NDLEA’s boss third term-tenure plan rocks agency · How Ribadu helped him to get NDLEA job · FG is helpless to change agency boss · His American govt connection

For officers and men of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, and close watchers of the happenings in the Agency, November 24, 2013, rather than a defining moment, was an anti- climax of sorts. On that day, the antenna of the entire staffers was high up to pick the breaking news- the replacement of Alhaji Ahmadu Giade, whose second tenure of four years each as Chairman and also Chief Executive of the Agency expired on that day after almost a decade of being in the saddle as the drug Czar.  But tight-lipped was the situation from the presidency.

The well over 70 year-old helmsman of the Agency was appointed to head the Agency on November 24, 2005. His appointment, eight years ago was greeted with a lot of hues and cries over what was regarded as his ill-preparation for the job.

Then Giade’s critics point to the lowly rank with which he retired from the police and his poor academic background. Daily Newswatch gathered that Alhaji Giade retired as Deputy Commissioner of Police as against Assistant Inspector General of Police, prescribed by the enabling Act that established NDLEA.

Investigation showed that his formal education peaked at Primary School Leaving Certificate, which many felt was too modest for an intellectually and internationally demanding drug control Agency.

Giade was said to be over 70 years at the time and if this appointment, having retired from the Police at 60, in 1996, considering the intellectual nature of drug enforcement.

Giade’s detractors when he was appointed as NDLEA boss wondered how somebody who was no longer useful in the police could be saddled with the drug control job. But all the cries fell on deaf ears because of the backing of the then Economic and Financial Crimes Commission boss, Nuhu Ribadu who saw it as a way of compensating Giade under whom he had worked in the Police. Ribadu singlehandedly appointed Giade after injecting bad blood into the mind of the former President Olusegun Obasanjo to sack Alhaji Bello Lafiaji, the then NDLEA boss.

The speculation for the better part of last week, stakeholders’ ears and that of the NDLEA’s staff were open to hear the replacement of their boss but nothing in that direction was heard.

It was gathered that the Presidency may have directed Giade to hand over to the most senior officer of the Agency. Our source hinted that the next rank of authority, the Minister for Justice which is favourably disposed to Giade's continued stay, is sitting on the directive.

Eight years after, both officers and analysts claimed Giade did not disappoint them. It is their opinion that the Agency has never had it so bad in terms of organisational management and that Nigeria as a country is the worst hit in terms of the negative consequences on the citizenry.

"The bottom line of drug control is how effective drug supply and demand has been brought under control. It is sad to see today that Nigeria's drug gulf is widening, the mechanical acclaim by the Alhaji Giade, not withstanding", said an officer who begged for anonymity, adding “There is an unprecedented availability of drugs in the streets of Nigeria today than ever before, be it cannabis sativa, psychotropic substances, cocaine or heroin. Compounding this is the alarming prevalence of non-conventional substances of abuse owing to ignorance of the general populace which the Giade led-NDLEA has ineffectively been unable to cure the people of."

Another aggrieved staff who said he cannot understand why the federal government is sleeping over making change after the man had spent the mandatory eight years stated.

"The growing criminality the nation is experiencing today may be traceable to dogmatism, but drugs remain the greatest reinforcement to criminal activities, be it cultism, gangsters, terrorism and civil strife. Enormous funds are been generated from drugs to fund these vices while the consumption of drugs itself is catalytic to outlandish behaviours,” he said

"Under Giade's eight year reign, Nigerians have seen a forest of irregularities in its drug control, not up to an inch of which led to the unceremonious removal of some previous Chairmen. Giade's obvious managerial incompetence, his narrow and shallow exposure and world view has landed NDLEA as a dysfunctional, malfunctioned, ill-motivated and defective Agency of Government."

Investigation further revealed that what many officers of the Agency find most curious is the alleged sacrilegious actions with which Giade is treating the issue of his disengagement from the Agency, coupled with actions aimed at perpetrating himself in office.

At the onset of his administration, Giade arbitrarily terminated the appointments of 71 promising, mainly career officers, without reference to the Agency’s disciplinary committee. He allegedly tagged the sacked officers with the garment of corruption, which was what the then authorities wanted to hear, yet he did not allow due process to take its natural course in discharging them.

“At the end of his first tenure of four years, he linked some officers with speculating the non-renewal of his second term bid, and were labelled ambitious and were punitively stagnated and thrown to serve in some remotest parts of the country where NDLEA offices only exist in name”, another officer in Abuja disclosed.

 Although Giade has spent an additional four years thereafter, there was no public statement regarding the extension of his tenure for second term.

He either clandestinely obtained that extension, probably, or decided to guard it jealously against public scrutiny or that the extension was a local arrangement between him and the supervising Ministry of Justice where there may be a top official with a pecuniary interest in Giade's continued stay in the Agency.

