High-handedness has become a way of life for Nigeria’s domestic intelligence agency, the Department of State Services. A show of might at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, late in January, once again highlighted the excesses of some DSS officials. Insisting that they were “officers of the law,” the DSS operatives refused to pay the N300 fee at the MMA tollgate that connects the domestic and international sections, which degenerated to an open conflict between the agents and the policemen manning the tollgate. This is a reprehensible behaviour.
To rid the country of impunity by security agents, the DSS managers need to investigate this case without delay. It is disgusting when intelligence officers openly break the law that they are paid to enforce. The culprits should therefore be traced and deservedly be punished.
The culture of security agencies keeping silent when their agents run foul of the law is sheer hypocrisy. More than that, it begets widespread impunity. It is curious that Ita Ekpenyong, the DSS Director-General, has not addressed this propensity for excesses among his men.
This particular episode strongly suggests that discipline may have suffered in the DSS set-up. Not only were the security men alleged to have threatened the policemen attached to the MMA tollgate with guns for refusing to grant them access without paying the toll, they reportedly descended on an employee of the private firm that was on duty, beating him severely. They were also said to have attempted to abduct him, but failed. What came over them?
According to witnesses, the action of the DSS men sparked a chaotic scene, causing a traffic jam that stretched for kilometres. DSS personnel, by the nature of their job, are supposed to be engaged in covert operations. For an agent to blow his cover, a grave incident must have happened. But this was not the case this time. Intelligence agents who blow their own cover because they don’t want to pay a N300 toll do not understand the high responsibility that comes with the profession.
That ethics and professionalism have been perverted in the agency is glaring for all to see in this episode. No wonder some DSS officials now openly proclaim their service status among the civilian populace when, indeed, they are supposed to remain anonymous. The present DSS leadership has a lot to do to reverse this untoward trend if it is not to be accused of being a part of the rot.
Without offering any reasonable explanation to date, the DSS created unnecessary tension in the run-up to the August 2014 governorship election in Osun, when its operatives stormed the state, donning masks. Giving flimsy excuses, they arrested some residents in the middle of the night, and fired gunshots indiscriminately in the daytime.
In spite of the severity of their act, neither Ekpenyong nor President Goodluck Jonathan did the needful by intervening in the excesses of the DSS operatives. In a way, their silence gives the impression that the action in Osun was officially endorsed. The operatives, later on their way back to Abuja after the election, opened fire on a police team that had also gone to provide security during the same Osun election.
Sadly, Nigerians have been suffering from a series of brutalities and persecutions by security agencies, who have refused to imbibe democratic ideals 16 years into civil rule. When state agents are not fighting among themselves, they are making a sport of their fellow citizens, beating and killing them. No security agency in Nigeria is free of this malaise that has not been checked, principally because the authorities have failed to whip the recalcitrant officers into line.
In a case that brought ridicule on the Nigerian Navy in 2008, ratings attached to Harry Arogundade, a rear admiral, stripped a lady, Uzoma Okere, naked and brutalised her over a minor traffic argument. To show their complicity, the Navy authorities appealed a judgement of N100 million fine a court awarded against Arogundade for the bestiality.
It was the same cruelty that made a naval officer, Felix Odunlami, to put a gun in the mouth of a commercial motorcyclist and pull the trigger for scratching his car at a traffic light stop in Lagos in 2005. In October 2013, six naval ratings brutalised a teacher at the Nigerian Navy Secondary School, Abeokuta, and beat him up over a minor disagreement.
The excesses of the security agents have gone on for too long. They should be curtailed. No responsible government tolerates this kind of misdemeanour from its security agencies. Nigeria should stop behaving as if the country belongs to the Stone Age, where the law is represented in a tyrant. In modern societies, these sorts of abuses are viewed as serious violations.
In 2014, for example, John Roth, the Inspector-General in the United States Department of Homeland Security, set up an investigation panel after a US Secret Service agent allegedly had a civil quarrel with her neighbour. Accusing the neighbour of harassing her and her father, the agent reported the neighbour to her superiors, who sent a “welfare check” team to her house to protect her. A case of using state resources, assets and personnel for private purposes was established. If it were in Nigeria, the neighbour would have been in serious trouble for simply writing the petition that prompted the investigation.
The DSS leadership should turn things around, and enforce a code of ethics that emphasises respect for the public, instead of the increasing show of power by its operatives.
To guard against defaulters, the MMA authorities should automate operations at the tollgate. This will go a long way in checking the excesses of overbearing security agents.
