NDLEA UNDER AHMADU GIADE IS A FALIURE: SEE 10 YEARS LEGACY OF INEPTITUDE IN NDLEA UNDER HIS WATCH

In a rather low key ceremony in the afternoon of Wednesday 25th November, 2015 ALHAJI AHMADU GIADE the erstwhile Chairman/Chief Executive of the NDLEA handed over to Mrs. Roli-Bode George, the Secretary/Director General of the Agency. 

Alhaji Ahmadu Giade had held sway at the helms of affairs of the Agency for 10 years having been appointed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo in November 2005.

In a very brief speech during the handing over ceremony, Alhaji Giade laboured to enumerate some achievements of his 10 year administration to include the certification of Nigeria by the United States, signing of several MOU’s with various countries to strengthen the country’s drug war, the tremendous improvement in the number of arrests and seizure in the country and finally his much touted zero tolerance to corruption.  In concluding his brief remarks he urged the incoming Chairman/Chief Executive to focus on improving the welfare of the officers of the Agency. He apparently remembered his officers welfare on the last day of his tenure.

In 2014, the EU under the European Union funded project ‘Response to drugs and related organised crime in Nigeria’ commissioned “an institutional assessment of National Drug Law Enforcement Agency of Nigeria”. This assessment was done by a renowned international consultant one Roger Gasper QC.

The following critical issues came out of this amongst several other issues –
i)    The assessment found an Agency in critical decline as a result of severe funding problems. Its promised budget is inadequate for its task but the situation has been made worse because even the expected funding has not been received by the Agency.  Such work as is possible which in some areas are very creditable, is currently maintained by the good will of the staff.
ii)    Funding however is not the only issue.  The Agency was formed 25 years ago when law enforcement methodology was still inherently reactive.  In that time, the criminal drugs business has grown and altered in nature and so has law enforcement methodology.  The NDLEA under its law enforcement responsibilities is tackling a clandestine business and reactive methodology alone is insufficient for that purpose.  There is no doubt that individuals within the Agency have and continue to make important interdictions of drugs and consequential arrests but these successes are not coming from the middle and top tier of offending.

To address this gap and improve existing activity, a move to intelligence-led methodology is essential.  This can only be achieved by the development of a supporting infrastructure. 

This assessment is clearly at variance with the so-called achievements Alhaji Giade is laying claim to.

Let’s now do an assessment of the ‘Giade years’ in NDLEA.  It is extremely difficult to put a finger to any tangible achievement of Alhaji Ahmadu Giade in the Agency.  The best way to go about this task may be to examine some of the former CCE’s actions and inactions that today define the Agency.
1.    Ten years ago when Alhaji Giade took over as CCE, the NDLEA was the only security Agency in Nigeria operating its headquarters from Lagos.  The Agency still remains the only Security Agency without its headquarters in Abuja the Nations’ Capital. Rogers Gaspers report referred to above noted the obvious disadvantage of this state of affairs.

2.    In the 10 years that Giade was at the helm of affairs, he only had three meetings with his State Commanders.  To this extent, he hardly had any physical contact with majority of his State Commanders.  As a matter of fact, he did not know eighty per cent (80%) of his Commanders physically until October 2014 when he had the third State Commanders Summit/Conference in Kaduna.  This was when he had his first one-on-one meeting with the Commanders individually.

3.    In the area of infrastructural development, Alhaji Giade left the Agency worse off than he met it.  The Agency has 36 State Command Offices and the FCT as well as eleven Special Area Command offices. The physical state of most these offices are in various state of dilapidation and not even fit for human habitation in some extreme cases.  If not for the magnanimity of some State Governors, who have assisted in renovations or paying rents sometimes, the story would have been worse.

The state of the headquarters complex does not even fare better.  The buildings housing the headquarters in Ikoyi were inherited from the defunct NSO. There has been no improvement on the structures for about 27years now after the Agency was created.

4.    In the area of logistics, the Agency even fared much worse.  The seven directors of the Agency have used one 2007 model Toyota Camry as official cars since 2008.  These vehicles are now zero value in the books of the Agency.  In Giade’s NDLEA they are even considered lucky. No other category of staff was given official cars even though the NDLEA order which he operated zealously throughout his tenure in the area of discipline of staff listed various categories of staff who are entitled to official cars.  Deputy Directors, Assistant Directors, State Commanders and their Assistants have no official/staff cars throughout the tenure of Alhaji Giade.

