Nigeria’s survival now at lowest ebb, says General Agwai, ex-Chief of Defence Staff

 Nigeria’s survival now at lowest ebb, says General Agwai, ex-Chief of Defence Staff

By Kennedy Mbele

General Martin Luther Agwai (rtd) was the Chief of the Defence Staff between June 2006 and May 2007. Before then, he was the Chief of the Army Staff (from 2001 to 2003).

In this interview, Agwai shares his perspectives on the insecurity challenges facing Nigeria and points the way forward. He also speaks on the Middle Belt BrainTrust, which he chairs, saying the mandate is to build peace and bring about security in the Middle Belt.

What is your general opinion on where we have found ourselves today in terms of national security? What do you make of the challenges that we are facing in different parts of the country?

The position we have found ourselves and the situation we have found ourselves in, in this country in terms of national security is really most unfortunate. I said most unfortunate because the stability of Nigeria is synonymous to the security of West Africa and Central Africa. And if Nigeria cannot find stability, instability will extend to other parts of the continent.

For example, during the time of ECOMOG, Nigeria brought a lot of stability to West Africa. If at the height of Liberia and Sierra Leone crises Nigeria was in the position she is today, you can imagine the level of carnage we would have had at that time. So the stability of Nigeria is very important and that is why I said it is unfortunate that we found ourselves in this position that people from other parts of the world want to assist us to find peace. And this now brings us to the issue of the economy, which is tied to security, because once there is no stability, the lives of people are affected greatly.

And that is why I think we find many people trying to come in to do what they can do to help us. But the sad part of it is the fire brigade approach which doesn’t last long and that is why you find out that, for a long time, we have not been able to find a sustainable solution to the challenges we have.

You mentioned the fact that our stability as a country is tied to the stability of the sub-region. Conversely, a lot of people have pointed out that many of the security challenges Nigeria is facing are now caused by all those countries, people and arms passing through those countries into Nigeria.

For instance, there was the issue of the collapse of Libya and the fact that the armory that the late Colonel Gadaffi had amassed got into non-state actors’ hands and moved to different directions one of which was Nigeria. Then the instability in Mali and Chad are all impacting on Nigeria. I know that during the course of your military career, you served not just within but also outside Nigeria. This should be home territory for you. Is that narrative correct that those countries’ instability is affecting us?

Sure! That is why I said that the security of Nigeria is tied to that of the sub-region and the instability of the sub-region will also have an effect on us, but the real challenge we face is that we seem to be more buoyant economically at that time.

Our economy was more stable than others’, so they looked up to us for their own economic growth. When they now found out that they have challenges… What leads to people trying to buy weapon? It is when you feel that your government cannot give you protection or there are things that are wrong, that is when non-government groups, irregular forces need weapons because they want to challenge government and that brings an issue like Boko Haram.

So, yes that now gives them an open market to buy weapons they can use in challenging government. That is why I said that it is unfortunate also that we have strategically operated our security architecture and understand that this is our position and that we will be affected, negatively or positively. There are those who will ask whether there are challenges in Nigeria?

Will there be market for us to take our weapons, and when they come and find the market, they would then infiltrate and provide those small arms to the irregular forces. Also, look at our artificial borders, how do you really differentiate a citizen of Benin Republic from a Nigerian? Even on the other side, Cameroon, remember, a part of Cameroon was part of Nigeria, sometime ago, called Northern Cameroon. So, because the world has become a global village, you find that what happens in one territory has effects on the other.

But, if you are able to control those things that bring about insecurity or you can reduce them, that is fine. If there are economic activities, jobs for the young population, and we have the highest number in the world of the growing young population, we will be on the verge of solving the problem. African countries, including Nigeria, are mostly made up of young people  of between 30 and 40 years and most of them unemployed, this set of people with energy have nowhere to expend the energy. So, what do they do? They go into criminality. I will tell you a story.

When I was the Deputy Force Commander in Sierra Leone, we met this child-soldier, there were many of them in Sierra Leone and I asked him, “why are you not going to school and you are not at home?” He said he didn’t know where his parents were and that, by the way, if he joined the rebels he could get $100 and that even if he stepped on broken bottles bare footed and sustained injury, he could treat himself with $50 and pocket the balance. Can you see what poverty can bring?

