Graduation Ceremony Of The National Institute For Security Studies Of Executive Intelligence Management Course 14 on 04/12/2021

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SPEECH DELIVERED BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE GRADUATION CEREMONY OF THE EXECUTIVE INTELLIGENCE MANAGEMENT COURSE 14, 2021 ON THE 4^TH OF DECEMBER, 2021

PROTOCOLS

The Chair and Members of the Board of the Institute, and the Director-General, thank you very much for the kind invitation to join you at this graduation ceremony of the Executive Intelligence Management Course 14, 2021.

Let me say that when I listened to the list of those who were receiving special prizes and awards, and I noticed neither my own Chief Security Officer nor the Chief Security Officer of the First Lady who is also in this course received a prize, I realised that there was no “man-know-man” in this thing.

We must commend the great foresight of the founding fathers of the Institute in recognizing the need for a place of learning and research of this calibre to equip members of the security and intelligence community as well as those from other agencies. It is in the recognition of the strategic value of this institute that President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019, elevated the Institute to the status of a “National Institute” by consenting to the bill establishing the Institute.

I am pleased to know that you have not only continued in the illustrious tradition of your predecessors, but you have set new standards of scholarship, excellence and creativity here at the Institute; commendations to the directing staff and the Board of the Institute.

But it is to the graduands of the Executive Intelligence Management Course 14, 2021 that our heartiest congratulations are due.

After ten rigorous months, you have now attained the special privilege of preferment rank of Fellow of the Institute, FSI. Well done indeed!

Permit me then to address you on some issues which I believe you should take into account in the special status that you have now attained. You are in many ways, the crème-de-la-crème of our security and intelligence services.

You represent the emergent leadership elite of this crucial arm of our defence and security infrastructure. What you know or do not know is what our defence architecture knows or does not know.

How well trained you are, how competent and knowledgeable you are, directly correlates to how safe and secure this nation of two hundred million people is and will be.  The burden of responsibility you carry is an enormous one because it literally is one of life and death.

Your task is made more challenging because we exist today in a profoundly complex, and often volatile geo-strategic environment.

Let me identify at least four major challenges in the environment:

1. The global dimensions to local security;
2. The size of the country and the challenge of covering the extensive terrain;
3. The availability and use of technology by criminal and terrorist individuals and groups, and;
4. Interagency coordination.

The question of global dimensions to local security challenges speaks to the complexity that every local challenge invariably has a global or trans-border link. Meaning that you cannot solve the local problem without understanding the international dimension.

So, take the insurgency in the Northeast as an example, you cannot fully appreciate its scope without recognizing its linkages with the Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), Al-Shabab and the so-called Islamic State or Daesh in the Middle East. The Boko Haram, ISWAP insurrection itself has since metamorphosed into an insurgency troubling three other countries – Chad, Niger and Cameroon.  Or how does one strategize against the alarming numbers of weapons available to criminal gangs in every zone of the country without fully investigating the various international routes especially from the Sahel region for the smuggling of small arms and light weapons?

So clearly our security and intelligence elite must also be geo~strategic in their conception of solutions. As thought leaders and planners of our security architecture, we should expect that you will familiarize yourself with the history, contemporary activities and modus operandi of these international terrorist groups that have links with local terrorists. You must understand their financing and how they transport arms and ammunition and what technology is and will soon be available to them in the coming months and years.

On the issue of the huge terrain of Nigeria, as a practical matter, policing and securing a large population that lives in a large country poses a unique challenge.

For example, the fact that Bama, a single local government area in Borno State is larger than Lagos State has implications for our understanding of what constitutes an effective policing or law enforcement footprint on the ground.

Mashegu local government in Niger State is 9182 sq km, which means it is larger than 10 individual States. The fact that Niger State alone is larger than the entire South-East of Nigeria is crucial to any conversation about the effective distribution of security assets in the country.

It is also clear that we cannot secure or police a country of this size with human assets alone. We must therefore leverage technology. At a time when national resources are stretched thin, we have to come up with technology-driven solutions to address our security needs. Whether we are discussing the law enforcement and policing of our borders or surveillance and reconnaissance programmes aimed at identifying criminal elements within our coastal waters or locating terrorists hiding within the general population, the challenges are the same.

We must become much smarter in the deployment of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tools to compensate for the human resource deficits within our security establishment. When applied creatively, technology can be a force multiplier, amplifying our potential and our capacity to effectively secure our territory.

It is not enough to know that we should deploy technology for surveillance and combat, at the heart of the complexity of the security environment, lies the technology and the way it has empowered criminal non-state actors with capabilities that just decades ago could only be exercised by nation-states. Now criminal non-state actors have access to weapons of the type that only nation-states had in the past.

So, for example, look at the various criminal and terrorist possibilities on the so-called Dark Web. The dark web is a virtual underworld that hosts a global illicit economy that has proven difficult for state actors to infiltrate. Within this underground cyber universe, transactions around illicit drugs, weapons, child trafficking and even weapons of mass destruction are being conducted.

We must obtain cutting-edge knowledge of the various iterations of technology and the various possible lethal and non-lethal uses, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, (ML) Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Edge Computing, Quantum Computing, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), 5G. There is so much today that we need to learn about and a lot of it has to be by self-education.

