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).