By Obi Nwakanma

In the aftermath of the Boko Haram bombing of the Louis Edet House, special agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation,FBI, promptly arrived Abuja to begin to collect data on the incident. Some newspaper reports also claimed the arrival of the Central Intelligence Agency,CIA of the US. I suppose in this climate of global terror, there is increasing transnational cooperation between and among the various spy agencies of the world and the gumshoes who pit-patter around each other to stem the rise of militant terrorism.

The Nigeria Police Force was too distraught to be of any use. It showed itself again incapable, in its current form, of defending and protecting the state for which it has been established. Indeed, any self-respecting national police system would feel the affront of another nation’s police arriving into its own domestic sphere to police it. That is exactly what happened. FBI came to Nigeria to police the Nigeria Police Force!

In the inter-agency meeting between Nigeria’s various internal security agencies held with the team of FBI agents and chaired by Nigeria’s National Security Adviser, General Owoeye Azazi, the Nigeria Police Force was roundly berated for its embarrassing incompetence and lack of robust policing.

Its embarrassing and clumsy reaction, its lack of alertness and a remarkably confused and disorganised follow-up to simple, basic investigative protocol revealed that the Nigeria Police Force is a frayed and lethargic institution. It proved to being an absent force in these matters. Its intelligence gathering division was in decay.

Its technical capacity was in dire straits. Its general state of being was subject to question. To put it simply, the Nigeria Police exists only on paper and at the many roadblocks they have erected across the land to collect tolls from an intimidated citizenry. It is what we may as well call a “Wetin-you-carry” police, whose timeworn method of crime-bursting remains the stop-and-search method – an unofficial form of highway robbery. They erect roadblocks on the highway and interrogate all vehicular movements.

“Comot for ground!” “Open ya boot!” Wetin you carry?” That is the extent of Nigeria’s internal security doctrine as designed and perfected by its extremely primitive police service. Even on the bombing of the Force Headquarters, it took the FBI, the police and intelligence service of a foreign nation to come and create a crime-scene cordon. Even at that, the perimeter was so violated that crucial evidence was damaged.

The sum of the debate circled around the question of the boundaries and limitations of Nigeria’s sovereignty. At the heart of the doctrine of sovereignty is the theory that a nation exists only if it has the capacity to determine and maintain its own internal security and defend itself against external aggression. Among the greatest symbols of a nation is its own police service.

No serious nation invites or even accepts the services of even the friendliest nation in matters of its own internal security. Even as Nigerians accept the friendship and goodwill of the United States of America, across the section of people whom I interviewed for this essay, there was a consistent feeling of frustration against what one source, a former Senior Research Fellow at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs calls “a serious error of judgment.”

That error of judgment in his estimation was for the Jonathan administration to permit FBI, even in the face of Boko Haram terrorism, strategic access to Nigeria’s national Intel and domestic security infrastructure. It is now clear to Nigerians and to the rest of the world that Nigeria has a weak national security and intelligence capability.

It seems also like Nigeria no longer has an autonomous Federal Government as it now depends on a foreign police and intelligence service to handle a flash-in-the pan group like the Boko Haram. We must remember that in 1980 during the Shagari presidency, Nigeria dealt with the Maitasine sect, the Boko Haram of the time.

The Federal Government did not go to America to invite FBI and CIA or to England for Scotland Yard to deal with that domestic sectarian insurrection. They moved troops led by Major-General David Jemibewon from One Division in coordination with the Nigeria Police to rout the radical Islamist movement decisively.

The shift in national mentality and the extent of decay of key national institutions reflect the fundamental dissonance of the contemporary Nigerian state. Even so, it is decay that has been long in the making. Some time in 1982, the late Sam Mbakwe, then governor of Imo State, in a fit of pique, suggested tongue-in-cheek that Nigerians should perhaps consider inviting the British to re-colonise us, since it is clear that we do not seem to know what to do with a free nation.

I should re-echo Mbakwe and suggest that Nigerians should seriously consider a plebiscite to formally hand this country to the government of the United States to run either as its colonial outpost or its 51st state, since it seems that we have no use for sovereignty. If we must depend on FBI to solve Nigeria’s domestic crimes, we may as well go the whole nine yards and sign a treaty of protection with the United States. Otherwise Nigeria must learn from America’s more solid virtues among which is to be self-sufficient and to defend the sovereign homeland with pride as well as within the rule of law.

The government of the United States would neither invite nor tolerate the presence of a foreign nation’s police and intelligence services in its domestic affairs. It would be an impeachable offence against any US president who orders such a move. Nigeria’s sovereign status is increasingly an apparent sham. It cannot maintain a police system worth its name, and it permits the penetration of its sovereign space by another national police system even in the name of international cooperation.

Among the benefits of formally inviting the US to come and govern us is that Nigerians would now carry a passport that would read, “Protected Subject of the United States.” Nigerians would no longer have to vote and elect corrupt leaders whose expensive habits and privileges they pay for and who cost a fortune to maintain even if they have no clue how to run the nation.

The Americans will appoint competent viceroys who will cut Nigeria’s bloated and incompetent service, recruit and appoint competent personnel who would run efficient municipal services, run decent public research universities, create appropriate intergovernmental synergy and solve the intractable riddle of the national question.

They will save Nigeria from Boko Haram and Niger Delta militants. Nigeria will then assume its proper status as a failed experiment, and prove with scant doubt and without shame that the African is incapable of self-government.