Opinion piece published in The Guardian on Monday 8th March by a nairalander as a full page advertorial (page 42):

Memo to PMB: National Security

15 years ago I set about setting up homes in Ghana even before I had a home in Nigeria because I believe that safety is a higher priority than other desirables in life and, even back then, I was afraid that Nigeria was in a state and on a trajectory that made eventual civil war and mob rule a quite likely outcome. Yes, the ‘civilians’ had inherited a messy situation but from the get-go in 1999 they were making valiant efforts to further compound the mess they met on ground. My hope was that my homes in Ghana would afford me a safe bolt hole if the proverbial ever hit the fan.

In late 2019 I went to discover Ketou, my maternal grandmother’s ancestral home in Benin Republic. The evil seeds of omission and commission sown in Nigeria by leaders and followers before and since 1999 had begun to really flourish and my anxiety level about the sustainability of relative nation peace and personal safety had ratcheted up. The mindless sabre rattling and mostly surreptitious egging on of the dogs of war that accompanied the general elections that held earlier in the year made me realise that nothing beyond the grace of God was keeping Nigerians from turning our nation into a hellscape drenched with our own blood.

Six years ago when I published various memos to you on Revenue, Education and the like I didn’t think there would be a need for a bloody civilian like me to ever counsel a general on national security but that is where we are now and I must step into this martial ring where so many super heavyweights have been wildly swinging to little effect for years now.

In the two years since the 2019 elections the ante has been raised successively by various challengers of the national security apparatus from the Boko Haram we already knew in the North East to bandits in Zamfara and beyond, IPOB in the South East and South South, marauding herdsmen in every part of our nation and now state funded Amotekun in the South West and state disowned Eastern Security Network in the South East. Everywhere one looks the federal might is being challenged with Nigeria’s armed forces and other security outfits consistently giving an underwhelming account of themselves.

The image of our national security agencies almost cowering before every kind of armed rabble has been so disconcerting that many Nigerians, especially from the South, have decided the only possible explanation for such national impotence must be instructions from above to allow certain forces run riot nationally to ease the purported land grabbing agenda of one of Nigeria’s many transnational tribes, the Fulani. The presidency’s ignoring of this highly toxic charge even while things got worse over the last few years has only allowed this theory to go mainstream so that today you can barely find any Southern Nigerian, educated or not, who does not outrightly believe it or think it highly likely.

Yet I and many others have for decades seen the signs of a failing state writ large all over our ravaged nation. Foreign intelligence agencies and crises experts even planned to issue Nigeria's obituary long before now but we have persisted almost inexplicably as a nation despite those gloomy predictions. As far as the American CIA was concerned there should have been no Nigeria in place for a General Buhari to rule over in 2015 much less in 2021. A few Nigerians, unfortunately much fewer in the South than the North, thus do our best to cast our minds over all the hard facts and history that brought us to the sorry pass we are now and focus on those in thinking of a way out, a safe path to Nigeria's still feasible future greatness, our Manifest Destiny some will be bold to say.

While our Manifest Destiny might be debatable, there is not much to debate about Nigeria being a highly consequential country in this time and space. It is difficult for anyone to imagine everything being right with Africa or West Africa without Nigeria getting its act together and it is impossible to imagine a peaceful and prosperous Africa if Nigeria ever slides into outright civil war. Those who have managed such a regionally crucial nation of roughly 200 million people have not done their job in building for it an army that is fit for purpose, internally and externally, in the last four decades. An army that would have sorted out the Sahelian menace the way it dealt with the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars almost single handedly few decades ago but today is itself prostrate before forces similar to those depredating Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso, our neighbors lying mostly in the Sahel. From being a regional power we have been reduced to a pawn not just on the global chessboard but one that even our local politicians push around for their own political agenda.

The Nigerian armed forces were already broken and not fit for purpose by the 1990s when Generals Babaginda and Abacha deployed the little we had left as part of ECOMOG forces. While I remember President Shagari procuring Alpha jets and other significant bits of military equipment, there were no such memorable military purchases for three decades until President Jonathan began the initially abortive moves to buy some Super Tucano light attack and counter insurgency turboprop aircraft primarily to deal with the Boko Haram threat. That of course was after billions had reportedly gone down the drain buying used Alpha jets without engines and combat helicopters without rotors. For eight years General Obasanjo focused all his energy on ensuring his ‘boys’ in the military couldn’t upset the apple cart for General Danjuma and himself. Despite the global goodwill he and Nigeria had at that time none of it was invested in getting significant quantities of surplus military equipment from our friends in the West or beyond. By the end of General Obasanjo’s eight years Nigeria was lumbered with an army of ‘anything goes’.

