In this exclusive interview with the Nigerian Defence Magazine, Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, CFR, offers his perspective on the indispensability of a strong military in an evolving democracy stating that without a strong military backing, a country’s voice is feeble in the comity of nations. He stressed that apart from its statutory responsibility of defending the nation from external aggression and internal insurrection, the Nigerian military is also very much interested in helping to consolidate our democracy. According to him, if called upon, the military “will always offer helping hands in terms of providing security for our election in order to achieve government’s policy of one man, one vote…”
The CDS also weighed in on the insinuation making the rounds in a section of the media that troops currently engaged in the counter-terrorist operation in the north east are denied adequate welfare and given obsolete weapons to prosecute the war on terror. He debunked the allegation and stated emphatically that the personnel of the Nigerian military are very well taken care of.
“We live in houses we don’t pay for accommodation, we have buses that bring troops to work every day and take them back home, we don’t pay for light, we don’t pay for water, our salaries are good compare to what is paid in the civil place, if someone with school certificate joins the Army, by the time he is five years in the service, his salary has doubled that of a graduate. Why do you think Nigeria is doing that for us? Nigeria is doing that for us because we have vowed that we will defend our nation if need be with our blood; so for a soldier to come up and say am not well equipped, yet you have a riffle; what do you want? You want APC, you want tanks? The basic weapon of an infantry man is riffle, so why should there be mutiny…”
He spoke extensively to Col Nwachukwu and Chidi Omeje on a wide range of issues concerning the defence and security of the nation.
Excerpts…
For about 10 months now you’ve been on this saddle and of course from our vantage position as information managers we’ve heard a lot of encomiums, and applause coming from people who identify with the military and your achievements being the Chief of Defence Staff at a very critical period in our history; we are having insurgencies and security challenges almost in every nook and cranny of the nation. Sir how has it been piloting the affairs of the Nigeria Armed Forces?
Thank you for coming this morning and it’s my pleasure to meet you. It’s been about nine months really since I came here and it’s has also been challenges here and there. However, you know that when you are working with a very good team, things work seamlessly. The way I have been operating with the service chiefs have been quite harmonious and that’s why you don’t hear divergent voices outside because we talk as one, we act as one knowing that we have only one objective and that the objective is the interest of Nigeria. There is none of us that have any personal ambition or reason to act independently outside this broad objective. That’s why I said it has been very seamless, very good.
Sir, taking a look at the records, you are the 15th CDS and I don’t think any of those before you had it so challenging the way it’s been since you took over. Will you kindly give us your impression or assessment of the current security situation and how are you are really handling it?
You see, my belief is that God never gives you a load you cannot carry after all He is the one that made your neck. So if God knows that your neck is going to break He will not give you load that can break it. Quite honestly, it’s been very challenging but that’s what we are trained for. While I was I was the Chief of Air Staff, we were on this issue so moving over here only means that I can give advice or I can direct better because I already have a kind of first-hand experience of what we have been up against.
Not every person out there can carry what you are carrying and still be walking. Our readers will like to know what actually prepared you for the leadership position you are occupying now and even the ones you have occupied in the past. Was there anything spectacular about you that made you strong to face challenges like this and yet moving and smiling?
Being prepared for an office is sometimes a function of experience or grooming. If an officer for instance has been groomed all along and he discharges himself very well in every office he has occupied, then that’s the grooming am talking about. I was a Directing Staff at the Defence College, I was also Chief of Policy and Plans at the Air Force Headquarters, I was an Air Officer Commanding, then Chief of Air Staff before now. I believe this is enough grooming for anybody to function well in this kind of position. If you allow pressure to weigh you down as a leader; if a leader starts crying, then what do you expect the followers to do? They’ll run away; so under whatever circumstance, someone must keep his cool as you direct. Don’t forget that we have put people in harm’s way, they have gone to war; so, if I start crying, those people at the war front will say oh there’s no hope. But if we maintain very positive attitude, it means there is hope and they can see that there is hope. That is my inspiration. To give the leadership that is not afraid of either taking decisions, or not afraid of telling people to do this or do that because I am doing my own part. So I must maintain the positive attitude.
Sir, for some time now you have facing the daunting challenges curbing the excesses of terrorists in the North East and at a point the Government declared a state of emergency in that region; what is your assessment of the activities of the terrorists, the Government’s response and the role of the military so far?
There has been so much misgiving in Nigeria about the declaration of State of Emergency. Even in the constitution it is written that a state governor can request the president to declare state of emergency if the security situation in his state degenerates. So the declaration of a State of Emergency is not something primitive. The declaration of state of emergency is just a way of solving some very serious security challenges. It allows the military to arrest people and keep them beyond 24hours or beyond 48hours; it allows you to conduct searches without having to obtain search warrant and if you remember when this insurgency started in the North East, we were doing house searching in Maiduguri Metropolis. That is the leverage the State of Emergency gave us; we go from place to place to carry out counter-terrorist operations without any inhibition. It gave us right to place curfew in towns and curtail people’s rights and that has actually allowed us to curtail and contain the activities of these terrorists. By and large, the state of emergency has been a success and by the grace of God, I don’t think we are going to look for another extension of state of emergency because with the way we are going we are doing very well.
