% were militarily defeated, the bulk were resolved through policing actions and . Clearly, military intervention is a small part of counter-terrorism strategy and should be used as a narrowly defined tool accompanied by diplomatic, social and criminal justice models as essential components for comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy.  In being tough on terrorism, it is also important to be tough on the causes of terrorism and the drivers that fuel violent extremism. Underlying grievances must be addressed and the need for a Marshall Plan to assist the people of the North-East is actually a necessity, not a charity.

Two of such fuelling agents that we have not comprehensively addressed alongside violent extremism are drugs and small arms. According to the UNODC, Nigeria is a transit point for heroin and cocaine intended for the European, East Asian and North American markets. According to the UNODC, there is a growing concern that the whole of West Africa is changing more and more from just being a stockpiling place into a hub where cocaine is traded with about two-thirds of cocaine from South America to Europe passing through West Africa, and Nigeria is the most significant transshipment point. Equally, Afghan heroin is trafficked through Pakistan and the Middle East into West Africa for onward transshipment to Europe. If we combine this with the widespread cultivation, sale and use of other psychotropic substances, we can imagine the deleterious effect this is having on the health conditions of Nigerians.

The proliferation of small arms is partly the concomitant effect of the weakening of states in the post-cold war era. The world has become awash with SALW since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Indeed it is estimated that there are over 600 million SALW in circulation worldwide that contribute to the destabilization of states and the facilitation of violent crimes resulting in instability in many states. Over 10 million of such weapons are traced to West Africa according to the Small Arms Survey. Nigeria’s immediate geopolitical neighbourhood is the Sahel, an area of just over 3 million sq. km, occupied by a profusion of weak states and rich in natural resources. The region’s most recent crisis has been caused by a convergence of drought, food insecurity, ecological degradation, political instability, conflict and the large numbers of internally displaced people and refugees. The problem of weak states has permitted a number of non-state actors including gangs, arms dealers, rebel groups, drug dealers and terrorists to flourish in the area. Weapons looted from Libyan armouries in the wake of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi have made their way across the region and have fallen into the hands of Tuareg rebels and terrorist groups like Boko Haram. Added to this is Nigeria’s long and porous borders covering over 4000 kilometres littered with illegal entry points and routes totaling 1500 points. With the porous borders, criminal gangs and terrorist insurgents easily smuggle weapons into the country which in turn are sold to Niger Delta oil bunkerers, South East kidnappers and other purveyors of violence in the Nigerian state.  The challenge we face is how to stem the tide of SALW proliferation in the face of our weak customs and immigration institutions.

Related to the security of our borders is maritime security. This is not only important in terms of protecting the exploitation of maritime resources, particularly off-shore oil, but also in terms of securing livelihhoods and development. Piracy is a growing phenomenon in our coastal waters and poses a serious threat to security in the sub-region. The Niger Delta and the Gulf of Guinea which cover an area of about 2000 nautical miles are already theatres of criminal activities ranging from oil theft and human trafficking to weapons trading and drug smuggling. Between 2003 and 2011, the Gulf of Guinea accounted for about 30% of piracy attacks, mostly off the coast of Nigeria, Angola and Republic of Congo. The region is said to be a source of about 5.4million barrels of oil per day and Nigeria accounts for 47% of the total oil supply from the area. Yet, the Gulf of Guinea is rated the second most dangerous pirate-infested region after the Somali coast. Although experts are increasingly of the view that the Gulf of Guinea is at least as dangerous as the Gulf of Aden, data on piracy in the former is not as refined as that on the Somali coast. The Gulf of Guinea generally gets less attention than the more notorious waters on the other side of Africa. But this is now changing.  Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea is partly an outgrowth of the decade-long insurgency in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. The vast, complex and largely unpoliced network of creeks and waterways that traverse the region make it a suitable environment for pirates and other criminal gangs. Furthermore, it is home to a sizeable population of unemployed youths, many of whom have been schooled in the dark arts of militant gangsterism and insurgency, and are ready recruits for the lucrative ventures in piracy and oil theft. The availability of an international black market for stolen crude is itself a critical factor in the increase in oil theft. According to findings by the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, the nation lost $11 billion between 2009 and 2011 to oil theft and vandalism. [1] According to the federal government, Nigeria loses about a 100, 000 barrels daily to oil theft with corresponding daily fiscal losses in the region of about $1.5 billion[2] These losses are far from insignificant and have had a serious impact on our public finances resulting in almost 50% cut in allocation to states from the federation account.

