The Federal Government has called for a complete overhaul of military tactics to tackle the country’s worsening insecurity. FG recently revealed that Nigeria needs the overhaul more than it needs a security summit right now.
Speaking during the ministerial briefing in Abuja, the Minister of Defence, Mohammed Badaru, said that he doesn’t understand the relevance of the Senate’s proposed national security summit, when there is a clear need for a different strategy right now.
According to him, while the summit will help bring people together to discuss the problem, formulating a strategy that will proffer solutions to our insecurity issues is more pressing at this point in time.
“On the summit, yes, strategy is far more important than summit. But summit will give you some inputs for the strategy. When you hold a summit, you have people, they talk. We take what they expect, and we go back to design or renew our strategy.
And then the chief of Defence staff gives operational orders based on the strategy they developed. So what the National Assembly is trying to do may be to bring people together to discuss issues.
I visited most of the past defense ministers. I visited most of the past service chiefs to discuss issues of security during their time and what we see today and how we do. And I’m sure the service chiefs also did the same.
So, the summit can help, but the strategy is much more important,” he said.
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Mohammed also disagreed with the idea that terrorists across the country are in possession of better firepower compared to the Nigerian military, insisting that the country’s armed forces are well equipped.
Insisting that Nigerian soldiers definitely have more sophisticated weapons than the terrorists they are tasked to get rid of, Badaru said the war has only been difficult because the enemy has informants around us.
“Yesterday, the House of Assembly said that the terrorists have better weapons than us.
That is absolutely not true. That is absolutely not true. We have much more sophisticated weapons and we have much more sophisticated drones.
The issue is, this war is not a conventional war. It’s like a guerrilla war. They watch us, they have informant around us .
They help the people that we try to protect. And they give them information. And they jump at us the way we don’t expect.
So, they don’t have more equipment than us. We have much more. We have much more sophisticated equipment,” he added.
