NIGERIA NATIONAL SECURITY- PRESIDENT’S POWER IS PREDOMINANT...But he needs Help! John O. Ojikutu - July 2011

Introduction

A nation’s security we are often told, rest on the availability of many resources which include human, natural, technological, political to name but a few. But Nigeria does not seem to lack too much of these, yet the current level of internal insecurity appears to be tasking the strength of our security forces far beyond their capability. It is equally testing the resolve of the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in taking decisive action to arrest the situation that is gradually developing to snowballing into full scale gorilla warfare. What most observers believe we seem to lack, particularly to confront the escapade of our homegrown terrorists, is our inability to organise the available resources, arrange and focus them within a coherent intelligent pattern. This organisational capacity which we lack is a prime factor in the management of the national security. This capacity depends on the individuals and the leadership in the national security structure and organisation.

Probably sensitive to the danger of militarism and domestic militancy, the makers of our constitution fashioning it with that of US, designed the highest elected government official, the President, as the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and endowed him with the powers to issue proclamation of war, declaration of state of emergency, suppression of insurrection, determining the operational use of the Police and the Armed Forces, but all these can come to pass  only with a National Assembly resolution and approval. These precepts have remained unchanged in the last 12 years, as the President and the national legislature have developed distinctive patterns of relationships in their concern for the national security. At the same time, there are other factors profoundly influencing the shaping of our national security structure. One is the absence of powerful nations on our borders. This confidence, couple with a persistent distrust of our security forces and our aversion to war, restricted the tangible evidence of our might to just a token military establishment.

Our security forces, particularly the  Armed Forces and the Police are distinct and separate entities, established , organized, funded by separate legislation, and yet carrying  out their assigned or implied mission as best as they could with limited means and capabilities. Moreover, in their joint efforts in conducting internal security, their operations are most times marred by acrimonious controversies, confrontation, confusion, makeshift administrative expedients and organisation improvisation. The most glaring weakness often, is the lack of coordinate intelligence, adequate monitoring or the coordination of efforts among the internal security forces for the development of policies for strategic planning and for the mobilization of the human and logistic resources for the national security.

Executive Power of the President

As the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the President has the central role in the formulation, direction and execution of the national security policy and this primacy makes him predominant in national security affairs. Unfortunately, our constitution appears not to have adequately addressed national security as a separate matter, but simply granted powers to both the National Assembly and the president to “ensure peace and security of public safety and public order” and leaves the course of events to determine which of the two arms of the government have the decisive voice. In most cases constitutionally, that voice in matter of internal security has always been that of the president.

For an executive president to fulfill his national security responsibilities, he must be knowledgeable about it, and must make vital and often swift decisions, not only about the national security, but also on foreign and domestic policies, economic and social questions and myriad of other problems. All these are integrated into the framework of the overall national policy and he, ultimately he alone, can conceive and understand it. However, he still cannot achieve it effectively alone in a vacuum.

Several years ago, President Truman of USA, underlined three conditions that must be met for a president to act effectively. First, he said the president has to be on top of situations, getting the facts, and all the facts take hard work. The president, he also stated, cannot make decisions if he does not know what the alternatives are. Likewise he cannot know what the alternatives are if he does not have all the facts. Second, the president has to find the best men he can to be in his staff and his cabinet. Third, the president needs an organisation that can and will give full effort to his decisions.

To get the job done and make achievable decisions the president as the chief executive and the commander-in-chief, is constitutionally empowered to appoint all the heads and members of the entire Executive Offices in the government. These executive offices are structured into the Presidency, in the inner ring and two others in concentric circles namely the President Cabinet and some autonomous Federal Executive and Advisory Bodies consisting of Commissions, Councils and Boards. All of these are responsible for social, economic and political matters.

The Executive Office of the President in general terms, is meant to provide him with a ready flow of information on top-level problems; help him in anticipating and planning for future programme; protect him from minor and time consuming details and ensure the implementation and coordination of policies. The most prominent institution in the president executive office is the President’s Cabinet which is wholly political in its makeup and has never been capable of providing the needed assistance to him. Very often, the interests of members of the cabinet are disparate if not conflicting since they align with the interest of their various political parties’ programme and to some extent the departments they head. The Cabinet was never intended to be working staff for the president, but they are prescribed by statue and thus are accountable in some respect to the National Assembly. However, they are all directly responsible to the president as the chief executive and their primary function is to assist him.

