Director General of SSS, Lawal Daura.
Nigeria’s
internal secret service, the State Security Service (SSS), is enmeshed
in a recruitment scandal following the exposure of a shocking
lopsidedness in the composition of the new officers recently absorbed
into the agency.
The agency commissioned 479 cadet officers after their passing-out parade in Lagos on March 5, at a ceremony attended by the Director-General of the Agency, Lawal Daura, and the Chief of Air Staff, Abubakar Sadique (air marshall).
The agency commissioned 479 cadet officers after their passing-out parade in Lagos on March 5, at a ceremony attended by the Director-General of the Agency, Lawal Daura, and the Chief of Air Staff, Abubakar Sadique (air marshall).
The
parade followed a nine-month training programme under the agency’s
Basic Course 29/2016/17, which encompassed academic activities,
insurgency/counter insurgency, intelligence operations and gathering,
firearms drills and physical training exercises.
But
the listing of the newly commissioned cadet officers seen by PREMIUM
TIMES reveal wide disparity in the numbers of slots allocated to the 36
states and the Federal Capital Territory, indicating that the federal
character principle may have been ignored in the recruitment of the
officers.
Officially,
recruitment for the Course was based on a minimum of five slots per
state. Ostensibly to ensure compliance with the federal character
principle in the exercise, applicants were last year made to sit for
recruitment examinations in the capitals of their states of origin. The
five slots per state were said to have been picked through the
examinations.
However,
it has emerged that the authorities paid scant regards to the federal
character principle in the final selection of the cadets.
Although
the authorities ensured that at least five cadets were recruited from
each state and the FCT, they grotesquely tipped the scale in favour of
some states in the balance of recruits that emerged from other
extraneous considerations.
For
instance, while only the minimum of five cadets stipulated per state
finally entered the Service from Akwa Ibom, Nigeria’s largest oil
producing state, a whopping 51 found their way in from Katsina State,
the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari and the Director-General of
the SSS, Mr. Daura.
It is not clear what criteria was used in the composition of the final list of the new officers.
The
anomaly in the exercise is further evident in the disparity between
intakes from the two most populous states in Nigeria, Kano and Lagos,
which have 25 and seven, respectively, indicating that the size of the
pool of applicants from each state was not a factor in the recruitment.
A
breakdown of the newly commissioned cadet officers on geo-political
basis revealed that 165 are from the North-west, about four times as
many as those who were picked from the South-south (42).
The figures for the other other zones are North-east 100, North-central 66, South-west 57 and South-east 44.
This
means that while 331 of the newly commissioned officers are from the 19
northern states and the FCT, less than half of the total intakes were
from states in the southern part of Nigeria. See table and charts below
for slots allocated to each state.
Attempts
to speak with the SSS on the criteria used for the allocation of slots
to states were not rewarded as at the time of this publication.
The agency has had no spokesperson since the removal of its last one, Marilyn
Ogar, in 2015. The Director-General of the agency, Mr. Daura, did not
pick calls or respond to a text message sent to his known telephone
numbers.
Also,
the Acting Chairman of the Federal Character Commission, Shettima
Bukar-Abba, did not pick his calls or respond to a message seeking
clarifications on the role played by the commission in the recruitment
exercise.
The
Commission has the responsibility of ensuring compliance with the
federal character principle in recruitment into the federal civil
service and agencies.
In
demonstration of the importance attached to the principle, it has been
enshrined in every constitution of Nigeria since the country’s
independence.
Section
14, subsection 3 of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria states that: “The
composition of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies
and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such manner to
reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote
national unity, and also to command national loyalty thereby ensuring
that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few states or from
a few ethnic or sectional groups in that government or any of its
agencies”.
States breakdown
States breakdown
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