Cloak and Dagger Men’s Brawl

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY by MAHMUD JEGA

Even before Malam Nuhu Ribadu settles down on his desk as the new National Security Adviser [NSA] to the President, a small Titan submersible-like implosion occurred within his intelligence and security domain. For the second time since October 2020, one print and several online newspapers reported late last week that a court ordered Ambassador Mohamed Dauda’s reinstatement as Director General of the National Intelligence Agency [NIA], the Nigerian version of CIA. The 2020 story was about a National Industrial Court [NIC] ruling while last week’s one stemmed from a Court of Appeal, Abuja Division ruling.

Even before I saw a response at the weekend from NIA’s Head of Legal Department [a rare event, for NIA hardly ever makes public comments], I wondered how a court could order anyone’s reinstatement to a political position. Could a court, for example, order the president to reinstate a minister, military service chief, Special Adviser or the political head of any government agency, all of whom serve at his pleasure, according to the Constitution? It turned out that both the October 2020 and last week’s stories were important reporting mistakes because what NIC ordered, which the Appeal Court upheld, was Dauda’s reinstatement as an NIA director, being a civil service position. It is a complicated matter; even if Dauda had not been dismissed from NIA in 2018, he would have retired in December 2019, having attained the age for retirement.

Both courts’ rulings were on the technical ground that the correct disciplinary procedure was not followed in effecting the former Acting Director General’s dismissal from service. It had nothing to do with the substantive issues, which were very substantial. NIA is not a visible organization. The stories I read about it since its creation in 1986 [alongside DSS and DIA] must be only a handful, but I find it disturbing that such a key agency deeply involved with this country’s national security should be dragged into the fray due to personality quarrels.

The first time that many Nigerians heard of NIA was in late 2017 when EFCC agents stormed a flat at Ikoyi, Lagos and seized $44m cash stashed there by its then Director General, Ayo Oke. He said the money was for clandestine operations. Then President Buhari apparently did not believe that because he suspended Oke, instituted a probe headed by then Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, and ultimately sacked the DG. Oke was never tried in open court, most probably because such a trial will spill the beans out of this country’s intelligence operations. Hot on the heels of the Ikoyi fiasco, NIA was soon in the news again from January 2018 when Ambassador Dauda was replaced as its Acting Director General by a substantive DG, Ahmed Rufa’i Abubakar.

According to information that leaked at the time, Dauda, who was Ambassador to Chad, was recalled to head NIA in acting capacity as the most senior director because Ambassador Arab Yadam, who took over in acting capacity from Oke, retired after only two months. It wasn’t done neatly; State House appointed Dauda to act without a letter, just a phone call. He acted for only one month before a substantive Director General was appointed in January 2018.

What followed Dauda’s replacement as NIA’s head was without precedent in Nigeria’s public service, in its police, military or intelligence services. First, documents from the new DG’s secret personnel file were rapidly leaked on social media platforms. Some stories questioned his nationality because though he is a Katsina native, he went to primary school in Chad, only to return home for secondary and tertiary education. I thought that was strange because many Nigerians did primary and high school in Europe, North America and Arabia. Some even acquired British accent, returned home, dodged NYSC and still made it to top positions in the country. Is it because Chad is a mere African neighbour? Many other allegations were made against the new DG, including that he has a foreign wife, which the Buhari presidency at the time said it had investigated but were unfounded.

At the time of the change of baton, we read in newspapers that the outgoing Acting DG moved $44 million out of NIA’s vaults to the National Security Adviser’s office in order, Dauda later told a National Assembly committee, to prevent his incoming successor from pilfering it. It was the strangest thing that I ever heard of in Nigerian public service. If the President, using his constitutional power, appoints someone to head an MDA, what is the outgoing head’s own [to use Nigerian parlance] to protect its money from the incoming head? $44million is even small by government standards. If, for example, the President changes the Finance Minister, Central Bank governor, Accountant General or CEO of NNPCL, these outgoing persons should take desperate steps to protect the agency’s money from the incoming head? There is even the small matter of logistics; where could an outgoing CBN or NNPCL chief move all its money for safe keeping? Yet, that was what Ambassador Dauda did, according to media stories at the time. I thought all he needed to do was to reflect what he was leaving behind in the handover notes.  

