16th July, 2012
The appointment of Col (retd) Sambo Dasuki as the new security Czar has important connotations for how security is conceptualised in Nigeria. His choice to the highest office in state intelligence may import a realignment of the lenses and imply a fundamental reworking of the operational blueprint of the Nigerian security establishment. These lenses are the instruments for sifting and interpreting data that constitute the external stimuli we must relate to. The operational blueprint often flows from the outcome of the interpretation and analysis of data. This preliminary but crucial process is the very first step in formulating a nation’s understanding of the world and designing appropriate and efficient approaches to the diverse and varied universes that constitute the totality of the world it must respond to and interact with. Ultimately, the objective is to isolate and identify a spectrum of tendencies, understand to transform attitudes, subjugate or annihilate elements, both internal and external, considered hostile or inimical to the integrity of the state. Otherwise, the state itself, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union, will die. In the pursuit of this most vital objective to perpetuate the state and its interests, the profile of the national security chief charged with managing these sensitive affairs matters.
Dasuki is coming at a time Nigeria faces a dilemma. He has some serious balancing act to do. His appointment returns the office of NSA to a particular orbit in national politics; a sort of unpopular continuity. It is also consistent with a certain tendency that has become part of the main discourse on the historical struggle for partisan appropriation of the Nigerian political space. Dasuki’s greatest asset is his integrity manifest in his daring open repudiation of the maximum ruler in the darkest days of the nation. Again though, his association with a duplicitous Ibrahim Babangida regime counter-balances this. Dasuki’s preference for dialogue with Boko Haram and the endorsement of this course by the northern elite are significant departures from the era of Azazi. It is a major policy shift. But how does this fit into the emerged conceptual orientations to the management and resolution of the challenge posed by Boko Haram.
Albert Horsfall, former director of State Security, who has forcefully interjected himself into the conversation over the strategy for defeating Boko Haram, and Azazi, the last NSA, represent two poles at the end of a spectrum of perspectives on security orientations in Nigeria. The challenge of comprehending and defining the vital attributes of Boko Haram and the immediacy of designing a formula to transform – meaning accentuating dialogue – or defeating Boko Haram set these two men, who share formidable credentials and impressive attainments under the belts respectively, apart. Horsfall is focused on the national and internal imperatives of his challenge, and somewhat restrictive in his operational preferences in relation to the immediate security challenges facing Nigeria. He is almost nationalistic in his bearing. At 60, the relatively younger Azazi is an internationalist. His expansive worldview has impacted his operational blueprint. This blueprint that factors a large role for Nigeria’s potential allies in the international security community, in neutralising Boko Haram and in that context, build firewalls against the incursion of international destabilising forces. His approach is consistent with the tendencies of most products of his time and age.
In Azazi’s world view, national security is more holistic spanning crucial interlinked calculuses that are not often accentuated in purely militaristic approaches as Nigerian administrations have favoured. George Kennan’s containment, considered by many experts as the classic strategic and security policy framework that guided post-World War II US to defeat the threat of the Soviet Union and surmount the challenge of global spread of communism, was a holistic security concept instrument. Containment encapsulated all the critical calculus from the sociological, political, psychological, geographical, economic, cultural to the military. In the final analyses, it was the contrived internal socio-economic decay of the Soviet Union that ended the adversarial confrontation with the West. There are lessons to be drawn from this, given the dire straits that Nigeria has found itself. The paradox is that both Azazi and his successor understand this too well. The devil, however, as they say, is in the details.
In Nigeria, unable to assume certain basic certainties about its internal fabric, national security, from the view of an observer far from the spy world, has been operationalised as protecting the extant administration. Security was more of a watch dog of coup plotters and purveyors of internal threats to the integrity of the state. It is also a lucrative enterprise. Many have also conjectured, not without good reason, that the articulation of national security has also been conceived as an instrument to consolidate an internal hegemony in the unabating struggle for the partisan appropriation of the Nigerian state. The very assuming unelected military president, General Ibrahim Babagida and more poignantly, the maximum ruler Sani Abacha, gave expression to this partisan concept of national security. The focus of this sectional notion of national security is internally trained. Echoes of this have emerged in the miniscule public appreciation of the forces and factors that led to the emergence of Dasuki as NSA. Some have also adduced that the emerged horror of Boko Haram is a part of the response to the challenge to this hegemonic project. These represent the operational assumptions of Horsfall, who has declared that Boko Haram appears to be foot soldiers of certain top political interests. These political interests, implying the political godfathers of the foot soldiers, should be the interlocutors with the government in negotiations to resolve what he perceives as essentially internally instigated political crisis. He is partly right. Dasuki would appear to have accepted this logic of the situation.