You agree with us that the security problem we have in Nigeria is not just in the North East; if we go to the Niger Delta for instance, we have the issue of theft of our oil and other marmite assets. The DHQ rightly established a couple of Joint Taskforces to take care of these obstacles. How much have these Joint Taskforces like the Operation Pulo Shield in the Niger Delta and Operation Safe Haven on Plateau established in response to security threats achieved the role for which they are set up?
Let me say something before I answer your question. For a long time, Nigerians were not been able to express themselves because of the kind of regimes we have had in the past. However, with democracy comes openness and virtually everybody can express themselves. I want to say that in fact the Nigeria Armed Forces is today very much part of our democratic experience and is helping to deepen that credential. In Jos, Plateau State, we had all this communal clashes and you now that that thing was purely political and that’s why I said that democratic space have enabled everybody to everybody to express themselves and so you have the good, the bad and the ugly. Now in the North East, we are actually facing the ugly.
And it started moving on the Plateau before the north east. On the Plateau, we had all these communal clashes and you know that that thing was purely political. That’s why I said with openness people started demanding for their own kind of thing to express themselves and that’s what happened in Jos. In the Niger Delta it’s the same thing, ‘resource control’, ‘it is our own…’ and so on. That is the openness which is no longer like those days so when the excesses became too much in the Niger Delta, we had to establish the JTF which has had various stages; right now we have operation Pulo Shield over there. We have gone from trying to stop the militants from saying everything is their own, we are into the business of trying to stop illegal bunkering and stealing of our common wealth. That’s what Op pulo Shield is doing there and I can tell you it’s been very successful. I must commend the Nigerian Navy for their wonderful effort down there. We also have a very serious person as the Commander of Operation Pulo Shield, Major General Atewe. He calls me virtually every night and tells me what he’s doing and I thank God too that we have a Chief of Naval Staff who has never been in support of this stealing of our corporate wealth in the Niger Delta. He promised that he was going to stamp out that theft and he’s doing everything he can to stop it.
Can we really stamp out oil theft in the Niger Delta?
We can stop the big ones, we can stop the serious theft if we are all sincere but you see, you can use military but what of the other oil workers there? I don’t believe that it is people breaking oil pipes to take small bottle of diesel that is causing all the massive loss we are having, it must be something else and the Chief of Naval Staff has addressed that issue at a forum recently at the Naval Headquarters but I think if we are sincere, we will stamp out all that oil theft in our country.
In Jos, yes there are still killings here and there but the major ones has been stopped. In fact, I was jokingly telling the STF Commander that they are just busy settling quarrels and petty stealing. But we know that we can’t leave them to snowball into heavy conflagration or allow them to go under the carpet. We keep assessing or reappraising the situation probably after the general elections if everything goes okay, maybe we can start scaling down but for now we will not scale down.
Before we proceed I will like to take you back to the north east where there has been a lot of mixed feelings about the involvement or collaboration of this civilian vigilante groups called Civilian JTF in the North East and there has been some applause and there has also been some complaints about their excesses. Sir, what are you really doing to streamline or regulate the activities of these groups?
We are looking at examples around the world where people operate vigilantes. In a country like Turkey, they have very well organized vigilantes and they are properly armed by government to protect their own communities. Now in Nigeria, I think it’s different. There’s a committee looking at how it will be regulated but by and large, our operations have been very successful with the civilian JTF in the north east. The committee will come out with how we are going to streamline the work of vigilantes because civilian JTF is actually a vigilante group that takes care of their own area. It is just the insurgency in the North East that made the vigilante to become very big and more combative because we found out that it’s the young men amongst them that are being conscripted or that are being killed. So they are saying no, they are kind of taking charge of their own destiny. So, we are working together with them; those people in the areas know the bad people among them. The military now uses the civilian JTF to identify or to lead them to where these bad guys are because they are often inside the community.
Given the imperative of training and exercise in the overall performance of the military, are there any plans for joint training and exercise for the Nigerian Armed forces? I ask this because we’ve seen that the problem we have now is terrorism and other forms of unconventional warfare and as such there is a growing need to pull the capacity of our Armed Forces together to deal with the situation. What is your take sir?
