The former Chief of Defence Staff, General Martin Luther Agwai, has advocated that the soldiers fighting the insurgency in the north-east should not be at the war theatre for more than two years.
Agwai, who spoke in Abuja on Tuesday as the keynote speaker at the three-day international conference on “Insurgency and counter-insurgency in Nigeria: critical perspectives on Boko Haram’’, said if they were not rotated after two years, they would become ineffective on the battle field.
The conference was jointly organised by the Victims Support Fund, Abuja and the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna.
He said: “If you have taken somebody to a theatre, you know the challenges. There is no sleep because when the enemy is coming, he doesn’t tell you which way he would take. You have kept somebody on his toes for a long period. Two years to me is the maximum but after that, the person will fail, inefficiency will set in, and he would have challenges of thinking about his family and his loved ones.
“If you just station them too long in the theatre, the animal in human beings will come out. And that is why you will see people reacting out of worry’’.
Also, Agwai advocated that the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) be split into two for effective coordination of the national security.
To this end, he made case for the creation of the office of national security coordinator, arguing that the office of the NSA as presently constituted is political and has many issues to contend with.
“This is my view; the National Security Adviser has so much on his hands, and to coordinate the DSS, NIA, all the other intelligence agencies together will be too much a thing.
“So, it is either you have somebody of the same status who is the coordinator or somebody known… Remember that the NSA office is a political office and he can leave anytime. But when we have a professional person who had grown to that place based on his profession, then he can stay longer and he can help the organization grow better’’, he said.
In his goodwill message, the Borno state governor, Professor Babagana Umara Zulum, who called for a lasting solution to end the insurgency, lamented that his people did not access to their land for agricultural purposes.
He also appealed to the Federal government and the Military to create an enabling environment for his people to go back to their farm land.
“I am appealing to the military and others to create an enabling environment that will allow the citizens to go back to their farm land’’, Zulum said.