However, whatever the merits or demerits of these postulations, the evolved exigencies of today are dictating, even if unconsciously, a critical re-examination of this extremely reductionist internalist approach to our national security. The situation in Sahelo-Saharan region that stretches up to our neighbourhood to the north compels this examination. Boko Haram has graduated from the limited psyche of the Maitatsine bloodhounds that preceded it. Matatsine was a rambunctious home-grown Islamic cleric who was as maverick as mad driven by a passionate puritan Islamic revolutionary fervour. Boko Haram shares the same attributes but has proven to be more sophisticated, ideologically driven, more resilient, more adaptive with explicitly pronounced revolutionary political-religious objectives. Boko Haram’s emergence has coincided with a robust engagement at the international level between western notions of modernity and conceptions of seventh century Islamic theocracy as the organic foundations of political entities. The political ascendance of salafist movements such as the al-Qeada in the Sahel, AQIS, and the Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), in the Sahelo-Saharan region – our immediate backyard – introduces a transformed deleterious regional context to Nigeria’s national security. Just like Nigeria, the security situation in the Sahel is murky. The dynamic of insecurity are somewhat similar, with the interaction of the same destabilising agencies that share common revolutionary objectives against targets that they commonly pursue as status quo dispensations that have to be eliminated. Even though the vanguard forces of the ostensibly religious revolutionary movements are local in both cases, they have deep roots in international ideo-based confrontations between the secular and the religious conceptions of the future. That is my interpretation of the Azazi doctrine. Perhaps this view of the world is the virus of our generation. But Dasuki is probably younger and his orientation forged from the crucible of a privileged existence in the very heart of the residue of a feudal North.
Boko Haram poses a threat to the residue of the northern oligarchy. At a more profound level, the Boko Haram challenge to the religious status quo in Nigeria also reflects a challenge to the political normative. In Mali, the convenient coalition of the Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, MNLA, and radical islamists, the Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith) with the al-Qeada in the Sahel, AQIS, and the Movement of the Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, MUJAO, was to challenge a status quo that one of the coalition – the MNLA – defined as mainly political in the fashion of Horsfall. All the radical allies of the MNLA deciphered their mission to overturn the status quo in Mali as religious. More importantly they perceive their odious revolution as integral to the striving for the ascendance of radical and fundamentalist virus of Islamic internationalism. These conceptual delineations notwithstanding, the practical implication has all the same been tragic. The bifurcation of the Republic of Mali as the world has known it for over 60 years in the infamous declaration of the Republic of Azawad culminates from this murky process. More profoundly for Nigeria is the overthrow of the MNLA secular revolutionaries by the radical salafists and the imposition of Islamic fundamentalism, as the new normative precept in the land. This exactly is the explicit objective of Boko Haram. The Boko Haram has flaunted its credentials of being fundamentalist, attuned to mindless violence, rejectionists of the political status quo in the manner of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, al Shabab and the Ansasr Dine and MUOJA. It is a local expression of an international virus. The military is an important element in confronting this hydra headed threat, but more sophisticated strategic engagement, including sustained collaboration with elite security management systems at the international level, is required to surmount this challenge.
International forces are, as usual, also deeply implicated for a host of reasons. The situation in the Sahel, including the pathetic state of the old Republic of Mali and the increasing instability in neighbouring Niger, have been impacted by the political objectives of state exporters of radicalism. Key actors in the insecurity in the Sahel are believed to be agents of Algeria’s Départment du Reseignement et de la Securité (DRS). It is the popular sentiment in Algeria that the Algerian state exploits the weaknesses of the states in the Sahel, in particular, Mali and Niger, to advance its national objectives to control the resources in that region. The joint declaration of the Republic of Azawad in April, 2012 by the Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith) culminates from the ensuing murky process. Indeed, evidence abounds that state exporters of radical Islam, such as Iran, have probed the Nigerian state for weaknesses. Nigeria has been under the radar of the al-Qeada for a possible strategic realignment to serve the interests of radical Islam. Our internal politics has greatly facilitated this objective as political opportunists in the North have defied the fundamental ground norms of state and society to sow the seeds of our current predicament. Appeasement and buying off the rebel leaders, Obasanjo’s preference, only help to buy some time. This approach to buy time did not work in Mali and ultimately would not do in Nigeria. Even Gaddafi’s Libya’s instrumentalisation of the Community of Sahelian States (CENSAD) to buy peace for Mali and Niger through containing the Tuareg leadership and providing escape to Libya for many potential insurgents eventually did not solve the problem. The continuing localised turbulence of the post-Cold War era that was expressed in the Maghreb as the Arab Spring saw the end to Gaddafi’s intervention. It must however be noted that Gaddafi’s was not an altruistic venture. These interventions were designed to win hearts and souls of weak and fragile sub-Saharan states in the ex-Libya leader’s guide to dominate a united Africa.
Meanwhile, AQIS had infiltrated the Malian military aided by the massive corruption in the government of Ahmadou Toumani Toure (ATT). Also, the deposed Malian president, even while cognisant of the situation, adopted a policy of appeasement by paying off leaders of the AQIS and the pivots of the Tuareg rebels. This approach demoralised the poorly paid and equipped Malian military that did not stand a chance against the better armed Tuareg and the Ansar Dine when they eventually struck in March 2012. The situation in Nigeria is the same. In Nigeria’s current circumstances Azazi’s strategic collaboration with African states, and selected members of the international community, especially European countries and the United States, to develop a new security and counterterrorism strategy is ineluctable. Dasuki must take seriously these fundamental assumptions of the Azazi doctrine. However, whatever hot air some of us blow from the sidelines, time would mediate the validation or otherwise the different visions on the way forward purveyed by Horsfall and Azazi, two illustrious and accomplished security buffs.
—Osuolale Alalade