President Bola Tinubu has been urged to be careful on the current move to restructure the Office of the National Security Adviser (NSA).
The call came from Non-State Actors Consultative Forum, in a press statement, signed by its chief convener, Abdulrazaq Alkali, who described the move as ill-advised and counter-productive to the national security architecture.
Alkali said there is a bill at the National Assembly for the restructuring of the Office of the NSA into an agency and allowing it to recruit its own personnel.
He warned that if it happened, the efficiency of the NSA’s office will be negatively affected.
The group said the Office of the NSA is known to be one of the offices which work with professionals and skilled officials selected from the various security agencies based on merit, skills and capacity.
He said, “If NSA office is 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 witnessed 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.”
Alkali warned that passing the bill will mean that the NSA infrastructure will have to be overhauled to avoid conflict with the sections of the constitution that established it or that section of the constitution will have to be amended to accommodate the bill.
He noted that restructuring 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 Services (DSS and military 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.
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