 Welcome back to the breakfast on Plos TV Africa. Our first major conversation this morning is about a very shocking incident that has occurred in Kaduna State in Afarka, and that's specifically at the Nigerian Defence Academy. We have reports that bandits attacked the Nigerian Defence Academy, killed some officers, and went ahead to abduct one with sources saying that 200 million naira has currently been demanded as ransom for the release. Let's invite now the PRO of a military veteran. Good morning, thank you for joining us. Good morning, what is the pleasure apart from today? Yes, fantastic. Let's first get your initial reaction to this situation. Lots of newspapers have called it a daring attack. Some have said it's a slap on the face of the military. How do you describe it? Well, it's been a gloomy morning. I was not even in a good position to have said this invitation. You know, the Nigerian Defence Academy is one of the best institutions in Africa where you come to talk about turning out of elite military officers. And it has taken a long time for them before they moved from the one, the location in the cantonment, the Revado cantonment to the new site. You know, and looking at that new site, if you see around the perimeter the also expanse of land being used as farmland by peasants not fully invaded and the access routes to those places, you would expect that there will be an enhanced perimeter defence system. There will be a lot of technological imputes to control and check mates, illicit activities coded and covert entrance access control systems. It's so sad that this is happening to the greatest and the elite institution in Africa. So sad. All right. There is, of course, conversations about this being an inside job or one of the papers even said that it probably was a robbery attack and some of all of that. But Ms Akidew, how much does this really tell with regards where we are concerning security in Nigeria today? The boldness with regards, whoever these people are, to attack the Nigerian Defence Academy bearing in mind that the Nigerian Air Force base is about 16 minutes or less than 20 minutes drive from where they are. What does this say really about these criminal elements in the country today? Okay. I'm going to look at it from two aspects. One of it is the unpreparedness for surprises. Before long time ago, a military officer can sit on a place especially maybe you see an officer drum. Even a policeman that is drum with his weapon civilians don't even touch him. They surround the place. They try to protect him. But the loss of privileges and the militarisation of the civil space, the population has given this lacuna for attacks. And if you look at roadblocks, we have said that there are civilian persons around our roadblocks that help our military passengers to collect money, taxes, levies from vehicles and those are the people that will expose their security. And now our roadblocks have been attacked when you look at the barracks. We have said that our barracks contain a lot of lacunas that could be exploited to attack the personnel. And today we have seen so much of that happening in different parts of the country. Now when we look at it in the aspect of educational institutions, it has been happening around that area. I do not forget that a school in Kaduna within that fair of space was attacked. Is that not enough red flag to tell you that there is darkness and there are possibilities of approaching and accessing the facility. If you look at also what is happening in Kaduna generally, this is that you see at test runs. People will now try to ascribe it as amrobry, kidnapping. I agree with you that there must be an activity, but the purpose is to test run our military to begin to checkmate our opportunities to overrun terrorism. And with this that has happened, if we don't allow heads to roll, especially those that are the hands of attack that are supposed to put mitigating measures in place, then we should be expecting an attack in a high profile institution controlled by the military in the next few times. Okay, so some stakeholders in Nigeria that have been reacting to this, especially the northern elders, have said that the attack on the NDA is just an indication of the failure of Nigeria's intelligence network. Do you say that's the fact? Well, you see, Nigeria's intelligence network or global intelligence network are run on two paraphernellas. One of it is the use of technology data and all that. The other aspect of technology is what we don't understand in Nigeria. You know, we like to buy, we buy from Israel, we buy, we buy so many things for so many countries with padded budgets. But you forget that the manpower aspect, motivating the manpower to handle the technology is very key. Okay, you have CCTV and now you are coming out quickly, so early to say that the soldiers that were supposed to man the CCTV, they went to sleep. When you put CCTV in place, don't you know that the man that you man the CCTV should be appropriately put in a motivated position? Then if you also put CCTV in place, don't you think that there should be panic alarm system, intrusion alarm system in case the human capital fails? So in technology in intelligence, you must have both of them running. Then if I have to generate intelligence, I must have gotten the trust of the people. All the people living around that area, don't they have phones? Don't you know that they relate with the soldiers that work and live in the academy? Nobody picked up their phone to call anybody and say there are suspicious movements and it is coming towards your direction. So if as an academy, are you also telling me that it does not be hope on