The National Security Organization (NSO) of Nigeria, or Nigerian Security Organization, was created under Decree number 27 of 1976 by the military regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo, after the failed Dimka coup which claimed the life of former Head of State General Murtala Mohammed. The NSO was given a mandate of co-ordinating Internal Security, Foreign Intelligence and counterintelligence activities. It was charged with the detection and prevention of any crime against the security of the state, with the protection of classified materials, and with carrying out any other security missions assigned by the president.
During the time of the military regime, and continuing through the Nigerian Second Republic, the NSO was accused of carrying out systematic and widespread human rights abuses, especially of those seen to be critical of the government. One dissident has called them a "Gestapo in Black".*New York Times. TOPICS; LOST IN AFRICA, 13 January 1985.
Directors General of the NSO Directors General of the NSO Term of ServiceColonel Abdullahi MohammedMarch 1976October 1979Umaru ShinkafiOctober 1979December 1983Mohammed Lawal RafindadiJanuary 1984August 1985Brigadier-General Aliyu Mohammed GusauSeptember 1985July 1986
Origins Dimka coup The NSO was created as a fall-out of the Dimka coup. Prior to the coup, internal security and intelligence was handled by the police Special Branch, a Secret Police, while external intelligence was conducted by the Research Department (RD), a unit of the External Affairs ministry. The Special Branch had failed to obtain intelligence about the coup and the coup plotters before the coup was executed; the inspector general of police at the time MD Yussuf excused this failure as the inability of the Special Branch to police the military. The police simply lacked the legal backing to conduct intelligence operations on the military. At the time, there were rumours making the rounds alleging that a former head of state General Yakubu Gowon had planned the coup form his hideout in exile. Gowon had been ousted in a bloodless coup led by the late Murtala Mohammed while he was in Uganda attending a meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and had taken up temporary asylum in Togo as at the time of the coup. The ringleader of the coup plotters was Lieutenant colonel Buka Suka Dimka, an in-law of Gowon and fellow member of the Angas ethnic group in Plateau State. Dimka had visited Gowon in exile in the UK and under interrogation claimed to have received Gowon's blessing for the coup; Gowon denied ever discussing the coup with him. The rumours of Gowon's involvement though unsubstantiated might have eroded whatever confidence the executive had in the RD as an external intelligence agency.
NSO establishment The new head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo, created the NSO by merging the Special Branch with the RD and appointed Colonel Abdullahi Mohammed, a former director of Military Intelligence (DMI) as its first director general. The new NSO set up offices in the 19 states of the federation and had its headquarters in the state house annexe in Lagos. The agency later moved into its permanent headquarters office space at 15, Awolowo road, Ikoyi, Lagos. This address also later served as the first headquarters of the successor to the NSO, the State Security Service. The most recent occupant of this same address is the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.
1976–1979 In the early days of the NSO, the agency was staffed by a mix of military intelligence officers, some fresh recruits, officers of the RD and former police Special Branch officers among whom was the young Albert Horsfall. The new agency was administered along a directorate structure; directorates included operations, external intelligence (Research Department), protective security (cabinet security office), internal security, finance and administration and legal services. The primary objective during this period was the protection of the Head of State and the junta from both internal and external threats.
The external security and intelligence activities of the NSO were centred around Nigeria's rising profile as an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member and how this affected the interests of foreign powers in Nigeria, also the NSO helped articulate the Nigerian government's foreign policy as it concerned Africa in the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle. In this role, the NSO maintained contact with various rebel leaders in the Frontline States of Southern Africa, the agency channeled funds to these individuals and groups and also provided them with arms and training. Some of the beneficiaries of this program include the African National Congress (ANC) in their guerilla war against white minority rule in South Africa, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army and Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army, both in the Rhodesian Bush War.
The biggest internal threat was from the restive military, the country's economy was experiencing massive growth due to the oil boom of the 70's. There were civilian dissidents, but the military had been blighted by the series of coups, counter coups and the Nigerian Civil War, there was widespread nepotism, promotions had been political and a new system of patronage was also introduced where the successful coup plotters and their kinsmen got choice government positions and those who were seen as outsiders were either summarily retired or arrested on trumped up charges of coup-plotting. Most of the internal security activities of the NSO during this period were focused on checkmating military and their propensity for coup plotting, the DMI under then Colonel Aliyu Mohammed Gusau was relegated in the national security hierarchy and its influence greatly curtailed. This focus on the military greatly limited the visibility of the NSO in the eyes of the public during this period. In the civil sphere, student protests and activism were a major concern of the NSO, a government crackdown on student activism led to the proscription of the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) in 1978 and the arrest and detention of its members and lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi.