Though the US embargo on supplying Super Tucanos was lifted a few years ago and payment made, we are yet to receive delivery of any of those much-needed ground attack planes. A few helicopters have been procured but the nation has had the misfortune of needing to urgently rearm and reman just when the financial resources to so do have been least available. Nigeria has just 21 combat aircraft in service according to a Wikipedia article, a mix of four decades old Alpha jets and new Chinese aircraft, with just 15 more combat aircraft on order. A nation of almost one million square kilometers and leading power in the eight million square kilometer ECOWAS space.

Beyond the gross fighting platform inadequacy of the various wings of the Nigeria Armed Forces we have a mindboggling under manning of all three arms and the paramilitary forces. Data available online tells us we have 135,000 military personnel in total. 80,000 paramilitary (civil defense?). This is as at 2019 according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. What these bald numbers do not tell us is that we have clerks, doctors, musicians and co in this total. We also have massive chunks of the fighting men committed to protecting oil and gas assets in the Niger Delta, fighting Boko Haram in the North East and as part of the Joint Task Forces in about 33 of our 36 states.

135,000 gross total would have given an average availability of 3,750 soldiers per state and ranks Nigeria at 152 out of 172 nations ranked on a soldier per capita basis. At seventh place in population ranking globally we find that the six countries more populated than Nigeria have an average of 1,047,500 persons in uniform and this is counting active duty soldiers only. Brazil, which is just three percent more populated than Nigeria as at 2020 estimates, has 1,340,000 reserve forces and 395,000 paramilitary in addition to producing virtually all its own arms including the Super Tucano we have been begging to buy for a decade now. No surprise then that, despite its equally severe socioeconomic challenges, with its crime ridden favelas being just a small part, no internal or external force has risen to challenge state power. The Nigeria Police Force (Service?) is hardly any better manned with that favourite whipping boy of Nigerians coming in at 123 out of 172 nations on the same cop per capita basis with only 350,000 persons in uniform.

With all the prior deployments of the military that we have in Nigeria to the Niger Delta, the North East and state JTF, the reality is that the average Nigerian state cannot call upon even 1,000 available soldiers even if death dealing Martians land in Eagle Square tomorrow. The Nigerian federal government simply does not have the men to send to combat any fresh challenges to its authority be that threat herdsmen, militants or plain criminal kidnappers. This explains why we mostly send in the air force to bomb Zamfara militants instead of the boots on ground required to not only flush them out but deny them future access. Trying to bomb mobile forest dwelling militants from the air is a sign of weakness and desperation and not a sign of a nation that can project appropriate deadly force throughout its territory.

While one can understand why the federal government cannot reveal to the whole world that it doesn’t have an army to call upon to deal with various threats to the state, for fear of emboldening various enemies of the state, but must instead bribe and indirectly empower its mortal enemies, there is no obvious explanation for the lack of concerted efforts in the last decade, especially with the advent of Boko Haram, ISWAP, IPOB and similar threats, for emergency recruitments to at least double the size of the armed forces or, preferably triple it. During the civil war when we realised we faced an existential threat the federal government was able to massively expand the armed forces literally overnight and this went a long way to make that war short and sharp with hostilities concluded in a mere 30 months despite the very significant and coherent prowess of Biafra.

My assessment of the Nigerian armed forces suggests that it is not only broken but also broke. When the nation had a bit of change to spare and should have built up men and materials the bulk of the budget was stolen and only made billionaires of almost every person that made it to the rank of a General. Today there is much less money to throw at the problem while it is not clear if the problem of grand corruption has been effectively checked. We received reports from men deployed to the North Eastern theater lamenting unpaid allowances and lack of equipment though I must say it is has been a while since I came across such reports.

While we have little funds available to the federal government, even that little is largely wasted on issues that are surely of much lower priority than saving Nigeria from the jackals gnawing at it from every corner. In the midst of our national poverty the federal government still found it expedient to hand N700b to the power ministry to support power generation in the two years before the 2019 elections, a subsidy of a privatized industry that entrenched private interests and cowardly political considerations had stopped from operating in accordance with the terms of the privatization contracts. Surely a nation that appreciates that national security trumps all other needs and wants would not throw away $2b that it couldn’t afford so cavalierly but it gets worse as we are currently in the process of borrowing $500b to waste on revamping a national television network that no one watches. In what universe is the Nigerian Television Authority a higher priority than funding more men and equipment for our overwhelmed military? In the 32 years between 1988 and 2019 Nigeria spent, I hope not just budgeted, $230 on the military on a population per capita basis and ranked 127 out of 150 nations for which there were complete records in that span, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Less than $10 in the average year on each Nigerian. In that same three decades we have the following per capita military spending records for our ‘peers’: Botswana - $4,789, Algeria - $3,863, Gabon - $1,882, Chad - $525, Zimbabwe - $767, Egypt - $1,326, Angola - $2,985, Namibia - $3,330, South Africa - $2,307 and Brazil - $3,054.