He was willing to even take the risk of walking on a heap of broken bottles bare footed to get $100 because he could use $50 to treat himself and save $50. This is one of the effects of lack of employment among young people who have all the energy and when they cannot get somewhere to use them, negative forces take over and then, because we have ungovernable state, especially in our country, there will be problems.

There are no economic activities taking place anywhere. Nobody knows what is happening. So everybody is creating illegal administration in their area and, once that is not checked, you find out that a little success by them will open more space. That is where we found ourselves today.

That brings me to the issue of the Nigerian armed forces and arms. I have spoken to some of your predecessors (Chiefs of the Army Staff) asking, given our current situation vis a vis the number of roles the Nigerian Army has to play in combating security challenges, are they over stretched? And in terms of training and strategy, tactics, are they prepared to take on non-state actors who are not in uniform and do not operate with the same kind of rules that the Nigerian Army operates?

Also, as of the last time a check was done, the army was operating in 32 states of Nigeria under different guises: fighting Boko Haram, illegal miners, herdsmen who attack farmers etc. Is the army over stretched and is it prepared for such operations?

The Nigerian Army, as I know it, has a role and I remember that when I became the Chief of the Army Staff in 2003, I was asked about what was supposed to be the strength of the Nigerian Army. And, if you follow events, after 1999 when the military left power and the civilian government came in, people were saying that for the country to have a peaceful and sustainable democracy, the strength of the army had to be reduced, that the strength of the Nigerian Army was too much; some said we needed only 50,000 soldiers, etc.

I said I didn’t know what the strength of the army should be and somebody felt “Oh, how do you make this Chief of the Army Staff?” I said I didn’t know because it is Nigerian Army, not mine. What does Nigeria as a country want? What are the roles because you must know the roles you want that organization to play? And that determines what the strength should be. If you want an army that can defend Nigeria and have nothing to do internally, it will be a different thing, and if you want an army that is to defend Nigeria from external aggression, and then also be able to perform internal security operations and peace keeping, which is another role with a different format, then your number will be different.

So, it is not enough to say, oh you want an army of 50,000. You must define what you want that army to do, then you will be able to know if 50,000 will do that job or you need more. If you now agree on that, what are the other security organs you have in the country doing? The police, do you want the police to be able to do the job of policing or to be able to take part in counter-insurgency operations? Then, you will see what role you have given to the army, the ones you give to the police. And then you will now know what role to give to Customs, Immigration and other security operators and agencies. We are in a digital world.

How much are you ready to sink into intelligence? When you look at all these across the spectrum, you will be able to say this is the type of forces you want and determine how to equip each group. What equipment do they need? What training do they have? What training do they still require? Today, if you want to increase the number of soldiers by 100 percent, I am sure you can do that within one week.

We have the human beings but we have gone beyond game of numbers and you talked about non-state actors. You must train and you can’t train overnight. You have to decide the type of training and put it into effect. Go and confirm this. When I became the Chief of the Army Staff in 2003, we came up with what we called ‘The Army of the Next Decade’. We started planning it; the documents are there. In 10 years, what type of threat are we going to have? I am one of those who believed then and still hold it today that Nigeria is not going to fight any war with her neighboring countries; Cameroon, Niger, Chad, etc. I didn’t see them having that capacity to do that even when some people say they have foreign supporters. The supporters economically are gaining more from us. Even Nigeria will help them on their economies to stabilize.

Even when the Bakassi Peninsula issue was at its peak, my analysis was a little bit different. So, what type of army do we want and what should be its configuration? I then set up a committee to look into The Army of the Next Decade, the documents are there with the army, the kind of transformation we wanted because the war we were going to fight was very clear, asymmetric warfare; it was not going to be regular warfare. So we had to change completely our doctrine and strategic plans.

Unfortunately, the army did not complete that exercise before we were caught up by Boko Haram and other things that came in. As you know, the army went down at some point before they started coming up to take the challenges because we were not prepared, and, that time, the bulk of the army had been fighting conventional warfare which we have been learning and practicing. And we saw it when we had civil war, it was a conventional warfare.

But now the world has changed. Everywhere you are is a battle field because you don’t know what is in the car parked next to yours; you don’t know what someone driving into a plaza has in his car. So everywhere is a battle field, you have to change the training of your officers to reflect that. Then, you have two things; number and equipment.

