I have many friends in the
intelligence agencies both within Nigeria and outside. I was at Harrow School,
Kelly College and Cambridge University in the United Kingdom with many that
ended up in M15 and M16 and their sister agencies all over the world and we are
friends till today.
Most of them are decent,
law-abiding patriots whose purpose is simply to ensure that their country is
safe and that its citizens are well-protected.
One of them, who is a good friend
of mine till today and who actually heads a formidable and weĺl-known
intelligence agency, recently told me that he sees his country as a plane that
is in mid-flight which is being flown and piloted by the politicians and
whoever may be the President, Head of State or Prime Minister at any given
point in time.
He said the role of the
intelligence services is to ensure that the engine of that plane runs well and
that it does not overheat or knock whilst the flight is in motion and whilst
the plane is in mid-air.
This is a profound description
and eloquent testimony of what the intelligence agencies are meant to do. And
all over the world most of them do it very well.
These are mostly courageous and
patriotic men and women who live in the grey areas of our mutual existence, who
operate in the murky world of secrecy and subterfuge, who do jobs and carry out
operations that few of us can do, who are hardly celebrated and who are mostly
unsung yet who do such a great job at keeping us safe and who carry out such a
vital and critical role. Without them we would be lost.
There is, however, also a darker
side. I say this because, generally speaking, these are people that are
obsessed with secrecy and haunted by some of the atrocities that they and their
friends and associates may have committed in the past.
A few of them are cold-blooded
and have multiple personalities. Worse still they are almost sociopathic in
nature. They have no feeling, empathy or sympathy for their targets, their
victims, the subjects of their enquiries or the objects of their interest.
Most relevant of all is the fact
that they do not always operate within the confines and parameters of the law.
Sometimes they do the most
hideous and barbaric things which is why their oath and culture of secrecy unto
death is so vital.
They can be very nice and
pleasant on the surface but below that they are utterly ruthless and exceptionally
dangerous.
Their Nigerian counterparts are
no different and I have worked closely with many of them over the years.
As it is with all intelligence
agents and spies, deception and deceit is their language and their loyalty
is, more often than not, to the state than to their friends and family members.
That is their training and I
guess no-one can blame them for that. Finally they operate like a cult and they
literally have their own strange code of conduct and coded language which is
exclusive to them.
Yet despite this chilling and
grim analysis quite a few of them are humane and decent people who have a deep
sense of what is right and wrong and who, more often than not, wish to make
amends for some of the horrific things they have done or witnessed in the past.
It was from a few of those that
share this kind, generous and charitable disposition that I was given the true
picture of things and the relevant information about what really happened to
Prophet T.B. Joshua’s church and how and why it was brought down.
I will not mention their names
but I will tell their story. And that story is as follows.
They told me why the operation
was carried out, how those involved covered it up and how they attempted to hit
TB Joshua the second time but failed.
They told me that it was the same
group of operatives that were behind the fatal “crash” of General Patrick
Azazi’s (the former National Security Advisor) helicopter and how Governor
Patrick Yakowa (the Governor of Kaduna state) was purposely lured on that
helicopter in order for them to literally “kill two birds with one stone”.
They told me how the operation
was conducted by rogue elements in the intelligence agencies without the
knowledge of Mr. Eta Ekpeyong, the head of the Department of State Security
(DSS) at the time who was totally loyal to Jonathan but with the knowledge and
support of a handful of disloyal and ruthless senior operatives from other arms
of the intelligence agencies who provided the logistics, hardware, man-power
and funding for the operation.
They told me that there was a
foreign component to the whole affair which I will touch on in part 3 of this
essay.
They told me that there was a
religious dimension to the whole affair and about how a group of fifth
columnists within the security agencies in Jonathan’s government had sworn that
they would destabilise his government and either kill him or stop him from
coming back in 2015 and how they assisted the then opposition by providing them
with sensitive and often false information to use against the government.
Their view was that the country
must not be ruled by a Southerner or a Christian and that Jonathan must be
stopped at all costs.
T.B. Joshua’s crime was that he
knew too much and that he was secretly exposing their plans to those that
cared for Jonathan. He needed to be discredited, stopped, “kept busy”, rubbished
or permanently silenced.
In part 3 of this essay I will go
much further into this matter and expose far more about this issue but for now
two things remains clear.
That firstly the entire
horrendous episode and the terrible tragedy that occurred in T.B. Joshua’s
church must be revisited and properly investigated by the security agencies
with a view to bringing the real perpetrators, and not their victims and
targets, to justice.
And that secondly the Nigerian
people would do well to question ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that their government
(and I mean ALL governments and not just the Buhari administration) tells them
about such events or that they read, watch or listen to in what President
Donald Trump so eloquently describes as the “mainstream media” (MSM).
At this point readers may ask, do
intelligence agencies and governments actually kill people? Unfortunately the
answer to that question is “yes, they do”.
This is especially so when they
believe it is in the national security interest to do so or when they want to
discredit or weaken the government that they purport to serve.
It is also pertinent to note that
when they do these horrendous things they always look for someone else or some
innocent group of people to use as scapegoats, to blame it on and to carry the
can.
Many innocent people have either
gone to jail or have been executed as consequence of this.
One should also note that
oftentimes they use violent criminal networks and bloodthirsty gangsters to do
their dirty work for them.
In return they give such men of
the underworld official protection and sometimes even funding.
Consequently when we hear that
people were eliminated by the local mafia, a group of armed robbers or any
other criminal gang, they may well have done so at the behest of one of the
intelligence agencies and they would have been well paid for it.
As the great writer and analyst
David Icke often says, “nothing is ever as it seems or appears”.
This is the way things work in
the dark “cloak and dagger” world of intelligence and espionage and this is the
way things are done by what has come to be known and universally described as
“the system”.
In the parlance of that murky
world they call such practices “extreme measures”, “special ops” or “black ops”
and those that actually carry out such operations (i.e. the foots soldiers
that actually pull the triggers or detonate the bombs) are referred to as “wet
boys” because what they do is not only deadly but also wet and messy.
It is a universal practice and it
is something that is well-known to anyone that has ever been in the inner
circles or corridors of power. It is also utterly evil and godless.
We shall look into their modus
operandi in more depth with special reference to what happened in TB Joshua’s
Church in the third and final part of this contribution. (TO BE CONTINUED).