The NSA’s Tapped Phone: When The Hunter Becomes The Hunted In Nigeria’s Surveillance State
By Oto Drama, PhD.
THE recent admission by Nasir El-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna State, that they successfully intercepted and recorded the telephone conversations of the National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, has done more than just ignite a political firestorm. It has pulled back the veil on the dark underbelly of the Nigerian state—a realm where surveillance is a weapon of war and the “rule of law” is a mere decorative artifact in the halls of power.
As a scholar who has just concluded the rigors of a PhD, I find it impossible to view this through a purely partisan lens. Instead, we must subject this controversy to the furnace of political philosophy to understand the existential threat it poses to our fledgling democracy.
The Medieval Ghost in the Machine
In his defense, El-Rufai and his supporters suggest a “tit-for-tat” justification: if the state taps our lines without warrants, why shouldn’t we return the favour? This logic inadvertently resurrects the medieval arguments of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In their era, sovereign authority was viewed as a divine mandate to maintain order amidst chaos. Augustine, in The City of God, argued that the state (the “City of Man”) has the authority to use the “sword” to punish wickedness.
Aquinas further refined this in Summa Theologica, suggesting that a sovereign could justly declare war and, by extension, employ any means necessary—including what we would today call surveillance—to protect the common good.
However, there is a fatal flaw in applying 13th-century logic to a 21st-century republic. Augustine and Aquinas assumed a Legitimate Sovereign acting for the Common Good. They did not envision a “Leviathan” that rigs its way into power, only to use its surveillance apparatus not to catch terrorists, but to hunt down political dissidents and bloggers.
Structural Violence and the Illegitimacy of Riggers
This brings us to the profound disagreement of Johan Galtung. Galtung’s theory of Structural Violence argues that when a state fails to provide the basic “contractual mandates”—education, security, job creation, and healthcare—it ceases to be a legitimate authority and becomes a source of violence itself.
When a government lacks the mandate of the people—when it is born of electoral heist and sustained by intimidation—it cannot claim the “divine right” of Aquinas to “tap lines” or “declare war” on its citizens.
As Galtung would argue, the abduction of critics like Abubakar Idris Dadiyata, missing for six years is nothing short of structural violence. The systematic deprivation of the masses while the elite play high-stakes spy games smarts lack of emotional intelligence. The use of “national security” as a linguistic shroud to justify the defanging of the citizenry is state terrorism.
State Terror vs. The Social Contract
Is it right for an illegitimate government to claim authority over those who did not elect them? The answer is a resounding no. That is not governance; it is State Terror. The Nigerian state today is attempting to have it both ways: it demands the total obedience of a medieval monarchy while providing none of the security or welfare of a modern democracy. We are witnessing a “defanged” citizenry, expected to remain mute while their privacy is violated and their colleagues disappear into thin air.
The El-Rufai/Ribadu saga is a symptom of a deeper rot. It proves that our “security” apparatus is being weaponized for internal rivalry rather than external safety. If the NSA’s phone can be tapped, then the average Nigerian has as much privacy as a goldfish in a glass bowl.
The Violent Silence of the Breadline
The current economic landscape in Nigeria is not merely a “tough phase” or a “market correction”; it is the ultimate manifestation of Johan Galtung’s Structural Violence. As we navigate February 2026, the data remains harrowing: with food inflation still hovering at punishing levels and stagnant wages for a “Gen-Z” workforce, the average Nigerian is living in a state of constant, silent trauma.
Galtung’s thesis is that violence occurs whenever a human being is influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.
In Nigeria, this “potential” is being strangled by an illegitimate social structure. When a citizen spends 70% of their income on basic nutrition, they are being subjected to a slow-motion physical assault. This is structural violence in its purest form—where the “knife” is replaced by a devalued Naira and the “bullet” by the removal of energy subsidies without a functional safety net.
Surveillance as a Substitute for Service
The El-Rufai/Ribadu phone-tapping scandal provides a chilling contrast to this economic misery. While the state and its former actors invest in the sophisticated technology of direct surveillance, they remain inept at the technology of direct service.
The paradox here is that the state can find a “tapped line” or track a dissident’s location with pinpoint accuracy, but it “cannot find” the billions lost to crude oil theft or the administrative solutions to provide 24-hour electricity.
This reveals a perverted Social Contract. Instead of a “Protector State” that uses resources to provide education and security, we have a “Predator State” that uses its legitimate (and sometimes illegitimate) power to defang the citizenry.
The Legitimacy Crisis
As we have seen through the arguments of Aquinas and Galtung, a government that rigs its way into power and then fails to fulfill its contractual mandate of welfare loses its moral right to demand “silence” or “loyalty.” To tap the phones of citizens while they dig up anthills for grain—as reported in northern regions—is not an exercise of sovereign authority; it is State Terror.
We must conclude that the current “economic hardship” is a choice. It is the result of a structure that prioritizes political survival and surveillance over the biological survival of its people. The “contractual mandate” must be honoured through job creation, security, and a living wage, otherwise the Nigerian state remains a medieval Leviathan—armoured in technology, but hollow in legitimacy.
The Path Forward
We must reject the normalization of illegal surveillance. We must demand that the disappearance of Dadiyata be treated not as “political rhetoric” but as a crime against humanity. If the government wishes to claim the legitimacy that Aquinas spoke of, it must first honor the Social Contract.
It must provide the “sufficientia vitae” (sufficiency of life)—jobs, safety, and bread—rather than a diet of fear and bugged phone lines. Until then, any claim to sovereign authority is nothing more than the hollow echo of a tyrant’s boot.
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