So you have to find a compromise when you raise the strength of your military because you also have to raise the strength of your equipment. Unfortunately, the world has become a global village, if you use some of those conventional weapons like 155mm artillery piece to fight in an area where there is insurgency, any damage you do the whole world will term it collateral damage. So, these are some of the challenges facing the military but I think we need go back to the drawing board and ask ourselves, what role do we want the army to play? The army cannot be fighting bunkers, be on the road checking vehicles, going after illegal miners, manning shopping complexes, etc. We must define their role and, if you want them to do all those, you must also build an army to perform them.

Sometime in 2014, just before the 2015 election, mercenaries were brought in to tackle Boko Haram, but change of government stopped the program. Some are suggesting that we go back to that because such mercenaries can be given a target because they are well paid. It is also said such would demoralize the military as it would mean that we don’t have confidence in our military. What is your view?

I was involved in peace keeping. There are those who even believe that peace keeping should be contracted to private army organizations to run. By the time you go to that area, you are acting out of desperation because anything private, the main aim is not for social or humanitarian services; you are commercializing your defense and the lives of human beings. You give a target; all they are interested in is meeting the target and that is why your argument is very important. They will not come in and say “here we are, we are mercenaries from x country or organization”. They are coming under the umbrella of your forces and because they are there for commercial purposes, they will get rid of anything they feel is on their way, even a pregnant woman they feel can spoil their business.

There is no morality and human feeling. I am saying that this country has enough knowledgeable, professionally sound officers, serving and retired, that if called, they will do it. I am happy you mentioned something: you will pay a lot of money to get those mercenaries to do that job. If you spend that amount of money internally, you will get what you want. The problem is that we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t give ourselves target and say if somebody has failed, “oh no you can’t fire that person”, we will start bringing Nigerian factor; religion ethnicity, etc, into it.

If someone is inefficient and you have evidence to prove that such a person is inefficient, remove him. This same Nigeria has successfully helped people in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, all over the world, is it at home that we are not performing? When you ask for what you require by the time you require it and you get it, fine.

If you don’t get it, you cannot blame the person for non-performance. For instance, if a doctor wants to perform surgery on a patient and he is not given the equipment he requires and the patient dies, do you now say that that surgeon is not effective? But if you give him all that he requires and he cannot perform, put him aside. You see there are two sides to internal support. You can bring people that can train your people in-house to perform that task but on the issue of mercenaries, personally, I never supported it both for peace keeping and internal operations. I don’t support it for anything because the principle itself is not what the military is built for. The military is built to protect and defend and these people are here to perform and collect money. That is fire brigade approach because even if you do not train your forces, even if they (mercenaries) successfully do what you want, what happens when they leave? You have created a vacuum again which can be re-filled (by terrorists). I still believe that what we need is to sit down and discuss national defense.

Everybody in Nigeria should be carried along. There is no top secret that we are hiding from Nigerians about our security and defense. When we want to secure this country, we can get enough knowledgeable people across board to sit down and address this issue. Unfortunately, we have too many experts in our country and instead of complementing each other’s efforts, we try to outshine and manoeuvre others and, in the process, we leave empty space for insecurity.

I am happy you mentioned the issue of too many security experts. You also talked about serving and retired generals, which brings us to the issue of politicization. When the Chiefs of the Army Staff from other countries stand side-by-side with our Service Chiefs, they look older with their uniforms usually full of medals won in war and so on, and they are usually more experienced. But in our system there are a lot of embittered and angry well trained and experienced officers who have been pushed out from the armed forces because of the politics of appointments.

When a Chief is to be changed, you pick someone who is two courses down from the current officer in -charge, which means that virtually every officer in the courses above and sometimes even in the course where the appointee is from have to leave, no matter how much the country have spent in their training and their level of experience. So, we have some 40 and 50 years old who are retired at a time they should have been most needed. As a former Army Chief, is this not part of the problem when you talk about capacity, morale in the forces and the development of knowledge to be able to tackle challenges?

Yes. Every organization has its own culture. The military does not operate on its own, it operates under the umbrella of government and we have to look at the laws, our terms and conditions and everything to overcome some of our challenges.