Climate change in the Sahel has also disrupted pastoral communities leading to their migration southward into Nigeria in search of wetlands. The increased rate of migration has led to more frequent clashes between herding communities and farmers struggling over scarce land. In the past five years, these conflicts have become increasingly violent with both parties deploying high-grade weapons. While this conflict is strictly ecological and economic in the sense that the struggle is over land, it has the potential to metastasize into a multidimensional crisis involving issues of identity, ethnicity, religion, politics and land ownership.   Since the inception of the Fourth Republic in 1999, sectarian clashes have claimed an estimated fifty thousand lives across Nigeria. These clashes have not only been inter-ethnic or inter-religious; they have also been intra-ethnic and intra-religious. The increase in the incidence of conflict suggests that there is a correlation between democratization and violence. A major reason for this is the nature of democracy itself. After decades of military rule, democracy was expected to usher in peace and stability. But democracy has liberalized the political space unleashing tensions that were previously bottled up by the coercive might of the military. Repressed identities and resentments have emerged as powerful currents in the polity with renascent communities making claims and counter-claims on power under the banner of micro-nationalism. The intensity of political contest for power which often leverages the passions and sentiments of micro-nationalism and other forms of sectarian populism raises the potential for violence in our polity. In this way, politics itself, in an under-institutionalized country still struggling to entrench rule of law, generates significant security risks that must be accommodated in our threat assessment matrix.

The Youth Bulge and Its Security Portents

70% of Nigeria’s population is under 35 years of age. This statistic has significant implications for national security. Any state with an exceptionally high number of people between the ages of 15 and 25 has a far greater potential for unrest than a country with an average age of 40. The median age of our population is put at 17.9 years. Any country with a relatively high population of young males is more likely to generate both internal and external violence. This is not to say that every youthful nation is more prone to violence than an older neighbour. Instead, it locates youth within a set of causative factors which in combination create a highly volatile mix. Other indicators include infant mortality, lack of access to housing and potable water as well as youth unemployment. [3] The interaction of these variables creates an incendiary social environment that incubates security risks.

The presence of young unemployed males sequestered in urban ghettoes is a predictor of both crime and conflict. Unemployment creates a vast pool of malcontents that can be recruited by politicians for private militias or that will fall into the hands of extremists and become tomorrow’s extremists. Add the large number of unemployed youths to the proliferation of small arms and we see an alignment of factors that make for a clear and present danger to our national security. The common denominator in the insurgency in the north and piracy in the south is youth delinquency. A key security challenge therefore is how to engage our young and absorb their energies in productive engagements to avoid losing a generation to criminality and insurrection.

The foregoing offers a broad overview of the security challenges confronting Nigeria at present. One school of thought in security scholarship categorizes risks into internal/societal risks and external risks. Internal or societal risks comprise civil strife, riots, civil wars and coups d’etat because both their causes and effects are locally-situated occurring within the territorial boundaries of the state. They are logically contrasted with external risks, such as inter-state war or international terrorism, which cross the political boundaries of nation-states. [4]

Our overview of the new security environment indicates that the lines between external and internal risks are blurred enabling their interaction in ways that engender domestic and transnational instability. As we have seen with the inability of weak states in the Sahel to police their territories, crime networks and a host of other insecurity drivers are thriving in ungoverned spaces. The effects of these groups do not stay local. They frequently spill over and become transnational security threats. The increase of internally displaced people or refugees, cross-border crime and insurgent groups, escalates local crises into destabilizing security threats on a regional scale.

Media Warfare and Perception Management

National security policy must be cognizant of the national psychology – the prevalent fears and anxieties of the day. Our deepest apprehensions as Nigerians revolve around the potential dismemberment of the federation and they find expression in what is popularly referred to as the 2015 prophecy of doom. In 2005, the US National Intelligence Council convened a group of top American experts on sub-Saharan Africa to discuss likely trends in the region over the next 15 years. The group discussed several major issues that will affect Africa, including trade, globalization and conflict among other factors. According to a National Intelligence Estimate authored by the conference, Nigeria could enter a phase of unrest and instability by 2015 that could culminate in her collapse by the year 2020.

