ON the back of security threats, especially the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency, Nigeria has consistently ploughed vast resources into defence spending in the past decade. The outcome has been chiefly underwhelming. Despite billions of dollars being appropriated to beef up the capabilities of the Armed Forces from the Goodluck Jonathan era up till the moment, Boko Haram is still a menacing force. Additionally, banditry and kidnapping for ransom have assumed a frightening dimension in the North, spreading southward since the President, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), won office in 2015. This is a double jeopardy: insecurity is increasing amid more funding. Therefore, there is a fundamental problem seething beneath the surface.
Undeniably, military budgeting has taken precedence in Nigeria. The pretext is that more funding is required to combat the insurgency. Ordinarily, that is a good idea. Nigeria is not alone in upgrading its military capabilities. Last November, British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced £16.5 billion in additional funding for shipbuilding, space, cyber, research and other sectors over a four-year period. Amid tensions between Europe and Russia, Sweden has increased its military spending by $3 billion annually from 2021 to 2025. This will boost the size of its military from 60,000 to 90,000 troops. It is in line with the NATO Wales Summit 2014 that recommended that 2.0 percent of GDP be devoted to military spending.
For years, Nigeria has towed a similar path. In the 2021 Appropriation Act, the Ministry of Defence received an allocation of N840.56 billion, far more than any other sector. In 2020, the MoD received N878 billion. According to World Bank data, the ministry was allocated $2.04 billion in 2018, a 26.02 percent increase from 2017. In 2019, Nigeria allocated 1.9 percent of total spending to its defence budget, the Bank stated. Under Jonathan, defence spending steadied around the N1 trillion mark annually. The Senate Committee on Defence said that N27 billion and N28 billion were allocated to capital in the 2021 and 2020 defence budgets, respectively. This means recurrent takes preference over the acquisition of equipment.
Apart from this, the National Assembly approved $1 billion to buy arms under the Jonathan administration. Within this period, the Ministry of Finance released $300 million and £5.5 million to the then National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, to “procure ammunition, security and other intelligence equipment for the security agencies to enable them fight the war against Boko Haram.” In 2018, Buhari approved another $1 billion to buy arms to fight the insurgency.
Where has all this money gone in the face of the upsurge in criminality? Transparency International UK says defence continues to be one of the most opaque and corruption-prone sectors, and defence budgets across the world continue to be an area in which unjustified secrecy often prevails, to the detriment of both national and international security. But corruption in defence spending drains scarce resources, reduces operational effectiveness and erodes public trust in the armed forces and the security services.
Before he recanted, the current NSA, Babagana Monguno, alleged that the military could not account for the funds it received to buy arms during the tenure of the immediate past Service Chiefs. A new report by an NGO, the Human and Environmental Development Agenda, alleges that 13 security chiefs (and others) stole $400 million, owning 216 of the 800 properties traced to Nigerians from such outflow in the United Arab Emirates. Since 2015, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has been prosecuting Dasuki for allegedly diverting $2.1 billion arms meant for arms procurement to fund the then ruling party ahead of the 2015 elections. In 2020, an army divisional commander was tried for moving N400 million cash from his base in Sokoto to Abuja by road.
The inconvenient truth is that military spending in Nigeria is murky. Despite the rise in defence spending, there has been a geometric rise in criminality. In 2014, Nigerians were jolted to this reality when the government bypassed the official channels to buy arms with a cash of $9.3 million. The South African authorities promptly impounded the cash. The EFCC is prosecuting some former Air Force chiefs for embezzling part of the personnel costs running into billions of naira. Repeatedly, there have been complaints from the frontlines of Boko Haram possessing more firepower than the Nigerian military.
To its credit, the Buhari regime made an early impact in 2015 by recovering the local government areas under Boko Haram annexation. That initial progress has faded. These days, it is the Islamists and the bandits that have seized control of the North-East and North-West, respectively.
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To disabuse the notion of inflated military spending, corruption and politics interfering with professionalism, the Buhari regime should publicly account for the allocations to the military. If it does, it is not doing the citizens any favour. In a democracy, the citizens have a right to this. It is the standard practice in all Western democracies.
Another key step is for the regime to win the trust of the citizens through timely account rendering. Currently, the public is in the dark over the welfare of the troops on the frontline. How are they remunerated and what is the length of their tour duty in the battlefront? This should be addressed now that new Service Chiefs are in place.
What of the casualty figures in the Boko Haram war? It is hardly stated publicly, but there is adequate information on this in the West. Data from the NGO, Action on Armed Violence, states that a total of 626 United Kingdom military personnel were killed on overseas operations between September 2001 and March 2014, out of 220,550 deployed soldiers, representing 2.8 fatalities for every 100,000. The UK government said 2009 was the deadliest year for its troops in Afghanistan after 105 deaths that year. In Nigeria, such information is hard to come by.
Ultimately, military procurement should be sanitised and those culpable of looting the approved funds should be prosecuted and punished. The NASS should be more diligent in its oversight functions on military spending.
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