Ex-Military Intelligence chief indicts Buhari, says governors, senators, ministers Boko Haram sponsors

A former Military Intelligence chief, Navy Commodore Kunle Olawunmi (Rtd), has indicted President Muhammadu Buhari on the current raging insecurity in Nigeria.

Commodore Olawunmi, now a professor of Global Security Studies in the Department of Criminology and Security Studies, Chrisland University, Nigeria, said the Buhari has developed cold feet in fighting insurgency in the north because some of those backing Boko Haram are now top-ranking members of his government.

Speaking on Channels Television programme, Sunrise Daily, on Wednesday, Olawunmi who said he invested his 35 years in the military in the Intelligence Service, described Tuesday attack by so-called gunmen on Nigeria’s premier military institution, the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), Kaduna, as an aberration.

“You don’t attack Nigerian Defence Academy and kill officers and get away with it.

“Why should a government try to cause this kind of embarrassment and insecurity to the sense of what happened yesterday (Tuesday attack on NDA)?” he queried, adding that sponsors of terrorists in Nigeria want to turn the country into a Taliban type state.

The former Military Intelligence chief who said he had conducted operations for Nigeria overseas said the Nigerian government knows those sponsoring the decade-long Boko Haram insurgency in the country but has not been able to prosecute them because it is partisan.

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“Recently, 400 people were gathered as sponsors of Boko Haram, why is it that the Buhari government has refused to try them? Why can’t this government bring them to trial if not that they are partisan and part of the charade that is going on?” he queried.

He continued: “You remember this Boko Haram issue started in 2012, and I was in the military intelligence at that time. We arrested those people. My organisation actually conducted interrogation and they (suspects) mentioned names.

“I can’t come on air and start mentioning names of people that are presently in government that I know that the boys that we arrested mentioned. Some of them are governors now, some of them are in the Senate, some of them are in Aso Rock.

“I told them that the centre of gravity of Boko Haram in Nigeria is the sponsors of the programme. It was beyond us (Military) because the job we needed to do was kinetic but we cannot resolve issues of sponsors of Boko Haram that were in Buhari’s government that we know them. That was why we couldn’t pursue that aspect that could have resolved the issue (insurgency) because we need to arrest people.”

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Olawunmi also said that the Department of State Services (DSS) has “tremendous information on terrorists but they can’t do anything except the body language of the Commander-In-Chief (President) shows this is the direction I want to go.”

Commodore Olawunmi believes the Nigerian government is not sincere in the fight against Boko Haram. According to him, fishing out the sponsors is a major way of ending the war.

“The challenge we have in this country cannot be solved the same way we solved the problem of the Niger Delta. I told them we can’t use the same strategy for Boko Haram,” he argued, citing when he served a security and intelligence brief at the Defence Headquarters between 2016 and 2017.

The Presidency had said it would publish names of those behind the Boko Haram insurgency but several months later, the long-awaited list is yet to be made public, a situation the ex-military officer said does not bode well for the government who he accused of shielding criminals.

“Try them, we know them. Why can’t this government, if not that they are partisan, bring those people out for trial?” he asked.

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