It is important to note here that the particulars of that estimate are not actually discussed in the public space. Most Nigerians are unaware of the context in which this projection was made. What makes the report pungent is the fact that it resonates with popular foundational anxieties about the long term viability of our union. For many Nigerians, it is enough that this is what America has projected concerning their nation. Local episodes of graft, conflict and terrorism, in the eyes of pessimists, only lend credence to the report. The fact that 2015 is an election year and that electioneering is typically fraught with violence on our shores further fortifies the conviction of pessimists that Nigeria is on her last legs. All of these inadequacies are not only reflected in the media, but they are also projected and magnified locally and internationally – and often in a very subjective and sensational manner depending on the perspective of its ownership. The role the media can play in exacerbating conflict can only be ignored at security managers’ peril as the world found out in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Such anxieties which are constantly projected in the local and international media may serve to generate a psychological context of fatalism and resignation within which conflicts, political violence and terrorism flourish. This risk highlights the need to recognize psychological operations and information warfare as a necessary aspect of national security planning.

It is obvious that our status as a young and populous democracy with as yet fragile institutions in a geopolitical arena defined by globalization and the internationalization of conflict presents us with a raft of testing challenges. The narrow and one-dimensional militaristic orientation of our security establishment is inadequate to address these threats and must be drastically revised. We must approach the development of a national security policy and strategy as a composite of various causalities not conventionally regarded as related to the subject of security. Issues of poverty, demographics, food security, energy security and social security are all risk factors to be considered in the generation of threat assessment matrix and the formulation of security policy.

The holistic appraisal of national security shows us the interdependence of causalities and how the interaction of diverse factors leads to adverse security situations. These scenarios bring home to us the fact that policies have consequences for national security. Our energy policy, for example, and particularly the lack of domestic refining capacity for our crude oil and therefore lack of access to cheap fuel for millions of Nigerians is a causative factor in soil erosion in the southeast and the north. For millions of rural and urban poor, firewood is the cheapest energy source and they obtain it at the cost of grave damage to the environment prompting uncontrolled migration to cities and other locales with ancillary risks of crime and unrest as different groups struggle for control of scarce resources such as land. Or take the increasing concern about the future of oil occasioned by the shale gas revolution and the return of Iran into the oil market and its security implications vis-à-vis the pressure on the nation’s finances. This is an issue that requires scenario planning and options appraisal with all of its attendant security implications by our national security strategists. With this sort of perspective, it is clear that security services must be invited to play a prominent role in crafting development strategies where their insights on the ramifications of policy for national security will prove invaluable.

Civil – Military – Security Relations in the Era of Democratization

In 1999, one of the main challenges we faced as a nation was that of how to achieve democratic control of the military and ensure its restrictions to the barracks. Having been in power for almost a quarter of a century, the armed forces had become highly politicized with what the historian Max Siollun describes as a “coup culture” entrenched in its institutional psyche. Our previous democratic experiments in the First, Second and Third Republics had been cut short by adventurous soldiers. The concern was legitimate considering the strong perception that the electoralism that produced the dawn of civilian rule was more of a reconfiguration of the political space, rather than a transformation of our politics. Indeed, the fact that the political space also encountered a dominant strain of ex-military generals in politics including the eventual winner of the election underscored a feeling of neo-militarism, rather than a genuine democracy. Thus, establishing the primacy of civilian command authority was crucial to guaranteeing the long term stability of the Fourth Republic. Fourteen years on, we have made very significant advances in this area. Post 1999, the military was placed on a course of re-professionalisation, re-training and re-orientation to exorcise it of residual tendencies towards political adventurism and position it as a competent fighting force in a democratic milieu.

This approach has been quite successful. Even in the most challenging moments of the Fourth Republic, whether during transitions from one administration to another, or during that period of uncertainty that surrounded the late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua’s precarious health or in the course of addressing a deadly terrorist insurgency, the armed forces have given no indication of any temptation, much less desire, to seize power. On the contrary, the signals from senior military figures and from the military establishment as a whole have been unequivocally affirmative of civilian command authority. The military high command has, in word and deed, affirmed the primacy of the elected president as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and as the embodiment of the sovereign will of the Nigerian people; and just as importantly, its willingness as an institution to submit itself to that will. However, caution ought to remain the watchword because of our seeming inability to extricate the military from purely policing and civilian activities.

