Reject ONSA Reform Bill in its Entirety – NOSACOF Urges Tinubu

Reject ONSA Reform Bill in its Entirety – NOSACOF Urges Tinubu

POLITICS DIGEST- The Non-state Actors Consultative Forum (NOSACOF) has called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu not to honour or sign a bill seeking to restructure or reorganise the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) as presently constituted.

The group in an open letter to the President, signed by its convener, Abdulrazak Alkali, said the brains behind such bill do not mean well for the President, the country and its security architecture.

According to the letter, the proposed bill will not add any value to the country’s security operations but will disrupt the existing cordial relationship among the security institutions.

The letter read in part:

“Mr President Sir, the 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 staff similar to existing government agencies and parastatals is ill informed and can set a very bad precedent.

“First and foremost, 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.

“Presently, 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 staff and collaborations from the various security agencies, such that the agencies do not see the office of the NSA as a rival agency.

“Secondly, the normal practice is that the NSA can obtain trained and experience staff from the security agencies (i.e., staff who are already trained and experienced to fill into national security roles). Thus, restructuring the office of the NSA into an agency and allowing it to recruit its own staff at present will very much reduce the efficiency in the operations of the office of the NSA.

“This is because the office of the NSA will not be able to fill the roles with candidates of the desired expertise and speciality, it will end of spending years (may be decades) and billions of Naira to train these staff to the desired level of competency and the other security agencies will be reluctant to share staff with the NSA as they will feel they are no longer stakeholders in the office of NSA. With the current security and financial challenges bedeviling this country, this is definitely a wrong move and a wrong timing as well.

“Lastly but not the least Mr. President, the office of the NSA is known to be one of the only offices that work with highly professional and skilled staff extracted from the various security agencies mainly based on merit, skills and capacity. If allowed to follow the route of the other agencies and parastatals, there is the risk of politicising the agency through biased and unjustified recruitments as witness in many government agencies (including some security agencies) and if this happens in the office of the NSA it will not serve the interest of our national security.

“Mr President, the onus of making the right decisions about our country rest on your shoulders and I am confident that you will not allow such dubious bill to be pushed through using your name and/or support.”