Nigeria: Like Rafindadi, Like Daura

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

 Like most other appointments in his 11 months in the job, only President        Muhammadu Buhari knows why he pulled out his kinsman, Lawal Daura, from  retirement and handed him the sensitive and strategic job of director general of    the Directorate of State Securities (DSS).

That was in July 2015, barely one month after he was sworn in as president on May 29.

*Lawal Daura 

But whatever his reason, as usual, it has less to do with competence, the axiomatic act of putting a round peg in a round hole, but more with the overarching considerations in all of his political moves – nepotism, prejudice, clannishness.

For a president who has confessed his love for working with those he knows and who, despite all the positions he has held in the country – including being military head of state for 20 months – his circle of friends is limited to his Fulani kinsmen, Daura may well be his idea of the man who the cap fits after he sacked Ita Ekpeyong who headed the agency from September 2010 to July 2015.

Established under the National Security Agencies Act of 1986 (Decree 19) the DSS, also known as the State Security Service (SSS) – one of the three successor organisations to the National Security Organisation (NSO) dissolved in 1986 – is the primary domestic intelligence agency of Nigeria.

Before the DSS, there was the NSO, set up in 1976 with Abdullahi Mohammed as the first director general.

But the NSO under Mohammed Lawal Rafindadi was broken up into three agencies by former military President, Ibrahim Babangida, after it had been turned into a monster used to abuse Nigerians and trample upon their fundamental human rights by the Buhari-led military junta between December 31, 1983 and August 27, 1985.

In appointing Daura the DG of a critical security apparatus such as the DSS, it would seem that Buhari’s primary goal, aside consolidating power in the hands of his Fulani brethren, is to recreate the stomach-churning 20th century secret police used by his military junta to whip people into line in a 21st century democratic environment.

Buhari: If We Were Truly In A Democracy

By Stephen Gbadamosi

Democracy! They say you are the government of the people, by the people and for the people; the government that is strictly built on the rule of law and adherence to the very minute tenet of the nation's constitution. Ok! In Nigeria, if we were truly in a democracy, would all these despicable 'peculiar mess,' as that revered South-Western politician of yore would say, be happening in Ekiti today, under the much-awaited change leadership of President Muhammadu Buhar? 

*President Buhari 

If we were truly in a democracy, would the Federal Government be brazenly disregarding the proclamations of the judiciary, courts, held as one of the three arms that is the last resort of the people in a people's government?

If we were in a democracy in Nigeria, why would the sanctity of the Ekiti governorship election be tested from the very first rung of applicable judiciary hierarchy to the Supreme Court (after which, in Nigeria's constitution, next is court of God), only for the Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) to be employing every available subterfuge means to truncate the elected wishes of the people in the name of politics?

If we were truly in a democracy in Nigeria, why would the Department of State Security (DSS), an agency of the Federal Executive, storm the Ekiti State House of Assembly, a component of the legislative arm recognized by the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and abduct four members of the House on trumped-up allegations, when the same constitution guarantees separation of powers?

To my consternation, I even heard that another Ekiti government official, secretly apprehended by the DSS, respected Chief Toyin Ojo, Commissioner for Finance, was asked by DSS what he contributed to Fayose's election to merit his appointment. What a mockery and rape of democracy, if that was coming from officers of the DSS. When did contribution to electoral finances become a criterion for holding professional positions in our governments? Why haven't the moneybags in this nation who have been known to bankroll governors' and presidents' elections been appointed to key government positions? And if they had been, in which statute book is it stated that they had no right to be so appointed?