you to create an outpost for intelligence generation in the Alan surrounding community? You can open a borehole and you can put an ex-military man there to sell water. You can open a kiosk, you can put an ex-military man there to sell cigarettes or whatever. All of these activities will be generated towards tracking suspicious activities around the place, picking information and sending it back for action. Now all those things have not been done and you expect to secure it please. It's so sad. Mr Akidevia, is it that we're not aware of these ideas? Because I've said it repeatedly that we don't lack ideas on how to solve some of the issues bothering us as a country and that includes security. Some of the finest analysts that we've interviewed, including yourself, have shared numerous ideas on what better ways we can do these things. So it's not a lack of ideas. Why do you think we're not doing this? Do you sense lack of sincerity with regards to what we're truly facing and how we truly are handling security in Nigeria? Is there lies that are covering some of all these things and that's maybe why the fight is harder to win? When some of us joined the army, we saw a very robust and disciplined hierarchy of command. If you are a lieutenant today, you pass out of the academy as a second lieutenant, you can predict at what age you will become a major, a colonel, a general. You can, with your performances in your core, if you are in the armored core, engineers, infantry, you can predict what time you can hold a position like a brigade commander, like the chief of army staff, you can keep pointers on XYZ number of officers to say this category of officers will deliver the chief of army staff, the chief of never staff. But when we brought politics into the military, what you have seen now is the play out of internal grudges. People become chief of army staff, chief of defense staff, different positions people hold, and others are retired prematurely. And those ones also have their retinue of followers, patriots, and you expect these people to be loyal to you 100% because you hold powers. You see, we need to look at professionalism in all our agencies, the police, the military, all agencies. They have said so that we can have this command and control and discipline back in space because I can be ready to die for my commander. When I was in service, we are ready to die for the command and for the commander. But right now you see soldiers, officers, they are holding grudges. Why? The officer holding position might not have the retinue of pedigree to hold that position. And because of political influence, all of this has been destabilised. And we need to build back that cohesion and instill the discipline of command and control. Okay. Fantastic points you raised there that will come back to... Breaking news reaching us from the Vanga newspaper confirms that the major that was abducted by bandits at the NDA is dead. We know that two persons were killed in that attack and one was abducted. So the news heard saying that the major abducted by bandits in NDA is dead. So if they never really wanted ransom, what can we say about their motive for that attack? Well, that news came to me also and I await two things now. I want to await the postmortem resource. Now I am predicting that as an officer and in that training institution of the NDA, people sent to the Nigerian Defence Academy as serving officers to either be instructors or official personnel are elites because they need to be an example to the students and the people we are raising. So I can't be a major, a serving major in the Nigerian Army and I will be taking away like a chicken. So I expect that there might have been some scuffles and I expect that there might have been some resistance. And I expect also that the officer knows that so many officers that have been taken, they were giving public execution, which you guys have seen on social media. So I need to wait and let's see a postmortem before we predict what really happened that made that officer to lose his life. OK, so Ms Akidevier, can you go further and share a little bit more on what we still are getting wrong with regards to this fight against insurgency? Is it still a problem with funding? Is it mostly just failure with intelligence gathering? Are there spies that have infiltrated the Nigerian Army? Is it a lot more than meets the eye? Just lack of interest really to defeat insurgency in Nigeria? Well, there are a million things. Like you have said, we have been talking about this thing for maybe the past two or three decades now. You know, there are a million things and the problem I have is that when we begin to see things picking up and they will accumulate to become a multitude of problems, we don't try to solve them easily and quickly. Now, look at the way Nigerian military veterans are treated. Some of us are not even in the appropriate ranking to be fighting for the welfare of veterans. But we find ourselves doing that because so many of our senior colleagues, where we see them living today, they are less than dogs on the streets. And these military veterans that you are looking at, their children are the ones fighting in the warfront, in the front lines. So many senior officers today, they were children of retired military personnel. So many other hands, non-commissioned officers. Their fathers are retired veterans and they have seen the positive of care for the veteran community. We kept shouting, we kept going on posters, we kept sounding the variance and the importance of the value of the veteran community. I am placed now in so many business pletoria. So many veterans have access to so many places in the