The Presidency is the most immediate to the president and one that attracts the most attention. This office is characterized by its flexibility and the broad scope of its activities. In many respects, it is the personal staff of the president helping him in his day-to-day tasks by preparing speeches, handling correspondences, maintaining inter relationship with the National Assembly, Cabinet Ministries, Departments, Agencies and the Public, regulating the flow of papers and visitors and taking care of the details and minutiae associated with his positions. The structure and operational procedure of the presidency varies from one president to another. While a president like chief Obsanjo capped the hierarchical structure of his presidency with a Chief of Staff, Yar’Adua had a Special Assistant to the President with extensive powers.

As distinct as the functions of the executive bodies may be, they often overlap and they also impinge on the national security affairs. The national security on the other hand would normally reflect principally the president’s view on the overall national policy and on his role in formulating and coordinating internal security and territorial defence. The more important an executive or advisory body is, should determine the president’s relationship with it, its responsibility and the presidential authority it enjoys. In many cases, this would always impinge every time on the national security affair.

Among the bodies in the president’s executive office, the National Security Council (NSC) is the one that he has as his first concern because it involves the security of the nation. Other executive offices like the Ministry of Defence and the Ministries of Foreign and Internal Affairs could be directly or partially involved.  However, the clear constitutional authority vested on the president on national security over other social and economic matters can be used to enlarge the power and the composition of the National Security Council. Although the president shares part of his authority with the National Assembly which makes laws and appropriates votes for national security, he exercises initiative, authority and leadership in matter of security and neither the National Assembly nor any agency of the government can therefore initiate or carry out national security programme without the president’s approval.

An Obasanjo as president could be on top of national security matters because of a previous experience as a General, former Head of State and Commander-in-Chief. A Yar’Adua could also have an advantage of unsolicited and genuine advice on national security from political interest and committed ex-security and service chiefs from his geographical zone or region. But for a President Jonathan in an unstructured and highly personalized ways of doing government business in Nigeria, he would probably need more advice than what he could possibly get from most members of the established executive and advisory bodies. He needs genuine advice and supports from committed quarters both within and outside the present formal national security structure, including the academia etc to contribute to the process of decision making in the matter of the national security. Part 1(section 25j) of the Third Schedule of the constitution surely empowers him to do that.

The National Security Council is one huge committee of representatives of many agencies that could suffer from comparative weaknesses like most other committees. The members sometimes may not always be free to adopt the broad statesmanlike attitude desired by the president but might rather depend on the views of their own departments. The result of their differences could produce presidentially approved statements on national security that could be imprecise or too broad to be applied for specific national problem. Sometimes the agencies heads may have difficulties in understanding and implementing presidential directives and they might take advantage of vaguely worded directives to do whatever they wished with the president’s directives in their own peculiar operational ways.

Some other times, clear cut views and differences of opinions or recommendation of members of the NSC could have difficulties in emerging at council meetings; Agencies Heads therefore could tend to individually bypass the council to seek the president’s ear. The result can create a breakdown in staff work and coordination that could threaten to negate the great potential value of the National Security Council. Should this happen, it could indicate that the president would need help through legislation on matter of national security. Recognition of these problems would therefore require a study on the role and procedure of the National Security Council in state security matters.

A peep into the working system of the NSC would enable us to find out what is the  knowledge behind the basis on which the quality of the national security programme planning depends or runs; how does the NSC and the president derive or generate information and intelligence about threats to national interest or security? What are the process of collection, evaluation, analysis, integration, and interpretation of intelligence information?

The knowledge of all these would enable us to know if the process adopted by the NSC can produce useful, credible, and reasonably accurate intelligence from the source. Knowledge of the process will also enable us to know if the process is well coordinated and considered by decision makers within the context of national values and objectives. Above all, we should know if information about intelligence is properly disseminated to the end users that need –to- know or to the state security forces to enable them to effectively interdict or disrupt the agents of the threats and attacks at their planning stage and not when they become operational.

Our national security programme planning suffers from the absence of an Executive National Intelligence Agency in the national security structure and this is a major factor in the national security policy. Here we rely on the different opinions of intelligence derived from various security agencies which generally are only relevant to their individual services and peculiar operations. This negates the relevance of intelligence or their value to the overall national security policy.

