From Mika’il Tsoho, Dutse
A group under the Non State Actors Consultative Forum (NOSACOF) has appealed to president Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reject an allege move made by some members within his government to make a bill that would change office of National Security Adviser into an agency.
This was contained in a letter to president Bola Ahmed Tinubu, signed and made available to newsmen by the national convener of NOSACOF, Comrade Abdulrazaq Alqali on Tuesday.
The letter called the attention of Mr. President to be conscious of the effort by some people and politicians in the government to deceive him in the name of structural and constitutional changes to some government institutions while concealing the fact that the true intention and motive for such move is about their personal and political interest.
“The allege present push for a bill by some members of your government to make the National Assembly change the provision that establish the office of the NSA and allow the NSA to recruit and establish own staffs similar to existing government agencies and parastatals is ill informed and can set a very bad precedence.
“Passing this bill will mean that the overall office of the NSA infrastructure will have to be overhauled to avoid conflict with the sections of the constitution that establish it or the section of the constitution will have to be changed to accommodate the bill.
“Also, the end product of the bill is re-structuring the office of the NSA into an agency or parastatal with unlimited privileges over the already existing intelligence agencies such as National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Department of State Service (DSS), and Military. This has the potential of creating many overlaps in the functions of these agencies and will further widen disunity, rivalry and lack of synergy between the various security agencies”, the letter said.
The letter maintained that, the NSA has been the fulcrum of maintaining and enforcing co-operation between the security agencies, and one key component of its success is due to the fact that it derives staffs and collaborations from the various security agencies, and such the agencies do not see the office of the NSA as a rival agency.