We must not only know about these technologies, but we must also develop the expertise even for writing the algorithms and codes for intelligent equipment. And we must be prepared to deal with new and lethal weapons coming on stream today.

How about the whole range of cyber intelligence and cyber security? The digitization of communications, information and financial services has led to the emergence of a complex virtual infrastructure that undergirds the global economy.

While the development of digitization itself holds the tremendous promise of growth, we must not be unmindful of the latent and manifest dangers. As we move more and more of our information including strategic information, and financial transactions online, certain strategic vulnerabilities must be accounted for. One is the threat of hacking and other cybercrimes which could inflict damage on our cyber-infrastructure and compromise critical sectors, including military, defence, telecommunications and financial services.

The threat environment that you are tasked with engaging in is not the same threat environment that existed even just a decade ago. This bears emphasis. In strategic national security terms, we must recognize that it is a new day and a new age.

Your challenges are new, and while I sympathize with you because it is your lot to deal with in a world that is far more complicated than that which your predecessors dealt with, but I must also add that you are functioning at the most advanced moment in human history.

You are better equipped, better resourced than at any other time in the history of man. I usually give the example of the smartphones we carry today. The smartphone you carry today has 100 times more computing power than all the computing power that the Apollo Spacecraft that carried men to the moon in 1969 had.

In any event, it has fallen on you to be the generation of security and intelligence practitioners that will marshal Nigeria’s responses to the variety of threats that confront us. There is no doubt that in marshalling these responses, we must be smarter and more imaginative.

We are compelled by the exigencies of our age to be much smarter in the way we go about our business not only because we are in competition with well-equipped non-state actors, some of whom are of hostile intent, but also because we must keep pace with society itself.

In addition to being much smarter, the perils of this new age challenge us to become even more imaginative. The business of intelligence necessarily entails the capacity to expect the unexpected and to foresee the impact of unintended consequences and Black Swan events – that is unpredictable events and usually these unpredictable events that we must be prepared for. We must plan especially because we have been given the responsibility to think ahead of a nation of this size and of this complexity. It falls upon our laps to plan ahead and to be imaginative.

It is not enough for intelligence services to anticipate the threats that they have a clear line of sight to. Indeed, given the resource constraints that we face, we cannot afford to wait for threats to become manifest dangers before we react. Our intelligence services must be proactive rather than reactive, ahead of the curve rather than behind it. Threats must be identified and addressed well before they evolve into manifest perils.

It is a very heavy burden indeed but the truth is that the intelligence community by the very nature of its mandate, is charged with being several steps ahead of the rest of us. This requires a high capacity for imagination. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in many respects, a failure of intelligence is a failure of imagination. On this note, I must stress that if there is any gift or skill that should define the intelligence officer of the new age, it is imagination – being able to think in terms of multiple alternative scenarios, variables and possibilities.

Imagination is a function of what you read and what you listen to. What are you reading right now? Have you read the latest books on the dark web or on the activities of global criminal networks? Are you intensely and constantly acquainting yourselves with the most up to date thinking and knowledge in the security sector?

The knowledge economy and the information age are characterized by the constancy of innovation and how swiftly and fluidly that conventional wisdom becomes obsolete every single day. The security and intelligence sector is not exempt from this dynamic. The point of constant learning is not only to keep us in touch with current trends in this space but also to enhance our abilities to anticipate and identify threats that lie beyond the horizon.

But perhaps one of the most critical areas that we must reinvent is the institutional culture of our security and intelligence agencies. Our security and intelligence agencies must adopt a culture that is empirical, data-driven, analytical and defined by forensic rigour. Above all we must emphasize interagency collaboration and synergy. This is absolutely important – we are as good as the synergy between all of the agencies; law enforcement agencies of government and security agencies of government.

This administration has certainly not shied away from investing in the sector. In May this year, arising from our deliberations in the National Security Council, the President established the Committee on Needs and Assessment of National Security Requirements. He mandated that the Committee look at all of the special needs of Defence, Security and Intelligence Agencies in the light of the current challenges and recommend options for containment. The President personally handpicked the membership of the Committee which had representation from the military, the police and the security and intelligence community, and he asked me to chair it.

As a result of the work of the Committee, the President signed a supplementary budget of N802.10 billion for the military, security and intelligence agencies. This was in keeping with his commitment since the outset of this administration to ensure that those charged with keeping Nigerians safe are adequately equipped for the job.

Beyond this, Mr. President has emphasized an approach that leverages interagency collaboration, joint operations, technology-driven enablers and the optimization of existing capabilities to avoid duplication of resources and expenditure.

Those of you graduating today are at the frontlines of an existential struggle. You are not just fighting to preserve the Nigeria of today, but for the opportunity to leave a better country for generations to come. It is the struggle to realize the words of our national anthem and make Nigeria, “a land where peace and justice reign.”

This nation of our dreams is still evolving, there are challenges, but they are surmountable, and every victory that you reap through your immense courage and toil even sometimes in the teeth of danger, serves to bring that new Nigeria into being. Your labours will not be in vain.

You are now better equipped for the command and strategic positions you occupy. I have no doubt in my mind that as you return to your respective security organisations and countries, you will bring fresh ideas and renewed vigour to the service of your respective countries and units.

I would like to congratulate you again; God bless you and thank you very much.