This is one area in which there is still room for substantial improvement is that of civil-military relations. Since 1999, the military has been assigned to deal with eruptions of ethno-religious violence, escalating crime levels such as endemic ransom kidnapping and peace-keeping. These assignments have brought it more into the terrain of what is traditionally viewed as the domain of policing and with that greater contact with civilians in the course of their operations. In some situations, this contact has been characterized by tension owing to the natural friction that occurs when the military is inserted into civil life, misunderstandings on both sides as to the rules of engagement and avoidable excesses. Indeed, according to the NSA, the military is now involved in joint-police military operations in virtually every state of the Federation because of the loss of faith in our police’ capacity to enforce law.

To be fair, the military has demonstrated the willingness to sanction its members for unprofessional conduct in such assignments. However, it is the general fabric of civil-military relations that requires tending. Greater liaison between the military and host communities is necessary to create a conducive operational environment. In particular, public relations efforts should be aimed at casting the military as partners in forging communal peace and security rather than as an occupational force which is the default assumption in a society traumatized by military rule. The successful repositioning of the military has been accompanied by the sea change in the comportment of security services since 1999. During the military era, security services operated with a paradigm of regime security that conflated the personal security of the head of state with that of national security. As a result, national security concerns were personalised. The entire establishment was primed to guard against threats against the person and power of the head of state such as coups. Such personalisation of power and national security considerations led to institutional and systemic vulnerabilities. For instance, while resources were invested in the protection of the head of state, there was comparatively little investment in securing our borders or equipping the police. Indeed, in all the years of military rule – the police was deliberately denuded, humiliated and de-professionalised such that it began to reflect the self-fulfilling prophecies of an untrustworthy institution often seen as the ‘agents of insecurity’ in popular parlance.

The security services were wielded as a hammer and so everything in sight resembled a nail. Overt and unsubtle force was favoured over rigorous intelligence-gathering. Fortunately 1999 brought a wind of change in security sector governance but even then the reform of the security sector remains largely cosmetic. Although, the transition to civil rule has brought about a notable shift from the regime security paradigm of the past to a national security paradigm that focuses on structural vulnerabilities, the authoritarian legacies of the past are still very much present in the functioning of some elements within the security system – as often discovered when dealing with political issues. Rather than the mutual paranoia that characterised the sector during military rule and led agencies to spy on and even undermine each other, inter-service coordination has improved and there is a new emphasis on mutual vigilance. The services have also adopted a new regime of openness in contrast to military era opacity. The place of improved civil-military/security relations also appears to be receiving an improved response with the establishment of offices responsible for civil-military affairs in the armed forces. Spokesmen and information offices offer a new level of visibility and accessibility, with greater liaison with the media and the general public. There is still room for improvement in this area but it is fair to say that Nigeria’s security and intelligence services are no longer viewed with dread as instruments of state terror as was the case during the military era.

Security Sector Synergy and Inter-Agency Cooperation

The multiplicity of actors in the security sectors can often engender conflict. The profusion of agencies can cause a functional overlap as well as a confusion of roles, charters and mandates. Territoriality in such a situation is natural with each agency protecting its turf from perceived encroachment by rivals. In the worst cases, such territoriality can undermine national security when agencies neglect or outrightly refuse to share intelligence with each other. This has certainly been an issue in the Nigerian security sector. But this is by no means a problem peculiar to the Nigerian security establishment.

Prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America, the US intelligence community was wracked by similar rivalries. Relations between various agencies were sufficiently mutually antagonistic for them to withhold information from each other. In the inquest that followed the attacks, it became clear that lack of cooperation between agencies was a contributory factor to the vulnerability that had led to the attacks. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Intelligence were efforts to more efficiently harmonize the different efforts in the intelligence sector.

In Nigeria, similar engineering may be necessary to prevent a break down in institutional discipline. Inter-agency rivalries have snowballed into armed confrontations. Clashes between Civil Defence Corps and the Police or between the Police and the military have been reported. Such deadly rivalries have no place in a progressive national security paradigm. In order for us to adequately confront the varied and complex threats facing Nigeria, synergy is vital. But for synergy to develop, it is also important to even possess a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes the security community and the security sector, formal and informal. Despite the preponderance of joint task forces composed of elements from the military, security and law enforcement bureaucracies dealing with various multiple situations, there is a need to continue cooperation between different agencies.