forest, in the marines, in the creeks, everywhere in Nigeria, in all police areas. Have you tracked off a value? Have you tried to review the importance, the relevance and what you can achieve with implementing a veteran structure that will be commensurate to dynamics of alternative security in Nigeria? Now, if you also look at the procurement system, the procurement system takes a million years from table to table to just buy a small technology that you need. A young man in Nigeria now just made drones and he has been flown out of the country. A drone, like in sequence, can cover that MGA porous area. So we are blinded by distractions. One of the distractions is corruption and corruption having impute in politics. Now, because of corruption having impute in politics, so many people have been manipulated. The intelligentsia, the agencies that should operate away from government to be able to apply protective measures, mitigated measures to the international and global insecurity situation have been calibrated. Now, officers and men are only looking for how to build a house for themselves because if they leave the forest, they are going to be begging one landlord because the pension is temporary. Officers and men are looking for a way to train their children in school. There is no more free education for military personnel. Officers and men are looking for money while in service to take care of their medical care because the medical provided by the Nigerian government does not cover all the necessary elements that a military personnel should seek and find treatment for. So a lot of all of these things have brought down the dignity of the military and the military has a business and right now, everywhere you see soldiers are deployed, you will see them being taken into businesses, they are like fish farming and protecting businesses of other people. It's not fair when you leave a military man in an outpost for more than five years, he's there doing what he has no access to his family, no access to any social life, nothing and it becomes integrated into the community and can be compromised. Then if you look at the promotion system in the police, in the army and all of that, it is getting to who knows who before you can be promoted and deployed professionally. If you look at the recruitment system, in those days people joined by interest, by passion, by patriotism and your local government and your state government gives you a letter to go to the government to join the military. Right now people have been selected, people have been nominated, people have been posted to join the military without appropriate politicians and yet someone in politics, someone in power, someone in position is pushing for those persons to be taken into the military. This is something we've been talking about on the breakfast with other security analysts. They keep talking about how one of the challenges with the Nigerian military is lack of patriotism among these people that are there and how this military opportunities are now basically like a job opportunity for people who need employment, who need a source of livelihood and who have political connections. How do you think we can begin to plug in those holes to fix the structural issues in the Nigerian military? Now if you go to universities, more than five or six also Nigerian universities, they have four years program for criminology and security studies. I have asked myself, why will I do four years studying criminology and security studies if I don't have an interest in it? Now I have asked our agency, can you go to those universities? Can you take the database? Can you send both SMSs, emails to those graduated students and catch an age bracket and ask them to come and apply for XYZ vacancies in any of the agency? You will be getting a front line of people that have a backdrop of academic intelligence and practical intelligence because some of them do their IT and other things in the DSS, in the police, in the military. Now this set of people comes into this profession, they will immediately begin to interrogate all the lacunas that are available. And if you now go back to your local government and say you are looking for people that excel in your work, five years and you are bringing them into the military, you are not asking the local government chairman to give you a list. You are going to the school to see people that are interested that have academic excellence, not doctor's results. All of this will help and we need to look for people that have patriotism. You need to pass through a litmus test to show why you want to join the military. And finally, the government itself must make it attractive. Have you seen the accommodation of the police and the military? Have you seen their take home? Have you seen the welfare of their children? Is it attractive? Then when you leave these services alive, whether disabled or intact, I use something to be looked at and say thank you for your service. We don't have that example. So what we are doing, we are kicking ourselves in the foot and destroying our only protective measure within the military. I want us to now take a look at something else. The NDA, the Nigerian Defense Academy, is the only military university in Nigeria and the first in the whole of Africa. With this attack on the NDA, how much damage do you think it does to the reputation of the institution? Let's look at the traumatic situation. There are a lot of students in the academy that, when they are there for that five years, they see themselves as superhuman. Why? Because to enter into that place, there is a new spirit that falls on you. Even as a student, when you go home for holidays, immediately