By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi I thought I had become inured to the scandal of brazen corruption in Nigeria ...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
I thought I had become inured to the scandal of brazen
corruption in Nigeria until I watched the interview former Chief of Defense Staff Alex Badeh granted to Channels TV on August 1. It’s the worst form of
self-indictment I’ve ever seen in my life.
Badeh told Channels TV that the last time the Nigerian
military bought equipment was 9 years ago, that is, in the twilight of
Obasanjo’s second term. “If I go down memory lane, I think the last time any
piece of equipment was bought for the Nigerian army was some APCs that were
bought in 2006, and how many were they? They were few,” he said, pointing
out that the Nigerian military flies “the oldest fighter aeroplanes in the whole
world.” The Alpha jets that form the backbone of the military onslaught on Boko
Haram, Badeh told Channels TV, were bought in 1981.
If Badeh is right (and I have no reason to think he is
wrong since he was Nigeria’s most senior military officer until his sack) that
basically means that, from Musa Yar’adua’s administration when the Boko Haram
menace started, to the end of the Jonathan presidency when it reached a
crescendo, not a single piece of equipment was purchased for the Nigerian
military. The military depended on obsolete equipment at best and no equipment
at all at worst to fight a determined and sophisticated Boko Haram.
If I didn’t hear this directly from Badeh himself, I would
have dismissed it as some wacky conspiracy theory. But it isn’t the revelation
by itself that is scandalous; it is the fact that the neglect of the military
is coterminous with the extravagant ballooning of the Nigerian military’s
budget. In 2010, for instance, government
budgeted N836,016,773,836 (which translates to $5.07 billion at 165 naira
to a dollar) for the military. In 2011 the amount ballooned to
N1,080,894,801,178 ($6.55 billion). In 2012 it increased to
N1,154,857,159,110.00 ($6.99 billion). It increased even more in 2013 to
N1,178,832,576,309 ($7.14 billion). Last year, it was scaled down a bit to
N1,174,897,477,334.00 ($7.12 billion).
That’s trillions of naira gone down the begrimed pockets of corrupt government
officials in the name of fighting Boko Haram!
My head spun as I looked at the figures. Now, Badeh
says in spite of these trillions that the Jonathan government budgeted for the
military, “the last time any piece of equipment was bought for the Nigerian
army was … in 2006!” So what happened to the trillions of naira? Every Nigerian
should be asking this until we get an answer.
After a whopping $32.88 billion in military budget to
fight Boko Haram in the last five years, we don’t have a single piece of
military equipment to show for it. This simply boggles the mind. It’s beyond
scandalous; it’s unacceptably and insanely criminal.
In spite of all that money, hundreds of thousands of
our compatriots in northeastern Nigeria have been murdered—and are still being murdered daily— by Boko Haram, and thousands more are internally displaced and
writhe in unspeakable hardship. Lives have been disrupted, businesses have
collapsed, and thousands have lost even the will to live. Yet one of the men
who superintended over the criminal enterprise that was military budget goes on
TV, without a tinge of moral compunction, to gloat about the incompetence of
the government he was a part of.
I am angry, very angry. This sort of criminal impunity
should never go unpunished. We are talking here about the twin evils of
unconscionably mindboggling theft and of the heartrending destruction of the
life of an entire region of the country. I know President Buhari is aware of
the scale and depth of the criminality that characterized the military budgets
in the last 6 or so years, but we should still prod him to not only recover the
stolen trillions but bring to justice the criminals who masterminded this
astonishingly conscienceless heist.
This is all the more unpardonable because from Badeh
to former President Jonathan, and all the minions in between, the fact of the
Nigerian military’s unpreparedness, which was all too obvious to even a perfunctory
observer, was intensely denied. Military officers were court-martialed and
sentenced to death for refusing to fight Boko Haram with bare hands. In other
words, they were condemned to death for refusing to commit suicide. Fighting a
well-armed enemy with bare hands is suicide. Pure and simple. But, in press
conferences, Alex Badeh passionately defended the death sentence passed on
soldiers who mutinied and ran for their lives. Now he admits that the military
he headed had no equipment to fight Boko Haram.
Former President Jonathan also once threatened to
withdraw soldiers from Borno State when the state’s governor said Boko Haram
was better armed and more motivated than the Nigerian military—a fact Badeh has
now admitted. During a February
25, 2014 presidential media chat, Jonathan said, “The statement is a little
bit unfortunate because you don’t expect a governor to make that kind of
statement and if the governor of Borno State feels that the Nigerian Armed
Forces are not useful, he should tell Nigerians. I will pull them out for one
month; whether he will stay in that his Government House; just one month, but I
will fly back to take over the state.”
When you add all this to the recent revelation
by SaharaReporters of a
N1,751,864,867 ($8,853,600) fraud in the Office of the National Security
Adviser over purchase of arms and
ammunition to fight Boko Haram, which never made it to Nigeria, all lingering
doubts that the Jonathan presidency was a massive criminal enterprise are
removed. I don’t know what would have become of Nigeria had Jonathan won
another term.
Related Articles:
State of Emergency and Worsening Boko Haram Crisis
The Insanity of Extending State of Emergency in the Northeast
The Malcolm Xian Logic in Jonathan's Praiseworthy Boko Haram Offensive
Amnesty for Boko Haram or Pampering of Mass Murderers
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