Presidential Security: Another Evidence of Our Beaten Statehood

Nigerians who are watching the recent row of shame at display between the personalities and officers with the responsibility of protecting our President must be sorely displeased. I see it as nothing but yet another show of the immaturity of our statehood.

This is what the story is. The Aide-De-Camp of President Muhammadu Buhari, Lieutenant Colonel Lawal Abubakar, and the Chief Security Officer to the President, Abdulrahman Mani, disagree on whose primary assignment it is to provide close body security to the president.

The ADC sent a memo on June 24 to redeploy the DSS operatives from beats they had traditionally manned inside the Presidential Villa. He
then moved to replace them with military and the Nigeria Police. So that leaves the Aso Villa with an army of idle secret service men and women while the heavily geared soldiers get too busy around a civilian president who isn't Robert Mugabe.
Two days later, the CSO issued a counter memo directing the DSS officials to disregard the ADC's order.

The purpose of this article is not to debate on who holds the legal duty of providing close body security to the president. That debate has by now saturated the media space. What I am interested in is how much this points to hardly noticeable corners where our systemic immaturity lives.

Now these are two senior professional security officers who would not claim to be ignorant of the set rules of the system in which they now operate at its peak. There shouldn't be a case of misunderstanding the operational procedure and jurisdictional allotments as far as their distinct officers holds. Every specific responsibility in a system of state has a sanctioned ministry, department, or agency to which it is constitutionally or statutorily assigned. Inside that agency or ministry or department of government, there is yet an office to which certain specialized aspects of the responsibility is laid. This makes it realistic that every officer in any system of state is very fully aware without any confusion what his or her job description is and where the boundaries are.

None of these men can tell me he does not know exactly whose in office it lies to provide close body security to the president. Why then will this kind of embarrassing conflict arise?
It is the same reason why we the books will say a thing and our political office holders will do another. It the reason our deputy Senate president is from the minority party. It is why our national policies are first world but our economy and democracy is third world.

The cause is a willingness to disregard the written down and hitherto agreed rules for the fulfilment of personal wishes. This is as a result of a state where the institutions are too weak and the leaders are too strong.

I am sure it is written down in some document what the specific roles of the ADC and CSO are and which agency provide what particular kind of security service to the president. But one of them is comfortable to ignore it because he can. Because it is the norm for an officer to raise his shoulders above his office. Because the system of rot we have created has over written our system of statehood.

Yes, it has always been the norm for individual government office holders to try to operate in spite of the system he or she is hired to serve as long as the powerful man who can call them to order approves or looks the other way, but this has to be stopped if we must make anything out of this change.