5.    The dearth of logistics is equally felt in the area of operations. State/Special Commands have no operational vehicles, where any existed, they are very old and scrappy. The only serviceable vehicles in the fleet of most commands were the result of the magnanimity state governments. This was how operations was run in the better part of Alhaji Giade’s tenure.

6.    The welfare of officers ranked bottom in the priority list of Alhaji Giade.  In ten years, he never paid transfer allowances to officers whom he subjected to the most frequent, inhuman and punitive transfers in the management of any organisation whether private or government in Nigeria.  Some officers, both senior and junior suffered as much as three transfers across the federation within one year.  To underscore how bad the situation was, the agency in response to a September 14, 2015 circular from the office of the Head of Service of the Federation “Collation of Unpaid Financial Entitlements of Staff Members” of MDAs in respect to salary arrears, promotion arrears, 1st 28 Days allowance, etc.  The Agency made a claim of about 7.2 billion naira owed its staff from 2005 till date.

Even after posting this huge legitimate debt owed to officers over a period of ten years, Alhaji Giade on the 20th November, 2015 transferred another 250 officers across the length and breadth of Nigeria without paying a dime to anyone as transfer allowance thereby further subjecting officers to a most harrowing experience in these difficult economic times.

7.    Throughout the tenure of Alhaji Giade in NDLEA, he never constituted a staff promotion committee or body of any kind.  He was the sole determinant of who gets promoted using all kinds of arbitrary known and unknown criteria whether for junior or senior officers.  To this extent he used promotion as a tool to reward his cronies and punishment against his perceived enemies.  What he left behind is a grossly distorted Agency with a large population of discontented staff.

8.    Alhaji Giade has always claimed zero tolerance to corruption as one of his most significant achievements. But he watered the ground for corruption by his actions.  All the forty-seven State/Special Area Commands received a paltry N130,000 (One Hundred and Thirty Thousand Naira Only) per month as imprest/running cost.  He expected the Commanders to maintain and fuel the old vehicles, pay utility bills, pay informants, feed their suspects from this money. He equally demanded arrest and seizure from them, failure of which often led to redeployment and oftentimes disciplinary measures for various infractions.  As we speak, the last imprest allocation for the Commanders is that of May, 2015

9.    In the 10years that Alhaji Giade held sway as Chairman/Chief Executive, he made nothing less than 200 foreign trips most of which he collected his estacode allowance.  To fund some of these trips, he “borrowed” money from the account of NDLEA Staff Cooperative Society.  The benefits of these trips never translated into the Agency as its fortunes continued to plummet under Alhaji Giade as CCE.

10.    By November 2015 when Alhaji Giade took his exit as Chairman/Chief Executive, he had practically put the running of the Agency’s critical operations in the hands of the Americans.  As we speak, it is the Americans who determine and select officers who will work in certain commands and special units after a so called lie detector or polygraph test. This absurd criteria has now even been extended to the Agency’s prosecution unit where experience has been sacrificed and complex and important cases are assigned to only prosecutors who pass the polygraph test.  This is what led to the bungling of the celebrated Kasamu’s case recently.
As if this is not bad enough, American agents have been put on ground at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA) Command in Lagos ostensibly to advice the Agency’s officers in their day-to-day work.  But this American agents are given unhindered access to critical areas of the airport just like any Nigerian Security Agent.  This cannot be in the best interest of our national security as a nation.

It is against this backdrop that the recent appointment of Alhaji Giade as the Special Adviser to the Attorney- General of the Federation on Narcotics and drugs beggars belief.  Why must Giade be returned in some public capacity after the expiration of his ten year tenure in NDLEA? Is it that the Agency is exempted from the wind of change blowing across the country? Alhaji Giade put in 37 years in the police and 10 years as Chairman/Chief Executive of NDLEA, a total of 47 years in public service! Given his ‘achievements’ in NDLEA as enumerated above, this cannot be the best candidate to advice the Attorney-General of the Federation on narcotics unless the motive is for him to continue to exercise some kind of control on the NDLEA.


CONCERNED STAFF OF NDLEA