you are coming back. Once you step into the defense academy, your spirit is renewed and renewed to the ethics and disposition of that personality you now hold as a cadet in the Nigerian defense academy. What do you think will happen to their traumatic states right now? How do you think those students will be feeling that many screants, bandits that we call, terrorists that have become, will now come into the premises and those elite officers that are their instructors start killing them like rats? Their morale right now has been abused. The only way to get them back on foot is to immediately go after these bandits across the country and make a mess of them. It's to immediately refuse to be controlled by any executive order. It is to immediately walk into Zambara, Borno, Bauchi, Bleytu, everywhere in Nigeria, Elu Gubayesai, that you see Banditry and SSC and break it down to his knees. That is the only way you can get our cadets to believe that they are training to enter an institution that had the highest interrogation against any kind of stupid intrusion by negative elements. Ok Davia, now we are at this point. Let's now talk on funding for terrorism and proliferation of weapons. It has also come up a few times as one of the ways that this can also end. If you can cut off their funding, if you can stop, they will block the access to weapons. They obviously aren't making those weapons here in Nigeria and so they are coming in from somewhere. We don't seem to have gathered enough intelligence to have blocked that. The government, the current administration has made mention of people who have so far, they were going to be trying some people for funding terrorism in Nigeria but we still haven't seen any headway with that. How do you think that this can help with the fight against insurgency? How can we be more sincere with blocking funding for terrorism and stopping the access to weapons? I think that the arrest of a certain number of Nigerians, information reaching Nigeria has been translated into positive intelligence and a number of people have been arrested and there is information and evidence that these persons are connected and culpable to financing terrorism in Nigeria. And he didn't stop there, he said there are institutions also that were implicated in the culpability and these institutions have been approached and have been investigated, interrogated and the results will be made public in due time. In due time, this is going to 2022. In due time, what kind of accelerated process do you think a financier of terrorism should have once found beauty, even if there is only a 40%, 20% probability? What kind of body language would the government use to use that as a deterrence against other persons that have been covertly indulging in such activity? You see, when you talk about financiers of terrorism, you are talking about people that make terrorism a business mandate. And every business must pass through registration, every business must have an account, every business must have people working for it, every business must have a business portfolio. What has our agency done? They have found out all the people and the organizations connected to financing terrorism. Now they have sent this information to the Attorney General's Minister of Justice and it is going beyond any activity to take place, to curtail, to curb and to penalize such persons. What else do you want us to say? Those that generate funds from kidnapping, from taxing our farmers to fishing in Nigeria, they pay taxes and all these things amounts to generation of funds. We have mineral resources in Nigeria, in play two and some other places, some bandits are doing illegal mining, some Chinese people were caught, public and paraded on the media for supporting illegal mining and banditry. Where is that case today? What do men was caught in kidnapping, terrorism, illegal mining, drug peddling, soldiers and police exchanged gunfire for what do men? Where is what do men today? There is no accountability. Criminality has now gotten a few days to operate beyond opportunity to mitigate by agencies and providers we have set up to help us have a civil society. It's so sad. So is it then frustrating seeing that from a report that we spoke about yesterday, there was a very subtle amnesty being given to certain former Boko Haram leaders and ISWAP leaders and the likes. And there's also talk about repentant terrorists that the government is seeking forgiveness or who are seeking forgiveness and some of all of that. How does that then make you feel if you have said repeatedly that we need to attack them and then completely destroy whichever every single detail of terrorism in Nigeria. How does it then make you feel seeing that there's reports that Nigerian government is certainly giving amnesty to some of these people and accepting back repentant terrorists? It's only going to encourage those that are perpetrators to go to the extreme in any violence or criminality they are engaging in. So if people come to you that they are repentant, salaries, bandits or whatever, there are enabling processes. We have a criminal justice system. There are so many people that have been held for murder and today they were pardoned and come out from the criminal justice system reintegrate to the society. So no matter the number of persons that come to submit themselves to the government, they should be handed over first to the police, the TSS and the immigration. First, the immigration should find out those that are Nigerians and the laws in Nigeria will be applicable to them. Then they will find out those that are not Nigerians and the law that is applicable to a foreigner coming into