Troops can do with better weapons says soldier

Nigerian soldiers are poorly paid, badly equipped and in no shape to take on Boko Haram insurgents rampaging in a great swathe of the country’s Northeast, one of the soldiers told Sky news in a sensational interview broadcast this morning.

“We are trying our best. The civilians do not know what weapons the authorities give us to fight Boko Haram,” said the soldier whose identity was masked for his own safety.

“We are given only AK 47 and they give us only two magazines. We need more powerful weapons that we can use before the ammunition will finish,” he added saying much of the weapon they are given do not work.

A Skynews team said it found only few soldiers on the ground despite repeated assurances that thousands of troops have been deployed to the area in the aftermath of the sensational kidnap of more than 200 school girls from Chibok while they slept in their boarding house.

Villagers in Borno state who bear the greatest brunt of the insurgency say they are frustrated by what appears to be a reluctance of the soldiers to fight.

“What can we do?” one asked. We cannot defend ourselves. The soldiers who are supposed to defend us they army seem reluctant to take them (Boko Haram) on, so what can we do,” said Ali Hassan, a villager who spoke to Sky news in a village near Chibok.

 

Two decades of Nigeria’s military was seen as a force of stability across the continent but now it struggles to keep security within its own borders as the Islamic insurgency kills thousands.

 

A lack of investment in training, failure to maintain equipment and dwindling co-operation with Western forces has damaged Nigeria’s armed services, while in Boko Haram they face an increasingly well-armed, determined foe.

A foe that abducted more than 200 secondary school girls in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, nearly a month ago. The military still appears to have no idea exactly where they are, but denies it lacks the capacity to get them back.

President Goodluck Jonathan has said that Boko Haram has “infiltrated … the armed forces and police”, sometimes giving the militants a headstart, but the problems go much deeper.

“The Nigerian military is a shadow of what it’s reputed to have once been,” said James Hall, a retired colonel and former British military attache to Nigeria. “They’ve fallen apart.”

Unlike Nigerian peacekeepers in the 1990s, who were effective in curbing ethnic bloodshed in Sierra Leone and Liberia, those in Mali last year lacked the equipment and training needed to be of much use in the fight against al Qaeda-linked forces, sources involved in that mission say.

Col Hall said the Nigerian peacekeepers had to buy pick-up trucks and their armour kept breaking down. They spent a lot of time on base or manning checkpoints.