Such cooperation can be promoted through formal institutional channels such as the strengthening of the National Security Adviser’s office and the National Security Council. It can also be promoted by the establishment of a national intelligence database under the office of the national security adviser with shared access by designated agencies creating a common pool of information that precludes wasteful duplication of effort. Secondly, cooperation can be cultivated through informal channels among senior officials of various agencies. When the leadership is demonstrably inclined towards inter-agency cooperation, that predisposition filters downward to guide the operational orientation of the services on the ground.

 

Dysfunctional Federalism and the National Security Architecture

But perhaps the greatest challenge to national security sector management in Nigeria is the uncertainty around what has become known as the ‘national question’. Our entire crisis response and security emergency preparedness architecture is being undermined by a systemic deformity peculiar to Nigerian federalism. Years of authoritarian rule have resulted in what has become known as unitary-federalism with the over-whelming influence of the centre in the affairs of the country and this has manifested in various ways. For example, State governors are regarded as their states’ chief security officers with ultimate responsibility for keeping their citizens safe and secure. But in reality, governors have no command over any area of the Nigerian security apparatus. We have no control over the police, the armed forces, the paramilitary agencies or the security and intelligence departments. Control over all these agencies is centralised and vested in the federal presidency. Yet, consistent advocacy for professional policing and multi-level policing is often pooh-poohed by interested role-players and not for reasons related to security management but often turf-control.

In practical terms, the relations between governors and the security establishment is convoluted. Governors are expected to liaise constantly with the state commissioners of police, state directors of the State Security Service and the state commandants of other units. Yet no direct official relationship exists between governors and these security chiefs. These security chieftains are expected to act on the recommendations of governors to deal with local security situations but must authenticate such recommendations through the chain of command which connects them to their Abuja headquarters.

In a fluid real time scenario, the process of decision-making is paralyzed by the cumbersome chain of command. Governors issue instructions that may be second-guessed by an authority in Abuja. The convention that requires security chiefs in states to first authenticate governors’ instructions with federal authorities means that there is a significant lag in response time. Often, this means that local security situations can escalate leading to a greater cost in life and property before action is finally taken. To put it simply, the over-centralized nature of the security apparatus is itself a security risk.

Moreover, the over-centralization of security administration can lead to unsavoury situations in which political interests hijack the machinery of security and law enforcement in furtherance of narrow political ends with negative collateral impact on law and order. Recently, we have witnessed such a scenario in Rivers State where external forces have orchestrated political unrest in the state aimed at undermining and possibly removing the state governor. Most disturbingly, we have also seen a serving state police commissioner clearly interpret his role as that of antagonizing and subverting the state governor as a proxy for rival political interests.

This turn of events is dangerous for several reasons. It violates the spirit of federalism. It negates the principle that the law should be an impartial arbiter operating beyond the constraints of partisan politics. Where an officer of the law and a security chief acts as a willing proxy of political interests, he not only demystifies the law and disgraces his uniform, he also undermines the rule of law and encourages impunity. Lastly, such acts of brazen bullying with the instruments of state could motivate governors to resort to self-help and extra-constitutional devices to counter their political rivals. Given all these debilities that arise from the over-centralized nature of security administration, it is not surprising that governors have called for the establishment of state police authorities. These demands are not rooted only in the politics of self-preservation but in the practical realization of the limitations of the current security arrangements. The fact is that Nigeria’s security needs are of such complexity, scale and variety that they cannot be met solely by the federal government.

We need a new framework of decentralized law enforcement and security administration while putting in place institutional measures to protect the system from political hijack. In Borno State, we have recently witnessed the tide turn against terrorists in Maiduguri. A big part of that turn was the emergence of neighbourhood vigilante groups now popularly known as civilian JTF (joint task force) which undertook to root insurgents out of their hiding places in their communities the way Kamajors – the local militia worked with peacekeeping forces during the Sierra Leone civil war. The military adroitly recognized the usefulness of local intelligence in dealing with a force that hides itself in the midst of the civilian population and co-opted the neighbourhood vigilantes. This underscores the multi-dimensional approach to managing violent extremism rather than depending exclusively on a ‘law and order’ approach that discounts the importance of intelligence which is where the ‘civilian-JTF’ has become useful. Undoubtedly, every counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations require adequate information or intelligence on the terrorists and their disposition, their habits, their source(s) of support, including weapons, funding, and mercenaries; their ideology and ultimate goals, capabilities, membership and recruitment strategies; mode of operation; leadership, motivations; affiliations etc. The critical question here is how much of these do we know about Boko Haram? How coordinated is the information gathered by the various intelligence agencies? How objective is our assessment of the situation? So far, we have been saddled with too many conspiracy theories about Boko Haram internally and we have often depended on outsiders to do our job for us. The way we have gone about celebrating the designation of Boko Haram and Ansaru as FTOs by the US government in itself depicts a form of helplessness and lack of clarity on our part without fully understanding the implication of such a designation.