We have our own laws put as terms and conditions of service. For example, by the time you are 60, you are gone, regardless of anything, because that is what the law says and, in some armies, they will tell you that you can go on if you have not attained this rank or acquired this experience; some will even take you back as a retired person to do a job because of the knowledge and skill you have and that is why you see what you are seeing that Service Chiefs from other countries look much older than ours because our own system says you must leave at the age of 60.

So, we have to sit down and decide how we want it to be; national security is a national issue and not an issue for one organization. We have to check if we are on the right track on our security. Do we need to retire our officers at a certain age, regardless of any other thing? Please, I don’t want anybody to feel that I have an interest in what I want to say now.

Go and check, at one time in the US, the government recalled some generals to service; one of them was even made the Chief of the Army. There is nothing wrong in that but the issue here is that until we think about our nation first and then think about our various groups second, some of the issues we are having will continue to be there for some time to come. I said so because if you think about Nigeria as a country, it doesn’t matter where the Army Chief comes from as long as he can perform that role you want him to perform, but if we think that “it is our turn, we have not had it”, that is where we have compromises that everybody would hold dearly regardless of what happens to the country. In a nutshell, I agree to all you said but we can do it if we want to do it, but not until we put national interest above sectional or group interests. This will make the country stronger, but when we continue to place our group interest, first, it will lead to compromise which is part of the causes of the challenges that we are found wanting.

Funding our forces is obviously a challenge coupled with the nation’s economic problem. How does one tackle that issue that can be likened to a moveable object meeting an irresistible force?

I believe that if you have dialogue and you bring in so many people into it, you look at national security as a national issue and national survival is more important than anything, we start getting solution outside the box. But if we want to follow the routine way of doing things, we will continue to have it that way. If we as a country should be able to select a think-tank, let that think-tank sit down and analyse and dissect all our challenges.

These issues cut across parties, they constitute a national problem. There are issues we should agree that they are core issues and treat them as issues pertaining to our survival. You know that our survival is now at the lowest ebb. We need to put our heads together, when this is done, you will be surprised at the result. I saw it when I was the Chief of the Defence Staff and headed a committee to revive DICON in Kaduna. I was surprised that when we had challenges, we went outside this country to get spare parts. 95 percent of the spare parts we wanted were fabricated in this country by Nigerians and, from that day, I developed confidence that task Nigerians properly, give them the right leadership, motivation, target with time limit, they will do it. So, I agree with you that there are challenges but they can be surmounted.

You are the Chairman of the Middle Belt BrainTrust and, in that role, there is an attempt to build peace and bring about security in that area. What have you found to be the key issues and how do we solve them?

The Middle Belt BrainTrust is formed by a group of us from the Middle Belt. This group works with countries that have come out of conflicts or are in conflict and are about coming out of it such as Columbia, Syria, Mexico, Zimbabwe and Lebanon. These are all countries coming out of crisis and there is a feeling that, firstly, we try to find an integrated transition that will move people because some of the transitions we have had are well planned, well intended but they are not integrated because you take one side too far away and leave the other side backward. For example, whatever you do in development and you have no education, the young people that are coming up have no future.

For example, you are lying down on a bed with a mosquito net that trapped one or two mosquitoes. Those mosquitoes trapped will disturb you to the extent that you will not be able to have a comfortable night. BrainTrust is made up of people from different backgrounds, no religious issues because we have both Muslims and Christians as members.

It has nothing to do with a specific trade because we have lawyers, doctors, engineers, politicians, those still in public service and those who have retired. It is just a group of people who said “we want to find a different way and the narrative is very simple; what you give to the people and how people visualize issues”. We are now working under that umbrella body to find how we can start. We are starting with Nasarawa State, we are grateful to the governor and the people of the state who are willing to work with us.

We will work with them on the major challenges they have. We sit down with them. Before then, we carry out research; our researchers go to the field to explore the real facts because some of these things we take from the top, the man at the bottom, that is not his concern. So when you bring the problems of the grassroots through research we will know what their real concern is and how they feel. For instance the herders/farmers, how they feel about each other and what can they do?

You will be surprised when you hear their wonderful recommendations and suggestions because they are directly involved. We hope and this is why we are working so hard to ensure that we create an impact and working with Nasarawa State government to see how much we can bring some positive changes that the government would see, other people would see and then we can work together to find out that we can do it in small bits. It is just a drop of water that once any drop drops, the more area you cover, in the long run, it has to be resemblance of peace.