You know for some time now, the Nigerian Armed Forces (the Army, Navy Air Force) and Police, DSS Immigrations, Customs and even the Civil Defence have all been in Maiduguri trying to stamp out this insurgency until it became so big and then it expanded to cover the whole of can I say the whole of the Kanuri Areas, both in Nigeria, Cameroun Chad and Niger and then the two states in Nigeria, Yobe and Bornu. So it’s like virtually every Boko Haram man you meet, is a Kanuri man. Now you can see that the Air force, the Army and Navy are working together. In the Niger delta, the Army, the Air Force, Navy, DSS and the police are involved. On the STF in Jos, we are all there, in fact we are drafting more and more policemen to that area and you know that we are fighting a different type of war.
This is not the type of war that we have ever been prepared for. We are learning on the job and let me tell you by the time we finish maybe people will come and ask us how did you end counter-insurgency? It is not easy definitely. For now, we joint operations and we are through with what is out there, we will now come and see what scenario to be enacted and see if there is anything we could have done better than what we are doing out there in Maiduguri. We have seen for instance that our wars now are being confined within our walls. The enemies are within and not without. So we will have to start making new doctrines as to how to fight this wars and when we make this new doctrines, that’s when we can start exercising within the scenarios that we are going to build. Definitely we will but not for now because our hands are very full.
Is it likely that the continued involvement of military personnel in internal security operation will affect the professionalism of the Nigerian Armed Forces, considering the recent incident where some troops shot at their General Officer Commanding?
You see, first of all, I said it earlier that the war we are fighting now is not the kind of war we have been preparing for, ok? We will have to adapt. Now we have taken the role of the civil police, remember in our training we are told that when the thing goes beyond what the police can cope then the military will be called to take over. Now we are virtually doing what the police is suppose to do including manning the check points. There has been allegation of people taking bribe and all manner of things, most time this allegations are not true because I have seen people out of concern they see people at road blocks, and you know Nigerians are very caring people, you see them stop and even go to the extent of giving food and water for soldiers on road block duties, and peoples see it and most time interpret it to be bribe taking.
Now in respect of the mutiny you made reference to, it was done by people who do not love Nigeria. When we joined this job, what does our oath say? It says we will go where ever the President orders us to go, weather by land, air or by sea. Now your commander tells you, let us advance and you say no! We have our law books, you see that oath that we took, is the same thing as saying if need be to execute us. If a soldier says he is not going to move, what do you expect people to do for him? Clap for him? The Nigerian military is very well taken care off. We live in houses we don’t pay for accommodation, we have buses that bring troops to work every day and take them back home, we don’t pay for light, we don’t pay for water, our salaries are good compare to what is paid in the civil place, if someone with school certificate joins the Army, by the time he is five years in the service, his salary has doubled that of a graduate. Why do you think Nigeria is doing that for us? Nigeria is doing that for us because we have vowed that we will defend our nation if need be with our blood; so for a soldier to come up and say am not well equipped, yet you have a riffle; what do you want? You want APC, you want tanks? The basic weapon of an infantry man is riffle, so why should there be mutiny, why should you accuse your commander of leading you into an ambush? Common! How can your Commander lead you to an ambush? If they kill my soldiers then of what use will I be? No commander will do that deliberately. This is the time for Caesar, all the time has been for God, all the time we have been taking salaries, we go and do exercise saying I will do this, I will do that; I will fly like this ad fly like that, all those ones you are preparing for the day Caesar will come and demand for his pound of flesh, and Caesar has come now and he saying, look come and do your work and you are saying you are not going…? No, it does work like that.
Nigerian is known to be among the highest troop contributing nations for global peace support operations; is this still the case given the internal security challenges which requires more troops involvement?
I don’t want to say we have been the leading contributor of troop globally, but in Africa we have been the leader and despite the challenges we are facing within the country we are still contributing substantially. We have a lot in Darfur, we have a lot in Liberia and then we have some in Mali; in fact in more than 10 countries we have our men either on peace keeping or as peace enforcement. We are all over the place; you see our aim is to have enough to contribute outside while also doing our own internally and that is all that we are proving that yes Nigeria may have internal challenges but we are also able to give you assistance outside, that is what we are doing.
What is your prescription for a better civil-military relations knowing the critical role it plays in the success or otherwise of any operation?