There is room for much creative thinking on the issue of decentralized security and law enforcement. We need a multi-layered, multi-pronged security strategy that leverages local community initiatives as first responders, early warning systems that pre-empt tensions before they flare into conflict; and networks them with federal agencies. Our conception of partnership in the security sector should not be limited to inter-agency collaboration; a spirit of strategic partnership should inform the relations between the actors in the security sector and actors in civil society.

In the new paradigm of security consciousness, security is every one’s concern not just the arcane science of a few rarefied experts. Securing our communities means that infrastructure and urban planning must be guided not only by environmental impact assessment reports but also by security considerations. Conventions which site strategic national assets such as pipelines and military installations outside civilian-populated areas have to be strictly enforced. The location and architecture of schools, hospitals and markets which, in the age of asymmetrical warfare are soft targets for terrorists, have to be guided by this awareness.

National security now calls for vigilance at every level beginning from individual households to residents and neighbourhood associations. While closed circuit TV systems will increasingly become fixtures of our towns and cities, the first line of defence against the forces of anarchy will still be “human surveillance” and communal vigilance, an orientation that utilizes citizens as the human intelligence assets of first resort. In the face of new threats and opportunities, our national security now largely depends upon our capacity for responsible security-conscious citizenship expressed in the imperatives of mutual vigilance.

Beyond the Military Option: Realism and Holism in Security Sector Governance

Our ultimate aim must be to devise a national security strategy that harnesses all the resources and tools of security and law enforcement at our disposal. Such a strategy would be more circumspect in the deployment of the military in internal security emergencies. The past decade has witnessed the unprecedented and liberal use of military assets in ways that encourage more rather than less militarisation of the public space. The military has been deployed in a joint task force in the Niger Delta mandated to stop oil theft, the vandalization of energy infrastructure, gangsterism and piracy. In the southeast, soldiers have been sent in to arrest the epidemic of ransom kidnapping. In Ebonyi, they have been deployed to put an end to communal conflict. In the Middle Belt, they are part of a special task force deployed to police the Plateau after a spate of sectarian violence. Across Northern Nigeria, soldiers have been sent in to undertake duties ranging from counter-insurgency to highway policing.

While the military has largely conducted these missions with uncommon valiance, it is also a fact that the overly liberal use of the armed forces has its drawbacks. Observers have noted that the military is in the midst of the largest peacetime military deployment since the civil war. The possibility of mission creep, role-inflation, overextension of our troops and stretching them too thin is an ever present risk. Military preparedness in terms of readiness to repulse possible external aggression is sure to have been impacted by the burdens of internal security management now being borne by them.

The last decade has also shown the dangers inherent in using a specialist tool like the military as the weapon of first resort in internal security situations. Army operations in Odi in Bayelsa State and Zaki Biam in Benue, aimed at neutralizing paramilitaries, turned into public relations disasters for the federal government. In both instances, courts have ruled in favour of compensation for the communities in what amounts to a firm judicial rebuke to both civil and military authorities for the unconstitutional use of excessive force.

The constant and somewhat casual insertion of the military into civilian and communal contexts also carries the risks of rolling back the gains made in civil-military relations since 1999. From a strategic point of view, it is necessary that the military’s role as an elite specialist weapon of last resort be fastidiously preserved while we leverage other resources and tools that are part of the security sector’s arsenal. This means re-tooling, re-training and re-arming the police force – much neglected in the schema of security planning – and recognizing their premier role in the field of law enforcement and the first line in national security management. Effective policing in a democratic environment requires the civilianization of the service. The portrait of the Nigerian police officer wielding an assault rifle is an unflattering portrayal that conveys the impression that it is a military unit and entrenches a misconception of identity in the minds of the police operatives themselves.

