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 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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