The Civil military relations in this country are going very strong. We are conducting seminars, people come here and we share ideas with them, we talk with media reporters and we have a whole department in DHQ for the purpose of relating with our people. Now with the challenges we are having within the country, we have to try and get people on our side, let them not go to our enemies and that is part of CMIC. I remember some time ago when we provided some quick impact projects like bole holes for some communities in Maiduguri where they were having challenges getting water. That is part of wining the hearts and minds of the people; when we started having too many refuges in Taraba and Adamawa states, especially when the insurgents started burning people’s houses, even going to the extent of destroying their farms, at DHQ level, we sent over 3000 bags of grains to those areas to ameliorate their suffering. We did that as part of wining the heart and minds of the people. The Federal Government last year sent lots and lots of food stuffs to Adamawa, Borno and to Yobe, I mean lots of it. It still part of wining the hearts and minds of the people; to show that in the face of the challenges, you have a government that is behind you. We will continue to do these to win the hearts and the minds of the people where these things are happening. We are engaging the wider society in dialogue and that is why you see that the clashes we use to have between the military and the civilians is no longer there. And the civilian population is beginning to understand that the people wearing this Khaki are not their enemies, that they are Nigerian soldiers. Nigerians most take responsibility for their soldiers because we will continue to tell them that if you cannot afford to continue to say that these soldiers are bad or unduly denigrate our armed forces. You don’t have another one; this is your own, so tell us if there is better way to make these soldiers serve Nigerian better.
Let me take you back to the issue of the morale of troops considering that it’s a very important factor in determining what will happens in the various operations that we have engaged in. Sir the media has been awash of insinuations from individuals who claim they our troops that they’ve not been accurately catered for, some of them have talked about not being properly remunerated, in terms of allowances, the leave allowance and all that and some of them have talked about obsolete weapons that are not adequate. Sir are these insinuations true of the armed forces or there are merely insinuations?
You see, I don’t believe that all those people who were calling, BBC, VOA, AL Jazeera and what have you, are Nigerian Soldiers. When you talk about the morale of the Nigerian soldier, the Nigerian armed forces in general, everybody in operation is paid upfront so that he can manage himself. You know your salary comes at the end of the month, but these soldiers don’t have ATM to go and buy anything they want, don’t forget we are not fighting in towns and cities. We pay them upfront. At least from the Army Headquarters, Naval HQ Air Force HQ, from DHQ, we pay upfront but you don’t expect the Chief of Army Staff to go and start asking the GOC, the brigade commander way down to their company commander whether allowance has been paid. We are all officers and gentlemen and we are all responsible for our soldiers. If the COAS or Chief of Naval Staff or CDS approves and the money is released to where it is supposed to go, we expect that that gentleman officer gives the money to the soldiers. That’s how far we have gone. Now, when you talk about the morale you know I first of all told you that the people calling VOA, BBC are not Nigerian soldiers. I don’t believe they are Nigerian Soldiers; if you just cast your mind back, the first report was on the soldiers not getting their money and that they are living on mangoes. That time was not even mango season. The report was done just to cast the Nigerian army in very bad light.
These are Boko Haram people; the fact that someone is seen wearing camouflage in the bush does not mean they are our soldiers. If you saw the picture of Shekau imposter at Konduga, was he not wearing camouflage? So these are Boko Haram making these calls. When we talk about obsolete equipment, what is obsolete equipment? If you have an FM riffle, don’t FM riffle kill? If you have AK47, doesn’t AK 47 kill? What is Boko Haram using against our soldiers? They are using AK47. So you have AK 47 and you have added advantage of having probably better vehicles than that of Boko Haram, you also have air support and you said if you don’t see aircraft you won’t go to war because our equipments are obsolete?
That’s what they were saying but what we since changed the hierarchy of the armed forces in January, the Chief of Army Staff said, no gentlemen we are not going to sit down in defence, because if you sit down in defence, all those other places are going to be taken over by Boko Haram, so we have to take the battle to them. We have not had new set of equipment and it is the same thing that we had as at December last year, it’s the same thing they have used and now to the glory of God and collective efforts of the people who genuinely love Nigeria, people who have been praying for us, even though we know that prayer without works amounts to nothing. But there has been prayers by our people and work by our troops so we are recording so much success in what we are doing. So, I don’t agree with story about obsolete equipment. The most important thing is the men on the ground.
What is your message of hope to Nigerians who have endured so much internal challenges of late?
I as Alex Badeh, I so much believe in this country; this country has given me everything and the country is capable of giving anybody what he or she genuinely aspires to. There is so much hope in our evolving democracy. They say for democracy to be consolidated, it has to be steady for about 20 years but I think even before 20 years, we have consolidated this democracy.
There is so much hope in this country; let us keep doing what we are doing as long as it is in the interest of country. In a democracy, you will always have deceptions here and there and that is why the military is an arm of democracy. Such that when our legislators are talking somewhere, they know they have a very strong military backing our democracy. When we go for international meetings, you try to impose our way, assert your position; if you don’t have strong military, you will only have a very feeble voice. As the President, Governor, Senator, House of Rep member, your voice can be loud because you know that you have something behind you.
There is hope and we will continue to grow from strength to strength. We will soon sort out all these petty insecurity and squabbles about politics here and there. If we are told to assist in providing security for elections we will provide it. One man, one vote, free and fair election and that’s what we will continue to do. We must all remain steadfast because everything will be ok.
Thank very much sir for your time
You are always welcome.
Source: Defenceinfo
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