The police should be and is, in fact, the law enforcement and security tool of first resort. It should shed its paramilitary comportment in favour of an institutional pre-disposition towards public and community relations, building trust with the citizenry and using such relations as intelligence channels in its mandate of crime prevention, investigation and law enforcement. The police have long been neglected in favour of the army in a trend dating back to the military regimes of the 1980s. During the Second Republic, the federal government equipped the police and was clearly interested in its utility as a coercive institution that could serve the political interests of the ruling party. Subsequent military regimes pursued a strategy of degrading the police apparently to prevent it from become a countervailing force in the polity. Years of such degradation severely compromised its capacity for mandate fulfillment.

The military’s dominant role in political life also meant that the armed forces, specifically, the army customarily got the lion’s share of public resources. The soldiers in power quite logically sought to favour their own. The preference for the military option even for tasks that could ordinarily be classified as being under civilian police jurisdiction, is a vestige of military era attitudes.

No reform of the police force will be complete without a corresponding wide-ranging reform of the entire criminal justice system. The prosecutors, the judiciary and the correctional institutions are strategic partners with the police service in the law enforcement and security architecture. Thus, for example, strengthening the capacity of the police to carry out investigations will count for very little if the accused can be released from jail for political reasons. If the judiciary itself does not abide by the rule of law, it becomes difficult to make the case that police or prison officials need to protect the civil and human rights of those suspected, accused or found guilty of crimes. It is therefore imperative to supplement reformatory efforts to strengthen the police service with parallel efforts to transform the judiciary and the correction system. [5] It would appear that a measure of distrust of and impatience with the judiciary has led to the preference of the military option even when the situation requires conventional police work. The effective militarization of police duties is not good for the military, the police or the development of our democracy.

The judiciary is not only a key component of the effective enforcement of laws; it also has a vital role to play in ensuring that democratic principles are adhered to in security sector governance. The judiciary is constitutionally empowered to examine and interpret the constitutionality of laws relating to security services, guarding against impunity, official excesses and abuse of power in the sector. For these reasons, it is paramount that the judiciary be insulated from political intrigues that will compromise its integrity. [6]

Effective security sector governance also depends on the quality of oversight provided by both statutory and non-statutory entities. National Assembly committees charged with overseeing the security sector have a vital role to play in ensuring that security services are not abused. This is a particularly important point. One legacy of military rule is that the presidency’s constitutional powers are vast. There is both actual and assumed latitude for presidential discretion in the direction of the military and the security establishment. Such unquestioned latitude leaves ample room for errors of judgment if not unconstitutional acts. This is why legislative oversight is of crucial importance. [7]

Civil society groups also have a vital role to play in monitoring the conduct of actors in the security sector. The object is to promote the adherence to democratic principles that can all too often lapse into tyrannical opacity. In a democracy, the adversarial tensions between the security establishment and civil society are mostly unnecessary. While it is true that security services thrive on a measure of secrecy while civil society desires openness, such differences need not become an implacable enmity. Both entities need to see themselves as partners in peace and security-building.

 

Conclusion

The successful outcome of the imperatives discussed so far are hugely dependent on the institutional and human capacities of those at the helms of affairs. In this regards, poor leadership remains the greatest bane of not only the security sector, but indeed every aspect of our national life. Nigeria still experiences significant competence gaps throughout the public sector. The political elite have also proven unable to rise above primordial interests and leverage the moral high-ground of detribalised patriotic objectivity in confronting our security challenges. [8]

While a lot has been said about regulating the powers of the commander-in-chief and the heads of the various security agencies, our prospects for evolving a functional national security strategy still requires visionary leadership devoid of the inclinations to pander to the whims of identity politics. Our nation more than ever before needs transformational leaders who understand the enormity of the offices they occupy and are adequately prepared to harness all resources and mediate all tendencies towards achieving national cohesion and security.

Thank you.

References

[1] http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/07/nigeria-loses-11bn-to-oil-theft-vandalism-neiti/

[2] http://www.punchng.com/business/business-economy/nigeria-losing-n1-5bn-daily-to-oil-theft-jonathan/

[3] Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat, The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge in an Uncertain World (Oxford University Press 2010) p.87

[4] Ibid p.88

[5] Security Sector Governance in Africa: A Handbook, Nicole Ball and Kayode Fayemi (CDD: 2004)

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid