Ex-NSA Aliyu Gusau Under Investigation Over Alleged Link With Lebanese Terrorists

Past National Security Adviser, NSA, and former Presidential aspirant, General Mohammed Aliyu Gusau (rtd) is currently under security watch over suspected links with the busted huge cache of arms stocked in an underground bunker in Kano.

Security sources quotes the Joint Task Force spokesman in Kano, Lieutenant Ikedichi Iweha, as giving this hint.

According to a JTF source, from the arrests made so far, it was disclosed that Gusau’s alleged link to the Hezbollah group is being investigated following confession by “those we have arrested”.

Gusau’s Failed Presidential Bid and Desperate Plot To Replace Azazi As NSA

The retired Lieutenant General was in two years ago enmeshed in alleged desperate and well orchestrated plot to return as Nigeria’s National Security Adviser (NSA) to President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

Recall that Gusau is a three-time National Security Adviser under the administrations of General Ibrahim Babangida, President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan before he resigned his appointment to run for President, which his marabouts had repeatedly revealed to him was his for the taking.

Gusau has never hidden his desire to fulfil the messages from his seers that he would be Head of State just like his peers—Sani Abacha, Ibrahim Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo.

His bid for the presidency however suffered a major set back when he joined forces with three other contenders from the north under the auspices of the Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF) — Ibrahim Babangida, Atiku Abubakar and Bukola Saraki to produce a consensus candidate, where Atiku eventually emerged as presidential candidate of the group.

Having suffered a major political blow in his presidential bid and later out of work, Gusau, about 70, had opened his ‘spy-bag’ and started a well-oiled campaign, with the tacit support of some political allies to discredit then NSA General Andrew Owoye Azazi.

Gusau’s first plot to return as NSA came up during the negotiations between the President and his aides on one hand and top members of the NPLF after Atiku Abubakar and the group had suffered an embarrassing defeat at the Presidential primaries of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Gusau was alleged to had pressed the group to insist on nominating the NSA, who would assume office immediately as apart of the reconciliation deal.

The former Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) according to sources had assured Atiku and core members of the group that once he returned as NSA before the Presidential election proper, he would use the resources and authority of the office to work for the victory of a candidate from the north that would get the group’s nod. President Jonathan however did not fall for the scheme and talks ended with the NPLF.

Furthermore, while talks were ongoing between Jonathan and the NPLF, a clique of the pro-zoning group made a move through the National Assembly to undermine the office of then National Security Adviser by pushing for a bill that would have made the Office of Coordinator on Terrorism independent of the Office of the NSA which superintends over it like most other intelligence and security agencies.

The plot was to create parallel intelligence coordinating office that could rival the NSA. The scheme, it was gathered, was to have Gusau or his nominee take up the position. This move however als to hit a dead end.

Having failed again, Gusau has once again taken his campaign abroad where his influential contacts in the United States Jewish community helped pressure the United States Government to nudge then Acting President Goodluck Jonathan to hand him back the NSA job having been sacked by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Sources said that Gusau had covertly hinged the campaign for his return on his experience in local intelligence and clout in the north, which he said would help hold the nation together and keep the military out of politics.

2015 Presidential Ambition

Gusau wants to run for President again in 2015, sources close to him have disclosed, and he has started his campaign very early. A well-orchestrated propaganda campaign in the local media as well as western intelligence and diplomatic communities started as far back as 2011.

The local media campaign had focused on blaming the leadership of the national security community as being unable to manage the security crises that engulfed some northern states in the aftermath of the presidential polls.

This is supplemented with sponsored editorials and cooked up analyses hinged on the need for Jonathan to bring erstwhile opponents from the north into his new government; the strategy being to subtly pressurise President Jonathan, that given the recent outbreak of post election violence in the north, only an ex-security chief of northern extraction could calm angry nerves in the north and thus manage the crises.

Azazi was the first non-northerner and non-Muslim ever to be appointed National Security Adviser in Nigeria’s history.

This may not be unconnected with the current security challenges in Nigeria as a result of network of insurgents which took years under the watch of successive NSA, who allowed Boko Haram to build its network and train suicide bombers and fighters.

A Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis report by Global Information System, ISSA formerly known as Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, founded in 1972, the March 22, 2011 analysis painted a picture of scary uncertainties that awaits a Jonathan presidency in the north if he doesn’t include aggrieved opponents of his presidential run in his administration.

The report specifically recommended General Aliyu Mohammed Gusau, the retired Zamfara State politician as one of the key elements to guarantee a peaceful northern Nigeria.

Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis Report and Current Insecurity

For clarity, the Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis Report is reproduced unedited below:

“Special Report: Nigeria: The Hiatus is Over; Now the Nation Must Rapidly Address the Detritus of a Year and More of Neglect or Face Major Security Challenges.