In 1988, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka a notable human rights campaigner received a letter from an inmate of a previously unknown ultra-secret detention facility, he gave the letter to the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) to investigate. The secret detention center was later discovered on Ita-Oko Island, a remote island in the Lekki Lagoon in the east of Lagos. The Ita-Oko detention centre was a prison colony run by the NSO where mostly political prisoners were held. The island was totally cut off from all civilisation, it was only accessible by helicopter or boat and the waters surrounding it were crocodile-infested. The facility was established in 1978 under the cover of a farm settlement by the Ministry of Agriculture. In a letter he wrote to the New York Times after the paper broke the story of the Island prison's existence, Olusegun Obasanjo justified its existence thus; "Ita Oko was established as a farm settlement during the implementation of Operation Feed the Nation, which aimed at the increase of food production. It was provided with boreholes, an electric generating plant and a medical facility. It aimed at decriminalizing people – Nigerians and non-Nigerians – who refused to work, even though work was available..."
Just before General Olusegun Obasanjo handed over power to the civilian regime of Shehu Shagari, the NSO started a program of infiltrating government agencies and establishments that were to be inherited by the new civilian administration. The NSO at this time was still a largely military oriented agency, which still had a serving army officer as its director-general and the outgoing military administration was largely suspicious of the incoming civilians. This situation led to the NSO posting active duty operatives under cover within the administrative structure to be inherited by the civilian administration with a view to gathering first hand intelligence on the daily operations of the new administration. A former special adviser to President Shehu Shagari on National Assembly matters, Tanko Yakasai remembered meeting two such operatives during his time in detention at the SSS headquarters during the Babangida regime. One of the operatives was a messenger in the office of Dr. Joseph Wayas, the second republic senate president while the other worked as a personal assistant to Bello Maitama Yusuf, the minister of commerce in the Shagari administration. One of the operatives revealed the objective and scope of the operation to Yakasai, informing him that their cover had been established before the new administration took over and also that they had been posted to various government ministries.
Second Republic (1979-1983) Transition to civilian rule Keeping to its promise, the military junta headed by General Olusegun Obasanjo conducted elections and power was handed over to a civilian administration headed by Shehu Shagari on 1 October 1979. After the handing over, all military officers who had served under the previous military regime retired voluntarily from the military; the new government then appointed Umaru Shinkafi a former commissioner of police in Oyo state, as the new director general of the NSO.
The Shinkafi-led NSO had the difficult task of transitioning from a military era secret police organisation to an organisation that functioned in a democracy and which also respected the constitution. During the second republic, there was a reduction in the number of human rights abuses committed by the NSO, though their overall human rights record still remained poor. Political parties and opposition groups complained of harassment by the NSO, particularly the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) headed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo – a keen rival of the party in power, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) – was constantly hounded by the NSO. Shinkafi explained these accusations in an interview; "Before the military intervention we had the UPN, headed by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. We had the GNPP and the opposition parties. The ruling party at the centre was, of course, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), headed by Shehu Shagari. It was feared that the operations of the NSO were slanted against the opposition parties, particularly the UPN. For this reason, people in the opposition parties tended to be afraid of the NSO and they looked at it as a terror organisation".
Maitatsine riots and intelligence failures In 1980, one of the NSO's bigger intelligence gaffs was brought to light in the wake of the Maitatsine riots in Kano. The riots in which 4,177 people lost their lives were started by the Maitasine sect, an Islamic sect founded on the teachings of the late Malam Muhammadu Marwa alias Allah Ta-Tsine or Maitatsine. Marwa, a Cameroonian preacher, was deported from Nigeria in 1960 because of his fundamentalist teachings. Before the riots broke out, the NSO has successfully infiltrated the organisation but they were still unable to predict the violent riots sparked by the group. The riots were subsequently put down with much violence by both the police and the army. The Maitatsine uprising served as a springboard for several other fundamentalist uprisings in the north of the country including the more recent Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. In 1982 a similar riot to the 1980 Kano riots broke out in Bulumkuttu, near Maiduguri and in Kaduna all of which displayed similarities with the Kano riots.