NIGERIA CUSTOMS SERVICE, SOURCES OF INTELLIGENCE AND BORDER SECURITY

Abstract

The Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) no doubt occupies a central position in the maintenance of border and national security, especially in the area of combating smuggling which remains its principal task as smuggling remains one of the most thriving illegal industries in Nigeria today. However, NCS perform their duties through intelligence sorting and cooperation both from within the NCS through the Custom Intelligence Unit (CIU), and outside the NCS by liaising with other sister agencies and ministries as well as International communities for intelligence. Moreover, the functional importance of intelligence considerably calls for the need to properly interrogate and assess the various sources of intelligence by considering their implications for national security in Nigeria. The paper therefore examines the various sources of intelligence services, mode of analysis and the implication on national security. The paper adopted the descriptive design, relied on secondary sources of data such as relevant books, Internet sources, journal and periodic articles. It was found that human intelligence (HUMINT) was the major source in use by the NCS, as it is time consuming, expensive and susceptible to manipulation. The study therefore concluded that the attention of the NCS should be drawn to the possibilities of deploying other sources of intelligence such as; images (IMINT), Signal (SGINT), Communication (COMINT) and electronic (ELINT) which can complement in the short run and possibly replace HUMINT as sources of intelligence in the long run.