Past govts weakened military, says ex-CDS Badeh  

The immediate past Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh (rtd), has said previous governments at the centre deliberately decided to weaken the military to ensure the survival of their regimes.

Badeh, who said this while delivering a valedictory speech at a pulling out parade organised in his honour at the Mogadishu Cantonment, Abuja, yesterday, did not mention the names of the affected heads of states and presidents, who headed those governments.

He added that some of the regimes acceded to the demands of foreign countries to reduce the size of the military, and deprived the nation’s defence forces of the requisite funding and size.

The ex-CDS lamented that such leaders accepted the advice of such foreign countries without considering the nation’s peculiar characteristics as a third world country, which lacked the advantages of modern technology to compensate for the costly reduction in size and strength.

Badeh said the military was overstretched to such a point that it had to resort to emergency recruitment and training to fight the Boko Haram sect, which, he said, were inadequate in the face of the level of security challenges facing the country at the time.

The former defence chief counselled that it was high time the Federal Government embarked on a comprehensive review of the nation’s military structure with respect to its size, capacity and the equipment that should be at its disposal to carry out its responsibility of defending the country.

“Permit me to also add here that nations’ militaries are equipped and trained in peace time for the conflicts they expect to confront in the future. Unfortunately, that has not been our experience as a nation.

“Over the years, the military was neglected and underequipped to ensure the survival of certain regimes, while other regimes, based on advice from some foreign nations, deliberately reduced the size of the military and underfunded it.

“Unfortunately, our past leaders accepted such recommendations without appreciating our peculiarities as a third world military, which does not have the technological advantage that could serve as force multipliers and compensate for reduced strength.

“Accordingly, when faced with the crises in the North-East and other parts of the country, the military was overstretched and had to embark on emergency recruitment and training, which were not adequate to prepare troops for the kind of situation we found ourselves in.”

Badeh stressed that the huge money required to rebuild the North-East and other trouble spots in the country would have been avoided if the military had been adequately equipped for its defence responsibilities.