National Security Organization

The National Security Organization (NSO) of Nigeria was created under Decree number 27 of 1976 by the military regime of Gen.Olusegun Obasanjo, after the failed Dimka coup which claimed the life of former Head of State Gen.Murtala Mohammed. The NSO was given a mandate of co-ordinating Internal Security, Foreign Intelligence and counterintelligence activities. It was charged with the detection and prevention of any crime against the security of the state, with the protection of classified materials, and with carrying out any other security missions assigned by the president.

The NSO was created as a fall-out of the Dimka coup. Prior to the coup, internal security and intelligence was handled by the police Special Branch, a Secret Police, while external intelligence was conducted by the Research Department (RD), a unit of the External Affairs ministry. The Special Branch had failed to obtain intelligence about the coup and the coup plotters before the coup was executed; the Inspector General of police at the time MD Yussuf excused this failure as the inability of the Special Branch to police the military. The police simply lacked the legal backing to conduct intelligence operations on the military. At the time, there were rumours making the rounds alleging that a former head of state Gen. Yakubu Gowon had planned the coup form his hideout in exile. Gowon had been ousted in a bloodless coup led by the late Murtala Mohammed while he was in Uganda attending a meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and had taken up temporary asylum in Togo as at the time of the coup. The ringleader of the coup plotters was Lieutenant colonel Buka Suka Dimka, an in-law of Gowon and fellow member of the Angas ethnic group in Plateau State. Dimka had visited Gowon in exile in the UK and under interrogation claimed to have received Gowon's blessing for the coup; Gowon denied ever discussing the coup with him. The rumours of Gowon's involvement though unsubstantiated might have eroded whatever confidence the executive had in the RD as an external intelligence agency.