REVEALED: Buhari Shops For New NDLEA Boss; Giade Asked To Handover

The coast seems to have been cleared for a new NDLEA boss following the quit order said to have been handed to the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency boss, Mallam Ahmadu Giade as he starts his leave of absence next week.

Giade is the longest serving NDLEA’s boss in the history of the anti-drug agency. By November 24, 2015, Giade would have spent 10 years at NDLEA, as its boss having served under three Presidents-Olusegun Obasanjo, Yar’Aduwa and Goodluck Jonathan.

Giade was appointed by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo in November 24 2005, through the recommendation of former EFCC Chairman, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu. Before now, the official tenure of every NDLEA boss was a four years, but because of the lackluster regime of former President Goodluck Jonathan and other sentiments, Giade was allowed to overstay the allotted tenure, and the NDLEA tenure was upgraded to a five years tenure, which allowed Giade to run for a two term tenure of five-years each, making him the longest serving boss in the saddle as NDLEA boss, even though there was no official document that made his second term in office legible, which prompted an altercation between Giade and some senior directors in the NDLEA.

Our investigation has revealed that Giade instead of being grateful to God for having served the agency for a whopping decade, was alleged to have started lobbying Buhari to extend his tenure, according to some NDLEA workers.

The officers said they will celebrate the exit of Giade openly because of high-handedness, corruption, tribalism, nepotism and red-tapism which has deadly affected the agency in terms of service delivery and competence. The officers are alleging that Giade has kick-started his third term-tenure plan which is now rocking the agency.

A Global Village Extra investigation have revealed that the presidency has started shopping for Giade’s replacement.

The well over 70 year-old helmsman of the Agency was greeted with a lot of hues and cries over what was regarded as his ill-preparation for the job when he was appointed.

Back then, Giade’s critics point to the lowly rank with which he retired from the police and his poor academic background. It was 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 such as NDLEA.

Giade’s detractors 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 Force.

Ribadu singlehandedly appointed Giade after allegedly injecting bad blood into the mind of the former President Olusegun Obasanjo to sack Alhaji Bello Lafiaji, the then NDLEA boss.

Speculations grew last week as 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.

However, our correspondent in Nigeria 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.

The non-appointment of a minister for justice and Attorney general of the federation is also said to be hindering the appointment of a new NDLEA boss.

10 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 organizational 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”, said an officer who begged for anonymity, adding “There is an unprecedented availability of drugs in the streets of Nigeria today than ever before, is 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 10 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 10 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 five years, he linked some officers with speculating the non-renewal of his second term bid, and were labeled 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 five 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. According to sources, the succession plan by 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 reorganization of the Agency.

For 10 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, former Minister of Justice 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. Favoritism, 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 10 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. 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 former presidency doesn’t want to replace him after over staying the mandatory 10 years in office. 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 source added that 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, 10 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. It would be recalled the President Buhari recently sacked the Immigration boss, Customs boss, NSCD boss, DSS boss, NIMASA boss, NNPC boss, and other agencies’ bosses whose tenures have expired.

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