Doubts as to the quality of our national intelligence were engendered by the examples of its alleged failures to interdict or infiltrate the perpetrators at the planning stages of the bombing attacks on the Bonga Offshore Oil Field, Atlas Cove Onshore Fuel Depot Lagos, Mogadisu Army Barracks Abuja, the nation’s 50^th Independent Anniversary in Abuja, the Police Headquarters Abuja, incessant bombings in Bauchi and Maidugri etc. even when there were signs and early warnings of these attacks.  While the validity of the criticism might be disputed, the alleged weaknesses and failures in intelligence called for closer scrutiny and supervision of the intelligence community.

True, our armed services and the police have organic intelligence, but their respective intelligence is tailored and useful only for their individual and peculiar services requirement and operations. The present Joint Intelligence Board (JIB) process of intelligence gathering by the National Security Adviser is a collection of biased and most times cloudy arguments of the various services, which cannot provide the National Security Council all the facts needed to sufficiently advise the President in making fair judgment or taking actionable decisions. A professionally autonomous body would therefore be required to coordinate and collate unbiased intelligence from the security agencies into a cohesive actionable decisions and help the president in taking  actionable decisions whenever it matter most.

Free nations need intelligence today to assure survival and studies have shown that intelligence is as important as the armed strength of free nations. In this era of pushbutton weapons, intelligence is more than ever before the first line of defence. Intelligence therefore is an instrument of defence and of the national security policy that must be subjected to effective and continuing higher review and coordination. In which case, its collection, collation, evaluation and analysis are jobs for professionals.  The golden rule in intelligence gathering is silence, because more can be lost by saying too much, or too soon, than by saying very little. If public statements have to be made at all, they must be made only in response to overriding national interest and on the responsibility and under the control of the high authority.

With the current level of threats and violence coming from our homegrown terrorists, the National Assembly and the President would need to do more than warning the criminals at every attack. Government should first determine how effectively or efficiently has it organised existing human and capital resources towards a coherent pattern for the national security. Government should also review the structure and the organisational capacity in the management and control of the security agencies intelligence with a view to restructuring them into an effective and efficient network on an executive platform for collaboration and integration. The aim is to provide a coherent and cohesive intelligence support for the decision making process in the National Security Council and for the president to take actionable decision.

Secondly, government should commence the review and amendments to executive policies, orders, directives and procedures that govern national security classifications of intelligence information in an effort to expand access to relevant information for federal agencies outside the intelligence community, for states, local authorities and the Nigeria public which are critical to the fight against homegrown terrorists.

Thirdly, government should begin the process of designing or amending the National Security Act to create and sufficiently staff a statutory executive director of National Intelligence Agency as distinct from the National Intelligence Agency in the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the non- executive office of the National Security Adviser. The Director of the proposed National Intelligence Agency should be the president’s principal adviser on intelligence and should have the full arrangement of management, budgetary and personnel responsibilities needed to make the entire national intelligence communities operate as a coherent whole. No person however, should simultaneously serve as the National Security Adviser and Director of National Intelligence Agency or as the Director of any other specific intelligence or security agency,

A statutory Executive Director of National Intelligence as distinct from the National Security Adviser should coordinate intelligence from the executive agencies of the Defence, SSS, Police, Border Security(Customs and Immigration) Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs Ministries etc. This Directorate should collate, analyse and evaluate information received from these intelligence community agencies and regularly disseminate intelligence to the National Security Council and to the president.

Perhaps, it could be argued by some that the Joint Intelligence Board chaired by the National Security Adviser functions well as an intelligence community. Unfortunately constitutionally, the Joint Intelligence Board as presently constituted is not a statutory body and the National Security Adviser, though a member of the National Security Council has an advisory role not an executive or statutory power unlike the other members of the NSC.

It is important to state finally, that all the members of the Executive office of the president ie the Presidency, the Cabinet and the Federal Executive Boards appointed by the President and approved by the Senate are only exercising the power of the president in their official capacity and are therefore only advisers in their relationship with him. They can only make recommendations to the president and only him as the Chief Executive and Commander in Chief can take decisions on national security and any other matters. He can not delegate Decisions on national security matters in particular, to any agency, committee or individual to make. The president can however delegate the execution of his decisions on national security and other matters to the constitutionally responsible agency, department or ministry. Even when he sits as the chairman of any council meeting and indicates agreement with specific recommendation, this does not become a decision or presidential order until the executive council or NSC to be precise, present a final document to him and secures his written and signed approval, before it can become a Government Policy, Presidential Decision, Directive or Orders.