The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, has narrated how former Nigerian rulers, including former President Olusegun Obasanjo, destroyed the Nigerian Army.
He said before President Muhammadu Buhari appeared on the scene, Nigeria already had “an Army of anything goes”.
Adesina said these and more in his weekly Friday column, titled: “No longer ‘an Army of anything goes.’”
In the article published elsewhere on this platform, the presidential spokesman said Obasanjo; former Military President, himself a former Chief of Army Staff; and late General Sani Abacha among others destroyed the Nigerian Army.
Adesina, who listed some of the moves that Buhari had made to revive the Nigerian Army, said: “But by the time Ibrahim spoke in 1993, the pepper soup was almost no longer there. General Ibrahim Babangida, incidentally a former Chief of Army Staff himself, had rendered the institution prostrate and comatose so much so that it was almost not able to shoot firecrackers again, not to talk of guns, light or heavy.
“What Babangida started was consummated by Sani Abacha and Olusegun Obasanjo, two other Generals of the Nigerian Army. It became truly ‘anything goes’ to the disquietude and sorrow of some officers trained in the finest traditions of the military.
“The situation was not radically better under subsequent Presidents until that thoroughbred soldier, an officer and gentleman from Daura came. It is said that you cannot likely effect change in a system unless you were sufficiently vexed with the inadequacies of that system. Muhammadu Buhari did not do any other thing after school other than soldiering. So he knew the Nigerian Army in its days of glory, and he also saw when it had degenerated into ‘an army of anything goes.’”
The article, titled: “No longer ‘an Army of anything goes.’” Is published elsewhere on this news website.