When this peanut gets to the military what does it do with it? The Generals used to, we hope that has now ended, carve it up and pocket much of it with crumbs going to arms, active service personnel and the retired. That last section surprisingly might be the most significant as Nigerian soldiers are allowed to retire with FULL PAY after just 18 years in service. ‘Full pay’ is in caps because Nigerian military pension is actually the same as the CURRENT salary of those on the same rank as the pensioner left service on which is a big reason we have military pensioners permanently protesting that their pensions are not up to date or paid and why those still in service have vehemently refused to be moved to the private pension schemes that operate in almost every other part of the economy today. If the military were to actually pay all pensioners what they are owed I doubt if there would be enough money left to pay serving soldiers much less buy bullets. I have a sibling who retired at the grand age of 38 around 1990 after 20 years in service and has been a government pickin since then. This is a blatantly unsustainable situation and must be fixed if any additional fund to be provided by the federal government is to have the desired impact. Beyond the cost of these pensioners who are mostly below 60 years old is the fact that they are not organized into a usable reserve force that could be called on in the sort of extremis we now find ourselves. Many continue picking up their full pay while exerting themselves as private security operatives in various formal and semi formal structures. Such overflowing energies should be channeled into at least part time protection of the state that continues to pay them beyond its actual capacity.

How does the military expend the rest of its minuscule budget that doesn’t go into salaries and pensions? It tries procuring what it can from all over the world. A look at the kit of the Nigerian Army especially shows kit from well over a dozen countries. The mind boggles at how effective training on and maintenance of such diverse range of equipment gets done. The most crucial issue though is that we procure next to nothing locally. Foreign procurement is fraught with embargos as in the case of the Super Tucano, long delivery times and endless variety of equipment as favored suppliers continue to change as international alliances evolve. Nigeria must go the Brazilian and South African route where most of their military hardware is produced locally by various private sector players with the quality high enough that they even export to developed world militaries. The DICON experiment has failed and it should be privatized with other private players encouraged in other to unleash the limitless potential of our people and save us from interference by foreign actors who embargo us for the flimsiest excuses and do not care much if the nation is bloodily dismembered. The recent procurements from Innoson Motors and other local manufacturers are a step in the right direction but we must move on to multi year development and procurement contracts with private manufacturers that will allow them to tool up and deploy the resources needed to deliver on mid and long term nation objectives.

While we work on seriously stepping up local production and procurement we still have multiple wars to win. We need to beg, borrow or steal equipment and even men. Nigeria is in a bad spot and cannot afford its usual big man pretenses. France, Germany and others are helping sort out ISWAP in four of our Sahelian neighbors but European forces on Nigerian soil might be a step too far. We however could explore at least borrowing kit from regional friends like South Africa, Egypt, Namibia and the like. We can negotiate for more surplus equipment from the US and other NATO nations. It is not impossible that even Russia and China could have materiel that they could gift to us. Their military stores probably need space to accommodate all the new kit they keep procuring. We need military and civil leaders ready to think beyond spending money we don’t have for the acquisition of critical materiel at this time. We need government to government engagement and not just engaging contractors out to make a buck. We need you, Mr President, going to the four corners of the world not just to get railway and dam contracts and loans signed but to go beg our friends to let us have some of their military ‘junk’. We are desperate and we need to see that you are fully conscious of how desperate things have become if the charge of your being a family head guilty of bringing his own family to ruin is not to stick and be your unfortunate and likely undeserved epitaph. Personally I find that narrative phantasmagoric but you must get out of Aso Rock and show us that you are taking this existential threat as seriously as the rest of us are. Your usual soft-spoken pabulum no longer cuts it and you are essentially sleepwalking Nigeria to a very bloody dismemberment. Neither you nor the rest of the political class that might be engaging in reckless brinksmanship is calculating the risks properly. There are already too many winds blowing against Nigeria's soul and no one can really predict what one more ill-considered puff can bring about be it ENDSARS, marauding herdsmen, overreaching IPOB, Amotekun, ESN or whatever else our misleaders come up with next.

The fact that one builds an air raid shelter doesn’t mean anyone looks forward to living in that austere space. I pray to God that I will never have to escape to Ketou or Tema. Everyone of you that calls the name of God should ensure you will be able to meet your maker with a clear conscience not only that you did not do anything you should not have done but also that you did do all you were supposed and given the responsibility to do. May the grace of God and the efforts of all patriots continue to keep Nigeria from the abyss that its enemies home and abroad desire that it falls into.

Abraham Abiodun Idowu

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