The deputy director of the Department of State Security, DSS, Mr Patrick Ikenweiwe, yesterday said that the country’s best academics and graduates should be forced to join the DSS and serve the nation to tackle security challenges.
Ikenweiwe said, “As far as I know, in Israel, students take one examination to get admission into the university. The moment you score above 70 marks, you have no option but to be sent to the university there.
“Tell me how would a “Dundee” (dullard) be able to keep security in a criminal gang that is constituted of first-class people? You know, it takes intellect to track criminality.
“So, if I have my way in this country, and we keep praying that we do the right thing, the academia should be able to supply us, sincerely, the details of students who have excelled in their various fields of study so that they would be forced to serve this great nation.”
Ikenweiwe spoke in Ilorin, Kwara State, at the 2025 Distinguished Personality Lecture of the Centre For Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ilorin.
At the event, he represented the director general of the DSS, Mr Oluwatoyin Ajayi, and presented his paper.
He clarified that the above statement was his personal opinion.
In the lecture paper, the director general of DSS, Mr Oluwatoyin Ajayi, called on stakeholders to check the situation, saying that Nigerians regard security and intelligence organisations as friends rather than enemies.
Ajayi said that such development affects the quality and quantity of intelligence produced “and, by extension, impacts peacebuilding and national integration.
The DSS DG, whose lecture was titled “The Roles of the DSS in Security, Peacekeeping and National Integration,” called for strengthening institutions like intelligence agencies, reorientation of roles, and a rethink of recruitment and staffing.
He said that despite the abovementioned constraints, the secret agency continued to leverage collaboration with sister agencies and engage with stakeholders to navigate identified challenges.
Ajayi identified traditional threats to national security to include sabotage, subversion and espionage.
He added: “In the last two decades, however, terrorism and insurgency have threatened internal security like never before in the nation’s history. Other threats of national security dimension extend to separatist agitations, militancy, illegal oil bunkering, farmer-herder clashes, ethno-religious hostilities, economic and cyber crimes, political violence and sundry violent crimes, such as armed robbery and kidnapping”.
Earlier, the director of the Centre for Peace and Strategic Studies, Prof Ibrahim Jawondo, said that the Centre was established in 2008 with the core mandate of producing manpower to tackle the various crises and conflicts of resource management confronting Nigerian communities and the globe at large.