“Space: Celebrating the Gagarin Moment

“Analysis. From GIS Station Abuja. Nigerian Pres. Goodluck Jonathan will soon discover whether his victory in the Presidential elections of April 18, 2011, was a Pyrrhic one. It was not that he had difficulty — in the end — in defeating his main rival; it was that he broke the delicate sense of nationalism among the country’s 250 or so ethnic/communal groups; he incited North-South/Muslim-Christian distrust; and he almost broke the one great instrument of recent Nigerian politics, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

“The seriousness of Nigeria’s fragility at this point cannot be overstated. Unless Nigeria is able to begin the healing after more than a year of Abuja infighting for power, then civil unrest could become profound national breakdown. One longtime British professional observer noted privately: “There are similarities between Nigeria’s condition today and its condition just before the outbreak of the Biafra civil war in 1967.”

“Dr Jonathan’s ambition — and that of his wife — drove him to override all objections to sustain his bid for the Presidency, but he will need to turn to at least one powerful and truly nationally-conscious figure to rebuild the Presidency and the country. It is a man he mistreated, but now cannot do without. And if he attempts to do without him now, Nigeria will continue with its protests, its anarchy in the Niger Delta ener¬gy states, and its debilitating inefficiencies due to its skewed and corrupt political structure.

“The triumph of Pres. Jonathan spurred predictable protests, but the outcome of the election was always likely to have been for the candidate of the PDP — this time Pres. Jonathan — provided the party itself remained intact as the only truly national party in Nigeria.

“Moreover, when the opposition to Jonathan coalesced loosely around former military head-of-state (December 31, 1983 – August 27, 1985), Maj.-Gen. (rtd.) Muhammadu Buhari, 68, of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the situation was never in doubt. Buhari had appeal only in three Northern Nigerian states, and even there he is seen as abrasive and dictatorial.

“One question which should be asked is why the PDP did not fracture when Jonathan violated his own party’s rules to stand for the Presidency at a time when the Party dictated that it was the turn of a Northern candidate to stand.

“It did not fracture because one of the founders of the PDP, and a man who had himself positioned himself for the Presidency, Lt.-Gen. (rtd.) Alivu Mohammed, decided that it was more important to preserve the party over his own personal ambitions.

“And it is former National Security Advisor and one time Chief of Army Staff Aliyu Mohammed — often referred to as Aliyu Mohammed Gusau, because he was born in Gusau — who must make the PDP and the Nigerian system work again.

“After the Armed Forces, the most significant truly national entity in Nigeria is the PDP. Even the Federal Civil Service is heavily skewed through its domination by Yoruba people and is only “national” by virtue of its geographic spread and its domination of the bureaucracy in the Federal capital, Abuja.

“But two key outcomes are now evident:
1. Political polarisation will worsen the nation’s security situation in the short term, with an anticipated rise in a wide range of terrorist and insurgent activities, some with external sponsor¬ship or support; and
2. The business of government will gradually resume after almost a year of distraction (and more than a year before that of stultification due to the illness of then-Pres. Umaru Yar’Adua), and this will provide an opportunity for Nigeria and its allies to stabilise oil and gas production and domestic infrastructure work.

“One thing which has emerged, however, is that the Government will remain constrained by the reality that almost all the national (Federal) revenues are being consumed by the process of governance, with very little over for social and infrastructural programs.

“With considerable funding controlled by key parliamentary leaders — in the Senate, particularly, but also in the House of Representatives — the President has only marginal leeway.

“And yet without substantial means to kick-start the private sector of the Nigerian economy, the President remains essentially trapped in the bubble — “the Forbidden City” as it was described in the case of Beijing — of Abuja. Key political leaders in the Senate will continue to extract, for their personal use, many millions of dollars worth of the exchequer each day.

“It will take considerable ingenuity, then, to cope with the Niger Delta unrest and the now-emerging dissent in Northern Nigeria against the rule of Nigeria by a “South-South” President, who has been seen — even in the brief period since he assumed the Presidency on the death of Pres. Umaru Yar’Adua on May 5, 2010 — to have been mired in corruption.

“Moreover, the first fully-elected term of office of Pres. Jonathan is not expected to bring any profound relief from corruption, except in areas where he was forced — in order to win political support — to surrender control over a number of key ministries to political leaders who needed this assurance before they would support Dr Jonathan’s bid for the Presidency.

“What is likely to emerge, then, is a Nigerian Government which will have some parts still mired in corruption, and other parts which will operate with a much higher degree of honesty and purpose.

“The key to the stability of the Government, then, is likely to remain in the hands of Aliyu Mohammed.

