The immediate past Chief of Defence
Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh (retd.), has said the Army he headed
was one with no equipment.
The former Chief of Defence Staff made
the statement while delivering a valedictory speech at a pulling out
parade organised in his honour at the Mogadishu Cantonment, Abuja, on
Thursday.
He said, “Permit me to also add here
that the nation’s militaries are equipped and trained in peace time for
the conflicts they expect to confront in the future. Unfortunately, that
has not been our experience as a nation.
“Over
the years, the military was neglected and under-equipped to ensure the
survival of certain regimes, while other regimes, based on advice from
some foreign nations, deliberately reduced the size of the military and
underfunded it.
“Unfortunately, our past leaders
accepted such recommendations without appreciating our peculiarities as a
third world military, which does not have the technological advantage
that could serve as force multipliers and compensate for reduced
strength.
“Accordingly, when faced with the crises
in the North-East and other parts of the country, the military was
overstretched and had to embark on emergency recruitments and trainings,
which were not adequate to prepare troops for the kind of situation we
found ourselves in.”
He also said some previous leaders took deliberate decisions to weaken the military just for the survival of their regimes.
Badeh said that some of the regimes
acceded to the demands of foreign countries to reduce the size of the
military and deprived the nation’s defence forces of the requisite
funding and size.
He lamented that such leaders accepted
the advice of such foreign countries without considering the nation’s
peculiar characteristics as a third world country which lacked the
advantages of modern technology to compensate for the costly reduction
in size and strength.
Badeh said the military was
overstretched to such a point that it had to resort to emergency
recruitment and training to fight the insurgents, which he said were
inadequate in the face of the level of security challenges facing the
country at the time.
The former defence chief added that it
was high time the Federal Government embarked on a comprehensive review
of the nation’s military structure with respect to its size, capacity
and the equipment that should be at its disposal to carry out its
responsibility of defending the country.
PUNCH