. . . Says NIA, Police need comprehensive overhaul

A civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has tasked the incoming administration and especially the President and the National Assembly on the urgency of the moment to comprehensively overhaul the operational modus operandi, the staffing and professional upgrading of the operatives to prevent the persistent and intermittent intelligence failures that occasioned the rapid decline of national security in the past eight years.

HURIWA said the incessant attacks and mass killings of Nigerians, including security operatives, by armed non-state actors, are intolerable unless Nigeria has become a failed state.

HURIWA said that “the outgoing government of President Muhammadu Buhari introduced selfish, illegal and unconstitutional policies and practices” regarding the staffing and appointments of heads of these relevant national security outfits to such a ridiculous extent that it almost became the official norm that to rise to the peak of the professional career in any of the intelligence-generating security agencies, that “the candidate must be a Muslim by religious persuasion and of same Fulani, Hausa, Kanuri ethnicities like the appointing authority.”

HURIWA stated that without doubt, the extensive breakdown of law and order in all parts of Nigeria in the last eight years happened because the majority of Southerners believe that the security forces were only headed by the Northern Muslims and therefore there was a lack of patriotism to the extent that it became difficult for Citizens to give actionable intelligence to the security forces because the President has shown that he has an ethno-religious agenda in the operational modalities of the Armed Forces of Nigeria.

The rights group said it was shocking that even when the Muslim Northerners dominate all the internal security operations as the heads, the North West States of Zamfara, Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto have become operational bases of top terrorists and bandits.

HURIWA blamed large-scale compromises by these top security chiefs from Muslim Northern Nigeria for the large scale smuggling of weapons of mass destruction that were coming into Nigeria from Chad, Niger and Northern Cameroon inhabited by native speakers of Fulfulde which is same as the Nigerian Fulani speakers affiliated to virtually all the heads of the top intelligence and security institutions in the country.

The group also said that it was regrettable that for eight years, President Muhammadu Buhari did not practice the management strategy of sanctioning security heads for the gross failures of intelligence occasioning mass killings of Nigerians because of nepotism and tribalism which were the hallmarks of his eight years of “treacherous leadership of Nigeria.”

HURIWA stated thus: “One case that calls for the immediate overhaul of the DSS, the Police, amongst few other security institutions, including the NIA, is the kidnapping of Kebbi State school girls that are still in the forests two years after they were taken away and the persons responsible are known to the government but they are operating freely to some extent that an investigative report stated that after collecting a huge amount of money as ransom, a notorious bandit kingpin, Dogo Daji, has released four of the 11 remaining students of the Federal Government Girls’ College Yauri, Kebbi State.

Citing an investigative report by PRNigeria, HURIWA said it was gathered that two of the released students returned with two babies delivered while in captivity. Dogo Daji had insisted that some conditions must be met by Kebbi State government before the remaining girls could be released.

It would be recalled that the 11 students were kidnapped when bandits invaded their school on June 17, 2021.

“HURIWA is therefore describing the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari as that which has destroyed the security forces through nepotistic appointments to such extent that incompetence and corruption in the security services have systematically denied the intelligence-generating and security institutions, the capacity and competence to gather actionable intelligence to stop terrorists, kidnappers and sundry armed non-state actors from constituting the kind of spectacular threats they have become against the national security of Nigeria,” the statement added.