By: Femi Fani-Kayode
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 subtefuge, 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
commited 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 columists 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 secrety
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 futher 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
occured 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 intellingence 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 footsoldiers 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).