Nigeria to perpetrate criminality will be applicable to them. Then you pass them through the judicial process. If there are those that were forced into terrorism, maybe they were taken as kids. So many young children were taken into terrorism. We have seen baby soldiers, terrorist soldiers. Now, if those ones are interrogated, they can be taken through juvenile resortment in a correctional centre. There must be no special treatment. Everybody goes into a correctional centre, comes out from the other side, either you are sentenced to death by defining this against you or you are giving parole or you are forgiving or you learn a trade and come out with a certificate of pardon. So by the time we begin to ascribe special attention, budgeting large chunks of money to this exercise, we are adding to the cankawong that will continue to destroy the precipices of security and peace in Nigeria. Also, I was going to ask you, when we look at the amount of training and skill that these people have, these majors at the NDA have, what then is the fate of a common man? And would you then say this then puts some logic into statement by politicians that we should go ahead and defend ourselves? Ah, that aspect of advisory, I have coined it into community resilience. I have spoken with my friends in the security sector, Konesam Wambu, Abba and Kalimu. All of us have spoken about it and we have agreed that community should be resilient. Resilience means you put together a structure that will first eliminate opportunities from suspicious persons to penetrate. One of the easiest way to penetrate a community in Nigeria is through religion and ethnicity. If I claim I'm a Christian, another Christian who wants to have on me, it will be sympathetic to my flight. If I claim I'm a Muslim, another Muslim who wants to have on me will pray together in the mosque and they don't take time to contain into relevance the purpose why you came into that community. So communities should be resilient. They should form preventive measures for access control for you to be able to live there. Every landlord should have a database of people that come to rents accommodation or flats or rooms from your facility. Communicate to the police that you be co-action, exchanges of intelligence and trust. Agencies you build trust. So why all of this dilapidates? Then you begin to see opportunities to disrupt civil life in that community. So I will only advise that communities should increase their resilience. Come together, look for your retired prisoners. Look for those that served in DSS police army in your community. Those that have professional private security practice experience. Come together, create a resilience and help to protect yourself. That is the way I have drafted it. That is the way so many of us agree in the professional security system. So if you also look at the relationship with agencies, communities should also try to fish out criminal elements in the agency and find a way to monitor them when they enter into your community. Because definitely with your resilience system, within co-action of your retired prisoners, you can be able to intimidate opportunities for them to disrupt your civil space. But what does this attack from yesterday show about their capabilities and what they truly, how dangerous they currently are? Somalia am coming to Nigeria through Sudan, through Niger, through Cameroon, and we don't have a proper monitoring system with our immigration and border control access control system. We don't have data control. We don't have ID cards and numbering system. Our population check is based on the number of votes we want to derive from different communities. So we need to agree that we are facing a well-trained enemy. They have the capacity to operate rocket-propelled grenades. They have the capacity to operate and use air to land and land to air missiles. They have the capacity because a lot of military people also know that we are not safe as fitarees because the only strength of the military is when you are together in a team, either as a platoon, a section, a command, a battalion, a brigade, or a division. Those are your strength lines. But once you are alone in the community of aggressors, it is only your personal skills and your intelligence application that can actually protect you. So for what has happened to those military officers, it's clearly shown that they were outnumbered and they were not in a position to quickly utilize whatever survival skills that we have in our third degree training. So these enemies that we face, they are properly trained, properly equipped, and they are criminality. People come out to complain for them that they are bandit, they are hungry. These are professional killers. People come out to protest against attack on all of these criminal gangs. Now the rival heads man. Now the mayor itself is saying that there are criminals like this. Sultan is saying that they should leave the forest or else if we attack them. So many imams are agreeing now. The Christian, the Muslims now see that criminality is not religion, is not trial. So it is late for us to begin to assess this now. What we mean is the sincerity of government around a certain attack on any criminality and enemy postulation in Nigeria. Roy Okidevia, Military Veteran, PRO Association of Licensed Private Security Professionals in Nigeria. Thank you so much for your time and for your wealth of knowledge this morning. Have a great day, sir. Next stop, we're turning to politics. We touched on this on the papers earlier this morning. It's about the confusion in the People's Democratic Party where it seems that two national chairmen have emerged. Stay with us.