Daily Trust May 13, 2014

Nigeria: The Diminished Stature of Nigeria's Military Forces

By Muhammad Al-Ghazali

Beyond coup plots and counter coups of yester-years, accentuated by today's alarming incapacitation in the face of the scourge of the Boko Haram insurgency, the Nigerian Military establishment has had its better days steeped in glory.

It had no choice. At independence, the nation was blessed with patriotic and visionary leaders who were also men of timber and calibre -apologies to the late K. O. Mbadiwe. They knew the value of a vibrant military-industrial establishment to the modern state, especially one gifted with such undoubted human and material capital.

Before a bunch of cold-blooded assassins who called themselves soldiers intervened to overthrow the nation's first democratic government in January 1966, the Nigerian Army was as professional as any in the civilized world. It ranked among the best in the developing world.

The history of Nigerian Army in particular dates back to 1863. The Navy and the Air force were not established until after the nation's independence in 1960. But back in 1863, it was a certain Lt. Glover, of the British Royal Navy, who selected 18 able-bodied men of 'Northern extraction', and recruited them into a local force christened "Glover Hausas" to mount punitive expeditions as well as to protect British trade routes around Lagos. The nucleus of 18 able-bodied men according to a report published by the GlobalSecurity.org, later metamorphosed into the West African Frontier Force (WAFF), the Queen's Own Nigerian Regiment (QONR), the Nigerian Military Force (NMF) in 1956, and the Royal Nigerian Army in 1960.

By 1960, the Nigerian Army was a well-organized force comprised of four battalions shared equally between the North and the South. It was also considered competent enough to be invited to partake in United Nation's Peace Keeping Operations (PKO) in the Congo. It grew in both numeric size and stature commensurate with the requirements for the prosecution of the civil war to its benevolent conclusion.

When columns of miss-guarded Chadian rebels violated our north-eastern borders to attack Nigerian villages in the 1980s, a Nigerian military Task Force, under the operational Command of General Muhammadu Buhari, who was the Commander of the 3rd Armoured Division with Headquarters in Jos, routed and pursued them back across their own borders. They never repeated the mistake again.

By the 1990s, the Nigerian military's involvement in operations in Sierra-Leone and Liberia, which oscillated between peace keeping and enforcement, resulted into the enthronement of lasting peace and reconstruction of both nations to the envy and admiration of the entire world. On account of our efforts back then, the former American President Bill Clinton, once famously referred to Nigeria as the 'moral superpower' of the world.

I recall also that it was only a few years ago that the former Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Victor Malu, had his famous burst-up with then President and Commander in Chief of the Armies Olusegun Obasanjo on the modalities for the training of our soldiers by officers from the American African Central Command on peace keeping operations. Malu - who distinguished himself as the Commander of ECOMOG Forces in Liberia, was of the opinion that Nigeria required logistic assistance, it had nothing to learn from the Americans on peace keeping operations.

More importantly, he also balked at availing the Americans with the Nigerian Military's contingency plans they demanded for soon after their arrival! Malu argued quite rightly that the issue of a country's contingency plan was exclusive and should never be shared with any other country. He reminded Obasanjo that there was no permanency in international relations as Nigeria's friends today could be its mortal foe tomorrow.

Malu ordered his commanders who called to express their reservations not to comply with the directive from the Ministry of Defence which granted the Americans unrestricted access to our military records. The order led to the removal of Malu as the COAS in due course, but he didn't blink an eye. He had made his point as a through-bred professional was supposed to. The episode also underlined how professional the thinking was in upper echelon of our military brass until recently.

Today, we are pained to acknowledge that the same military, which was once the source of pride to all Nigerians, has become the stuff of crude jokes on the social media. This same Army, which fought valiantly to guarantee the nation's unity in its greatest time of need, is now repeatedly mocked by a ragtag 'Army' of terrorists who continue to call the bluff of our military high command. We are baffled that the same Army, which successfully prosecuted amphibious campaigns in the perilous creeks of the Niger Delta to flush out Biafra rebels during the Civil War, has inexplicably found it difficult to deal decisively with the few thousand gang of cut-throats rampaging on the plains of the Savannah.

Quite inevitably, we are now constrained to ask the obvious questions: what could have happened in the space of a few decades to make the military establishment such a pathetic shadow of its glorious past? What factors contributed to its steep decline from an effective fighting force to one which is now increasingly viewed by military experts abroad to posses only limited capability for defensive operations?

How can such a force defeat a rampant Boko Haram whose continued growth is accelerated by the social conditions of the fighting terrain? It is important, of course, to acknowledge that no Army in the world has ever found it easy fighting an insurgency of whatever magnitude. We know that from the experience of the British in Northern Ireland, and the American's too, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, the military efforts of the British led to negotiated settlement, while the Americans at least have succeeded in eliminating scores of Al-Qaeda's field commanders, and also drastically degraded its capacity on inflict mayhem on its own terms. More important still, they can never be faulted for want of viable initiatives to defeat the scourge. The same cannot be said of our military's handling of the Boko Haram insurgency.

Here, every major atrocity perpetrated by the sect is met by the usual pathetic hollow proclamation that the insurgency would soon be a thing of the past. When he was newly appointed, the Chief of Defence staff boldly declared that the insurgency would be a thing of the past by April. I need to remind him that we are now midway into May, and if the one-sided encounters between our military and Boko Haram was a boxing match, it would have been halted a long time ago by the referee. It would be a technical knockout!

To defeat an insurgency of this nature it is required that a combination of factors must all work towards achieving the same objective. With 5.8 billion dollars or a quarter of federal budget dedicated to defence, funding should be the least of the problems on paper, except for the inevitable corruption, or the scourge of recurrent expenditure which could lead to as less as 10 percent of the huge vote dedicated to capital projects and the acquisition of armaments.

Morale is also thought to play a crucial part, but beyond that, there is also the issue of political will. No quantity of superior arms can defeat Boko Haram if the political leadership continues to trivialize the issue by peddling the absurd falsehood that it is the military wing of northern elites who resent a southern leadership. It may seem so simple, but it may actually be the reason behind the half-hearted measures of the military in confronting the insurgents so far.

In what I found very embarrassing for the military high command, it took them more than three weeks to visit Chibok, and that was after international campaign for the release of the girls had reached a crescendo. That is not how to fight an insurgency!