Nigeria Won't Defeat Boko Haram, Unless...

A retired army colonel and former quarter-master of the Lagos Garrison Command, Col. Gabriel Ajayi has warned that unless the rot in the Nigerian Army is tidied up, the country may not win the war against Boko Haram.

Col. Ajayi, while speaking with our reporter, explained that apart from lacking patriotism and the will to fight for the country, Nigerian soldiers are made to work with crude instruments of warfare.

He identified long-term non-funding of the military during the regimes of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sanni Abacha, corruption, the quest for regime elongation by the military, abuse and misuse of intelligence gathering and lack of political will by the civilians who took over in 1999 to probe the atrocities in the military, as the factors responsible for the present sorry-state that the soldiers are finding themselves.

[caption id="attachment_877" align="aligncenter" width="412"] Col. Ajayi[/caption]

Col. Ajayi also blamed the Nigerian army commanding officers for failing to live by example, saying they fail to constantly visit the officers who are on battlefield.

He noted that elsewhere in the world, leaders normally visit the troops in battle as away way of boosting their morale.  But in Nigeria, the case is different as no high-ranking officer or civilian administrators have visited the states where Boko Haram insurgents are currently waging a serious war against the country.

“How many of the managers of the Nigerian military have visited the warfront? Minister of Defence, high personalities in the sanctum of the management of the operation, for God’s sake, how many of them have visited the place?

“Donald Rumsfeld, during the American war in Iraq, was there at the warfront to ask the generals how many prisoners have been captured, how far they had gone? He would go and sit down in the operations room and they would brief him and he would ask questions in military language.

“Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t a general. Tell me how many of our leaders have gone to Borno, Adamawa or Yobe? War is not fought by the soldiers on the ground alone; war is fought by the whole nation,” he said.

The former officer, who was implicated in a phantom coup in 1995 and had commanded many battalions in the northern part of Nigeria, noted that the present insurgence in Nigeria has been fueled by many Nigerian Muslims’ belief that Islam has no boundary.

He noted that many of those who got into the country through Nigeria’s porous borders were not supposed to be in the country and as such have no clear allegiance to Nigeria as a nation.

“These set of people, he said, may have aided or even become part of the Boko Haram insurgence to wreak terror in the country.”

Ajayi, who now consults for various organisations on security issues, advised the Federal Government, through the military, to take step to protect other forest reserves in the country before another terror organisation hijacks them.

Apart from Sambisa forest, which he describes as “not a tactician’s paradise,” he particularly mentioned Afaka forest in Kaduna State as constituting a threat to national security if left in its current state.

“There is another forest, I said to some colleagues who are still in service. I said to them ‘what are you doing about Afaka forest?’ it is another forest that if it is held by another group of terrorists, we will have problems,” Col. Ajayi warned.

The Boko Haram sect is believed to have killed no fewer than 5,000 people across Nigeria through their terror attacks since 2009.

Over 650, 000 residents in northern Nigeria are also reported to have been displaced following series of bomb blasts, kidnappings and killings carried out by the insurgents.