Nigeria Content Online

“We were on duty around Bayelsa
court,” said a police constable, who was one of those wounded at the
Independence Day bomb blast in Abuja.

Agbo Ochife said after the first
bomb exploded, he and other security agents were controlling the crowd
without knowing that the car they stood beside has ticking bombs.

Mr. Ochife, who has been a
policemen for only two years, however, sees the incident as part of the
normal duties of policing, and vows that he will get back to his beat
as soon as he recovers.

But Ochife’s leaders in the
Nigeria Police Force, along with those in the other intelligence and
security agencies, were caught flat footed on that day. The result of
their lack of robustness left some 16 people dead. Tellingly,
government has not released the exact number of the dead and wounded, a
week after the bomb explosions.

Reports pieced together from
different sources who all spoke on conditions of anonymity due to the
sensitivity of the issues involved, revealed that while some western
intelligence agencies shared the results of their monitoring and
observation with our country agencies, they either did not take the
briefings seriously or reacted the wrong way. It was learnt that Henry
Okah, suspected to be the mastermind of the bombings, had been having a
running battle with President Goodluck Jonathan’s government.

Shortly after he assumed office as
acting president, Mr. Jonathan reportedly directed that payment, which
commenced under late president Umar Yar’Adua, to Mr. Okah must stop. In
a discussion subsequently with an aide to the president, Mr. Okah
allegedly threatened to make the country ungovernable if the payment
does not resume.

SA intelligence agencies

It is also believed that Mr.
Okah’s phone calls were being monitored by security agents.
Interestingly, security sources confirmed that it was not the
government of Nigeria that asked South Africa to arrest Okah.

“He (president) never made the
request to South Africa, but I do not believe that no one else in his
services did not make the request as well,” said a security source.

But South African intelligence
agencies are said to have picked the intelligence about Mr. Okah’s
subterranean moves and dutifully informed the Nigerian government,
which most likely explained the president’s statement that the outrage
was caused by a ‘foreign group.’

There is no doubt that security
monitoring has become lax, as some agencies have been compromised in
discharging their duties, putting the country at great risk. An example
is the EFCC that has lost its bite in keeping corrupt elements at
check, resulting in large volume of cash moving around for nefarious
purposes.

At the same time, the president is
said not to fully trust the security chiefs. The exit of the former
national security adviser, Aliyu Gusau, unsettled the apple cart, and
sources said that was why he did not make Kayode Are, Mr. Gusau’s
deputy, the NSA. His appointment of Andrew Owoeye Azazi, a former chief
of army staff, as the NSA last Monday, is believed to be a way of
dealing with this distrust.

“The president needs to clean out
SSS and the National Security Adviser office and set up direct routes
for reporting and information,” said another security source.

Maybe by the time Ochife is well to resume at his beat, the bungling
security chiefs would have been replaced by dynamic and efficient ones.