“Gen. Mohammed is extremely well-known to most world leaders and the heads of most major intelligence services. He is devoutly religious (Sunni Muslim), but close friends with Christians and Jews. He is also regarded as one of the few generals never to have taken an oil concession, or been associated in any way with corruption.

“While this gives him great credibility in some quarters, it makes others nervous and cautious. He has, however, a track record of loyalty to the government and nation, believing that continuity of elected government is the only hope of Nigeria’s progressive recovery from economic problems.

“If it emerged that Pres. Jonathan reneged on his promise to allow Gen. Mohammed control over a number of Nigerian ministries, then the Government would lose substantial credibility with the major powers, from Russia, to the US, the PRC, and EU.

“Moreover, his absence from the Government would almost certainly result in an increase in domestic violence, given that there would be no-one to craft sophisticated policies to assuage the frustrated populations of the Delta and the North.

“The key challenge, then, will be how the Nigerian Government can be given a measure of economic flexibility and freed from the fact that the bulk of the budget currently goes directly into sustaining the National Assembly and the bureaucracy.

“The reality also is that changing this situation will prove difficult because of the deals which had to be done with key regional and national politicians to ensure Pres. Jonathan of re-election.

“Some hope was to raise funds and improve public services through the privatisation of electrical power supply, but the first period of Pres. Jonathan’s rule saw much of the electrical sector privatised along terms which were less than transparent, with the likely result that the outcome will also be less than transparently beneficial to the public and industry.

“The question of Federal-State relations is also critical, given that the Federal Government is obliged to distribute oil revenues down to the states, and has little control thereafter on spending. Moreover, the pat¬tern of distorted and corrupt spending at the level of most of the state governments mirrors the same dysfunction of Abuja.

“This is, ironically, particularly the case in the Niger Delta states which have rightly complained that they have received insufficient reward for creating the energy wealth which sustains the en¬tire Nigerian nation.

“But Abuja — even under a President from Bayelsa, in the Niger Delta — has learned that giving more money to the Delta governors will not necessarily translate into better services for the residents of those states.

“In other words, giving more money to corrupt and/or inefficient state governors in the Delta will not help ease the unrest of the frustrated and displaced population, particularly the youth which feed the Move¬ment for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the primary South-South insurgent group.

“MEND — which is almost entirely Christian — has also demonstrated that it has links with the North African Islamists of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has provided it with some improvised bomb-making skills and possibly some triggers.

“That move parallels the links which the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had maintained with South American narco-terrorists and Libya: illegal networks will deal with each other across ideological lines.

“One of the most significant indicators of the changing nature of the conflict within Nigeria has been the spread of consistent and serious unrest outside the Niger Delta, with the broader — out of Delta — activities of MEND, and the foreign support for both MEND and the pseudo-Islamist Boko Haram movement in the North.

“Boko Haram has been co-opted, in many respects, as a franchise for the neo-salafist jihadist movement, despite Boko Haram’s lack of true Muslim jihadist credentials.

“This has all manifested itself in a profound escalation of the number and sophistication of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nigerian urban areas.

“At the same time, the Nigerian security and intelligence authorities — and even the people charged with the physical protection of the President and Presidency — have failed almost absolutely to address the issue of lEDs and counter-IED capabilities.

“Despite claims to the contrary, no counter-IED capabilities reside within the State Security Service (SSS), the Police, or the National Intelligence Agency (NIA).

“It is true that the first task which will be given to Aliyu Mohammed, if he is brought back in, behind the scenes, to save the country, is to address the underlying social and political conditions which give rise and support to MEND and Boko Haram, and their likes. But at the same time, there will be a major need to revitalise the NIA and SSS to give them capabilities to deal tactically with the phenomena of the at¬tacks.

“Equally, and concurrently, the Government must then decide to take measures to keep corruption within acceptable bounds so that additional revenues can be diverted to broad social and infrastructural issues.

“The Jonathan Government has been given options to create a domestic monitoring capability which would essentially limit or end the process of illegal oil uplifting, but to implement it would actually implicate many officials very close to Pres. Jonathan. As a result, the program has been stillborn.

“There is still one more piece in the election drama: the forthcoming state gubernatorial elections. These will also unleash a period of further violence, before the national healing can begin, if it is to begin.

“But in the end, the situation will remain entirely unstable unless Aliyu Mohammed is invited — and is prepared — to once again drag Nigeria back from the brink,” the GIS wrote.

It’s however clear that President Goodluck Jonathan didn’t succumb to the plot.

Those who follow events as regards the insurgency in northern Nigeria would have seen that alleged complicity of some highly place security personnel in Boko Haram activities may not be described as unfounded until a painstaking investigation proves otherwise.

source: http://issuesinngr.wordpress.com