It was further learnt that even on the eve of the expiration of his second term, there was no known effort by Giade for definitive line of succession for the Agency.

Daily Newswatch was told that the succession plan of Deputy Commanders General of Narcotics and Assistant Commanders General of Narcotics designed by a Presidential Committee for the Reform of NDLEA, to provide Government with a pool of successors was discarded by Giade who pre-empted the implementation of the Committee's work with his own feeble reorganisation of the Agency.
For eight years, Giade only instituted an ad -hoc management team by allegedly picking his cronies from lower ranks and rushed them with accelerated promotions. These anointed staffs now serve as directors above their superiors.

According to our findings, those directors he could not remove, he displaced them to non core areas.

The case of Femi Oloruntoba, a celebrated prosecutor and Director of Legal Services, who has won several cases for the agency is now heading the renovation and repairs unit of the Agency. “What a hatchet act”? Said a judiciary correspondent with a national newspaper.
Agency analysts feel that Giade’s deep and distorted management architecture, is a calculated attempt to render Government helpless in the choice of replacement, fuelling speculations that he is scheming for another extension of tenure for at least two years on the grounds that only him can pilot the affairs of the Agency while the rest of professional narcotic officers are misfits and are corrupt.

“It’s even said that Giade and Mohammed Adoke, Minister of Justice, have manipulated some Americans to do a letter to the President that they are at home with him”.
Some of the staffs said Giade's incorruptibility no longer exists. According to them, Giade can only flaunt his anti-corruption stance to the marines. “He does not see any act as an act of corruption, except it involves bribe taking. Favouritism, tribalism, which hunting, marginalization, highhandedness and selfishness have been the hallmark of Giade's administration”, another staff stated.

 “Giade has objectionably hidden under quota system to stagnate the careers of so many well deserving officers and decided to pole vault officers from his geographical and religious extraction. Mediocrity and abuse of office have been very much entrenched in the Agency, such that officers who had given a good account of themselves before the advent of Giade are walking bare-footed while mediocre are riding on horses”.

With the highest academic qualification of primary school leaving certificate and the highest career rank of a deputy commissioner of police which he got on the eve of his retirement after 37 years in the police, his appointment, singlehandedly processed by Nuhu Ribadu, the then anti-corruption generalissimo, was said to be the greatest abnormality and disservice to drug control in Nigeria.

“If there are any offices that require intellectual resourcefulness, managerial sagacity and professional virility, it is drug control. This is why, for the eight years, NDLEA has carried on with mumbled voice, with the leadership lacking intellectual capacity to convincingly engage stakeholders that investment in drug control is worth the while. Giade goes into hiding once any drug matter at hand involves intellectual discourse”, a staff who pleaded anonymity stated

“In fact, he treats any officer with intellectual disposition with disdain. What Giade is brandishing as life time achievement for which reason he wants to remain a life chairman of NDLEA, is his concocted burgeoning statistics of arrest of drug suspects, drug seizures and convictions. Our Mr. Chairman has forgotten the proverbial saying that statistics is like the mini-skirt, which seems to be exposing so many things but is still hiding something. Is it an achievement to arrest all Nigerians, put them in chains, whereas there are so many things he would have done but for lack of intellectual capacity to have prevented this multitude, sorely needed for productivity, from going into drugs”? He queried.

Investigations revealed that there are no more rigorous, well structured anti-drug awareness initiatives, on a consistent basis. The ones carried out recently was an individual effort of a musician, called Lamboginny.

What the agency under Giade doesn’t  know was that current war against drug trafficking and control measures globally is proactive and preventive; working on people's psychology with factual information but the current drug war in Nigeria is making enormous provision for guns, hand cuffs and tear gas, so as to fill up the already congested Nigerian prisons.
Ahmadu Giade’s super achievement of note was the de-listing of Nigeria from United States Drug Decertification list, for which reason the presidency doesn’t want to replace him after over staying the mandatory eight years in office.

Joe Nwadike, drug analyst says the US interest on drugs is what a country does to prevent drugs from entering America, even if drugs litter the street of that particular country.

In spite of the US certification of Nigeria, is drug not more prevalent in Nigeria today than in the time past? He asked.

 “America can only donate items at border posts to prevent outgoing of drugs, not minding the effects of drugs that enter Nigeria and cannot find their way out. That is why local consumption of drugs is surging on a helpless scale in Nigeria”. Continuing he said.

“Do not forget the international politics of drugs where the US uses such pegs like drugs and terrorism to tackle nations with slow pace of democratisation. This is better understood when Giade's so called life time achievement is juxtaposed with the stone cast efforts of General Musa Bamaiyi under the military rule, which failed to earn Nigeria the US certification. So, let Giade not fool the Nigerian government as he canvasses for third term as he does not have a hand in the democratisation of Nigeria which naturally has made US to soften its stand”.

