Nigeria’s campaign against Islamist Boko Haram insurgents is being hampered by “cowards” within the armed forces, National Security Adviser (NSA) Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd) said yesterday in London.
Boko Haram’s bloody uprising to carve out an Islamic caliphate has taken much of Nigeria’s northeast.
“Unfortunately, we have a lot of cowards. We have people who use every excuse in this world not to fight,” Col. Dasuki told an audience at the Chatham House think-tank in the British capital.
But, he stressed, “there is no high-level conspiracy within the army not to end the insurgency.”
Col. Dasuki denied that the army was under-equipped, as critics have asserted, calling this an “excuse.” He said reinforcements had been sent in to retake Baga, the Borno town seized by the sect in a January 3 raid, which reportedly led to the death of over 2,000 people but which the military authorities put at no more than 150.
Col. Dasuki added: “That wasn’t that much of a multinational task force; it was by name (only), because they were all supposed to be physically there,” when in fact most were not.
He added that the headquarters was being moved to the nearby Chadian capital N’Djamena, but that “Nigerians don’t see what the use is” of the regional force.
Defending the funding of the military, Col. Dasuki said that the list of equipment lost in Baga included six armoured cars with 4,000 rounds of heavy ammunition in each, as well as artillery pieces.
“Anyone who is saying that our soldiers are not well armed is not telling the truth. We had a lot of cowards, and it turned out there was a problem in the recruitment process … There were a lot of people who joined because they wanted a job, not because they wanted a career in the military. These are the people who ran away.”
