Buba Galadima, a former ally of President
Muhammadu Buhari, has advised the federal
government to recruit mercenaries to assist
Nigerian troops in fighting insurgency.
Speaking when he featured on Sunrise Daily, a
Channels Television programme, on Tuesday,
Galadima said Nigeria has become extremely
vulnerable and may witness more violent
attacks if the morale of the Nigerian military is
not boosted.
He said Nigeria lost “a good chance of seeking
foreign help” when the president refused to
attend the burial of the late President Idris Deby
of Chad.
“Nigeria has become extremely vulnerable and
we lost a very good chance when our president
refused to attend the burial of the Chadian
strongman, ” he said.
“Because there were world leaders including
France and it could have been a very big
opportunity if the president was there and
discuss the security situation in both West and
Central Africa. As we know, the Chadian strong
man was the super cop in this region. He has
soldiers stationed in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger
Republic to maintain peace.
“We lost this chance again because two days
ago, the military council in Chad said they will
never negotiate with bandits which means Chad
will fall into civil war and you have the
proliferation of small arms coming into Nigeria.
And Nigerian military is overstretched; not
enough manpower to tackle insecurity in the
south-east, north-east, north-central, it means
that the north can be overrun anytime.
“For now, I sympathise with the military because they are overstretched, under-armed and their morale is so low, so all we need to do is to boost their morale.
“Tribal wars in Chad will make small arms filter
into Nigeria and our military will be
incapacitated. We have to recruit mercenaries to assist the spirit and carriage of our own troops.”
” BRUTE FORCE ALONE CANNOT WIN THE WAR AGAINST INSURGENCY”.
Galadima added that it is no longer advisable to
use only brute force to tackle insecurity in the
country.
“Our solution is simple and difficult. You cannot
use only brute force of human strength now
anymore to fight this war,” he said.
“I have said severally what you need is a merger
of intelligence and technology. Unless Nigeria
does that, we are likely to get into trouble.
“We are only attacking symptoms. Why don’t we
go into the root cause? The root cause is simply
that very few people corner Nigeria’s resources
to themselves. An ordinary man has nothing to
do, to eat. All we need to do, we must attack the
foundation of insecurity in Nigeria, that is
fighting corruption.”
Culled from Ebunoluwa Olafusi