A source hinted that Giade's greatest supporter in his third term bid is the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, supervising NDLEA.

 “This is understandable. It is said that the minister has a political ambition come 2015, and is receiving patronage from Giade via his boys in juicy commands such as the International Airports, to enable him fund the campaigns. There is the rumoured diversion by Giade to the Minister, of two vehicles donated by the US to NDLEA”. Our source stated.

“Besides, Giade has been so slavishly submissive to the minister such that the Agency has no control over its budgetary allocation, but as decided by the Minister in the name of budget envelop, where it is said that a bulk budget is given to the Ministry of Justice which decides which parastatals under it gets what”.

According to our source, Giade tells the Minister to give NDLEA whatever pleases him. What has mattered to Giade over the years was provided by what is released by the Minister.  Recent available information says the Agency is broke and it has affected the salary of workers. Another allegation against Giade was that he is the most travelled government official in Nigeria today instead of the foreign affairs minister.

This, according to Giade’s aggressors’ accounts for why NDLEA is worst funded Agency of government today, leaving states and local offices to fend for themselves by going cap in hand to governments at lower levels, with their own funding challenges to grapple with. In most states, operational vehicles are not just there except as donated by state and local governments.

Investigations revealed that drug barons are cashing in on the crippling financial conditions of the Agency. Even under Giade's nose at the National Headquarters, officers are made to travel on official assignments on credit; that is, using their money pending when they would be paid. And this could be "waiting for the Godot." Scores of officers have been posted to the uttermost places without their transfer benefits paid to them. The official language is “no money".

Under this crippling financial position of the agency, gloom and frustration has become the second nature of NDLEA officers. Greater majority of officers have not known promotion for an upward of 13 years. After allegedly awarding double promotions to his cronies, he referred this helpless majority for promotion examination, which these officers passed with the help of God, only for Giade to turn round to say there are no vacancies for the successful ones. “The same way he deceived the much stagnated Chief Narcotic Agents into a conversion course of six weeks only for him to abort the programme barely four weeks into the course on account that they were threatening to burn down the training school where the course was taking place”, a victim of Giade’s administration stated.
Checks revealed that even the officers he recruited in 2011, under alleged questionable circumstances, can attest to Giade's managerial inconsistency.

He was said to have enlisted the officers and pushed them to operational field without the requisite training, causing casualties to begin to trail the officers. Recently, he decided to send some of the officers, mainly from five states of Bauchi, his home state, Kebbi, Kaduna and two others for a maximum of two months training, as against six months. He said he has decided to reward these states that have been given monthly subventions to the Agency.

Officers from the remaining states are bitter that it is not their fault their states could not afford to assist the Agency. They feel short changed that Agency raked in hundreds of millions of Naira from their enlistment fee, which could have earned them even foreign training.

Compounding this high tempo of frustration, our said was the rate of both career attrition and morbidity in the Agency. Officers have been sent packing in their droves just at little provocation. “This has been made possible by the monstrous powers conferred on Giade as the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive. All he has tried to engage the board in is retirement and dismissal of officers that the board is now weary. The number of officers the Agency has lost in mysterious circumstances in the last eight years of Giade's regime has never been so in the annals of the Agency before he came”, our source added.
“After 37 years of service in the police force, eight years in the Agency and more than 70 years of  age, Giade's extension bid only smacks of disservice to the nation and an a criminal attempt to corrupt government youth empowerment mantra. What with the huge youth population of career officers of the Agency who may not get to the top of their career with people like Giade hanging to power? There is no way of separating Giade's age from the age if his ideas, hence the avoidable somersault the Agency has been plunged into”.
When contacted on the third term-bid of Giade and tenure elongation the Public Relations Officer, Mitchell Ofoyeju denied the tenure elongation and said those peddling the rumour are not honest with the truth. He stated that the appointment or replacement of any top officer of that magnitude is the sole and exclusive duty of the Presidency and not that of the NDLEA management.

Speaking on telephone, Ofoyeju denied slashing of the NDLEA salaries but said the new federal government policy is to pay staff through the Integrated Personnel and Payroll System (IPPS), which allows the government to pay staff directly through biometric data means.
Ofoyeju added that for now it may look difficulty because of some difficulties in the process but that doesn’t mean a salary cut or that NDLEA is broke. He added that if there was any problem in the salary it was due to the fact that the IPPS, which just started operation, may have encountered some problems either because of the software they are using.

He disclosed that the problems would soon be over and that the problems would be ratified soon. According to him, every staff was aware of the IPPS but regretted the way the actions of those who saw at as salary cut.