…Says restructured NSA poses security risk to the country

By Emmanuel Elebeke

As demand for restructuring of Office of the National Security Adviser ( NSA) gathers momentum , Non State Actors Consultative Forum( NOSACOF) has advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu not to bow to pressure of desperate Nigerians pushing the cause for their personal and political interest.

A Bill seeking to establish the office of the NSA is currently in the National Assembly.

The Bill by some members of the parliament aims to change the provision that establishes the office of the NSA and allow the NSA to recruit and establish its own staff similar to existing government agencies and parastatals.

Drawing the attention of President Tinubu to the danger of endorsing the new NSA restructuring Bill in a letter by NOSACOF, Convener Abdulrazaq Alkali, dated dated January 9, he said a restructured NSA poses security risk to the country.

The letter reads in part: “Mr President Sir, the present push for a Bill by some members of your government to make the National Assembly change the provision that establish the office of the NSA and allow the NSA to recruit and establish own staffs similar to existing government agencies and parastatals is ill informed and can set a very bad precedence. First and foremost, passing this Bill will mean that the overall office of the NSA infrastructure will have to be overhauled to avoid conflict with the sections of the constitution that establishes it, or the section of the constitution will have to be changed to accommodate the Bill”.

“Also, the end product of the Bill is re-structuring the office of the NSA into an agency or parastatal with unlimited privileges over the already existing intelligence agencies such as National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Department of State Service (DSS), and Military. This has the potential of creating many overlaps in the functions of these agencies and will further widen disunity, rivalry and lack of synergy between the various security agencies”.

The Forum added that, presently the NSA is the fulcrum of maintaining and enforcing co-operation between the security agencies, noting that, one key component of its success is due to the fact that it derives staffs and collaborations from the various security agencies, such that the agencies do not see the office of the NSA as a rival agency.

“Secondly, the normal practice is that the NSA can obtain trained and experienced staff from the security agencies (i.e., staffs who are already trained and experienced to fill into national security roles). Thus, restructuring the office of the NSA into an agency and allowing it to recruit its own staff at present will very much reduce the efficiency in the operations of the office of the NSA. This is because the office of the NSA will not be able to fill the roles with candidates of the desired expertise and speciality, it will end of spending years (may be decades) and billions of Naira to train these staffs to the desired level of competency and the other security agencies will be reluctant to share staffs with the NSA as they will feel they are no longer stakeholders in the office of NSA”,
NOSACOF Convener affirmed.

As things stand today, the Forum reminded President Tinubu that the office of the NSA is the only office that works with highly professional and skilled staff extracted from the various security agencies mainly based on merit, skills and capacity.

“If allowed to follow the route of the other agencies and parastatals, there is the risk of politicizing the agency through biased and unjustified recruitments as witnesses in many government agencies (including some security agencies) and if this happens in the office of the NSA it will not serve the interest of our national security.”