A second amazing thing happened in February 2018. Ambassador Dauda appeared before a House of Representatives committee and read out a sensational petition, which was leaked to the media. I have been reading TIME magazine since when I was twelve years old. It was only during the 1987-88 Iran-Contra scandal that I recall secret intelligence material being mentioned before a US Congress committee. Dauda made many charges against some persons, which I will not repeat here in order not to also fall foul of national security laws.

Weeks later, stories broke that NIA dismissed Dauda from its services. National Industrial Court ruled in 2020 that the correct procedure was not followed because the applicable law for disciplining him is Article 8(1) and (2) of Instrument No. NIA 1 of the National Security Agencies Act, which was not complied with. Instead, NIA’s Senior Management Committee set up a Special Management Staff Disciplinary Committee that invited Dauda to appear before it due to “a wave of unbridled leakages of official documents, publication of falsehood concerning the Agency’s affairs, as well as unauthorized movement of funds from the Agency’s vaults.”

Though Dauda refused to appear before the panel, it went ahead and found him guilty of “breach of confidentiality, violation of oath of secrecy/allegiance, misapplication of Agency funds, unlawful petition, disobedience of lawful orders, falsehood and prevarication, injurious rumour peddling and violation of Section 108 on unauthorized publication in the media.” Among men engaged in international cloak and dagger operations on behalf of Nigeria, these were serious charges indeed. NIA’s Senior Management Committee then dismissed Dauda from service, “with the approval of the President.” It said even after dismissal, he must still observe NIA’s oath of secrecy. It was this dismissal that both Industrial Court and Appeal Court have set aside. Why didn’t NIA send Dauda before the appropriate disciplinary committee?  Because the committee was supposed to be headed by the Deputy Director General and it had none at the time, its officials later told a House panel.

Dauda was unhappy with his non-confirmation because as he told the Reps committee, he could not return to Chad as ambassador because his one-month stint as Acting NIA DG had blown his cover as an intelligence agent. Since then, many more strange stories about NIA and its internal workings have surfaced in the media, clearly a continuation of that fight from 2018. In June 2019, there was a petition by “concerned NIA staff” alleging favouritism in the nomination of its officers to serve as Nigerian ambassadors abroad. I have been reading newspapers since my primary school days, but I never knew before then that our secret services have a certain quota of career ambassadors. This is not something that citizens need to know. Foreign spy agencies probably knew it already, since they do the same thing themselves.

That petition went many steps further. It mentioned the names of some of the ambassadorial nominees sent to Senate, outed them as secret service officers, and mentioned others that they were going to replace abroad. It was a bonanza for foreign spy agencies; now they knew which Nigerian diplomats are engaged in intelligence work. In any authoritarian country, one could be executed for revealing such information. Even in the US, a law passed by Congress in 1982 prohibited the disclosure of covert CIA officers’ identities. In July 2003, New York Times columnist Robert D. Novak outed Valerie Plame as a CIA officer after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, criticized President George Bush over Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby had leaked the info to Novak; he got 30 months in prison for that.

Some readers will probably allege that by wading into this matter, I am a closet cloak and dagger agent. The nearest I ever got to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia was when the late Ahmadu Audu Abubakar pointed it to me from inside a taxi cab. I also want to remind skeptics of something that former British MI5 agent Peter Wright wrote in his highly publicized 1987 book, Spycatcher, which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried very hard to suppress. He said people think that spy agencies get most of their information from cloak and dagger operations but that in reality, MI5 gets 75% of its intelligence information simply by reading newspapers and other public documents between the lines. In other words, journalists like me are the ones that do the hard spadework. Spies only sit back, sip tea and biscuit, analyse it and claim credit.