Recent complaint by the Army Chief of Staff, that the Army has no funds to fight insecurity is a national embarrassment. In fact, it is incredulous and a cruel joke that the Army of an oil-rich country, where billions of naira are routinely alleged to be missing, and whose Petroleum Minister uses a N10 billion to charter aircraft, should complain of lack of money to carry out its constitutionally assigned role of providing security for the nation.
The complaint was made on May 21, 2014 at a time the Army and its Commander- in- Chief are under fire for their lacklustre performance in containing the terrorist insurgency in the North-east. While we are tempted to dismiss the complaint of the Army as a lame excuse for the glaring incompetence of the armed forces in fighting Boko Haram, for which reason the country has been humbled to accept military assistance from a number of countries including the US, this complaint is not the first.
In December, at a public hearing to review the 1999 Constitution at the House of Representatives, the National Security Adviser (NSA), Colonel Sambo Dasuki (rtd), lamented that the nation’s security agencies lacked funds to wage effective battle against terrorism. The NSA revealed that his office was being owed about N 7 billion as unremitted funds by the Ministry of Finance from its 2012 budgetary allocation.
The implication of this is that expectation that Nigeria would ever be freed from the stranglehold of the rampaging Boko Haram is a mirage. However, Finance Minister, NgoziO konjo-Iweala, revealed recently that between January and April 2014, N130.7 billion was released to the Ministry of Defence for military operations. She said in 2013, N281. 51 billion was allocated to the three armed services – Army, Navy and Air Force- for their operations. This amounted to about $2 billion!
Flowing from above, it amounts to mockery of the average Nigerian, whose life under the present dispensation has witnessed unprecedented poverty and deprivation, for personnel of the Armed Forces to complain of lack of funds. It also amounts to a crime by personnel of the Armed Forces to have sat idly by under the guise of lack of funds while thousands of innocent Nigerians were bombed out of existence by the Boko Haram. What do we say of the hundreds of school children whose throats were slit in their sleep in their dormitories by the Boko Haram and the sad tale of the 270 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno state who are now captive in the hands of the insurgents?
If Nigeria had a responsible government, the disappearance of the huge allocation made to the Armed Forces, which has led to the virtual destruction of a region of the country by the Boko Haram, and routine explosion of bombs in other parts of the country, should be the subject of a probe. The probe should be to find out what happened to the security and defence money, as well as the reason the Nigerian Army has become incapacitated?
The problem in the Armed Forces is serious, considering that the poor conduct and levity of top commanders recently resulted in a mutiny in Maiduguri, Borno state, the centre of the insurgency, when angry infantry men attempted to kill their commander!
Our fear, however, is that no probe may take place to find out the whereabouts of the missing billions allocated for national security because of the pervasiveness of corruption in the polity which benefits those in power, as well as the deification of corruption and protection of accused persons by the present Commander-in-Chief!
