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 A lack of investment in training, failure to maintain equipment
and dwindling cooperation 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 attaché 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.
 Hall said the Nigerian peacekeepers had to buy pick-up trucks and
their armor kept breaking down. They spent a lot of time on base or
manning checkpoints.
Military education is still taken very seriously, he said, but
equipment and training to use it have been neglected, with radio
equipment in particularly short supply.
Army spokesman Brigadier-General Olajide Laleye recognized some of
these problems in a news conference on Tuesday. He said the army
would "undertake an equipment audit ... with a view to identifying
areas where equipment and material are in short supply,
unserviceable or even obsolete".
The defense headquarters did not respond to a request for comment,
but the military argues that counter-insurgency is something new
that they are slowly learning to take on, just as the U.S. military
had to learn they couldn't fight al Qaeda in western Iraq using
conventional warfare.
"They're having to learn new counter-insurgency skills and get new
equipment ... like armored vehicles," said Kayode Akindele of 46
Parallels, a Lagos-based investment management firm that also
consults on financial, political and security risks for foreign
investors.
The militants know the military's limitations. A police source said
a fighter jet flew over the market town of Gamburu on Monday as a
group of gunmen killed at least 125, but the killers didn't flinch,
knowing they could not be targeted while scattered in a densely
populated area.
President Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the northeast a
year ago, ordering extra troops, but security sources say the armed
forces remain overstretched. Perhaps as few as 25,000 service-ready
troops face an insurgency over a wide area in the northeast,
communal violence across north and central Nigeria and rampant oil
theft in the south, as well as commitments to peacekeeping missions,
one security source says.
LOW MORALE
Morale is also a problem, says a ground soldier deployed in the
northeast who did not wish to be named.
He said the food was bad, sleeping conditions rough, very few people
get the leave to which they are entitled, and they live in constant
fear of Boko Haram attacks.
"There is just a kind of hopelessness hanging over us," he said.
 Not so their adversaries, whose fearless determination is fuelled by
dreams of jihadist martyrdom.
"In a typical unit, Boko Haram has between 300 and 500 fighters.
It's not a guerrilla force that you can fight half heartedly," said
Jacob Zenn, a Boko Haram expert at U.S. counter-terrorism
institution CTC Sentinel. "It's snowballing. It's getting more
weapons, more recruits, their power is increasing every day."
On February 12 dozens of fighters loyal to Boko Haram attacked a
remote military outpost in the Gwoza hills. A security source with
knowledge of the assault said they came in Hilux tracks with mounted
machine guns and showered the camp with gunfire.
Boko Haram's fighters had little cover and were easily picked off -
50 of them died against nine Nigerian troops - but they still
managed to make off with the base's entire armory stockpile of 200
mortar bombs, 50 rocket-propelled grenades and hundreds of rounds of
ammunition, the source said.
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Their ability to dart over the border into Cameroon, whose own
security forces have shown little appetite for taking them on, gives
the militants an added advantage.
Ethnic and religious divisions within the military have also bred
some collusion with Boko Haram, sources say. An artillery soldier
said units were sometimes suspiciously ambushed. He is convinced
"someone in command leaks our plans to terrorists". "The military,
just like the rest of Nigeria, is fractured, which means it probably
does have Boko Haram sympathizers within it," former U.S. Ambassador
John Campbell said.
The military isn't that short of money on paper. In 2014 security
will swallow nearly 938 billion naira ($5.8 billion), a quarter of
the federal budget. Of that, the defense ministry will take more
than a third, but only 10 percent is for capital spending.
A government advisor says there was some evidence a few senior
officers were pocketing money meant for equipment, so corruption may
also be a factor in the shortfalls.
A senior security official, who declined to be identified, said the
process of decline in the military has been gradual, starting when
the military seized power in the 1960s.
He said Britain, France and the United States had been Nigeria's
main military assistance partners, but they gradually backed off
from its increasingly quirky and corrupt military dictators,
culminating with the venal Sani Abacha in the 1990s.
In the 21st century, Nigeria, now democratic, can be prickly about
meeting conditions on military assistance packages, Western
diplomats and military officials say, such as giving Western
trainers full access to its bases, intelligence sharing and
improving its human rights record.
 "The human rights issue has been a point of friction for a long
time," said one U.S. military official, speaking on condition of
anonymity.
The military has repeatedly denied allegations of abuses such as
summary executions, but Amnesty International condemned the alleged
killing of hundreds of prisoners escaping from Giwa barracks last
month. The military said it had no choice but to prevent their
escape.
Foreign aid aside, decades of coups made unstable military regimes
fear their own armed forces. Each coup plot led to a deliberate
under-resourcing of any department under suspicion.
A botched 1985 counter-coup against newly installed Ibrahim
Babangida was rumored to involve planned aerial bombardments, so his
junta cut funds to the air force, a security official who remembers
the time says. Another failed coup in 1990 allegedly involved
military police, so their budget was squeezed.
When democracy returned in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo,
himself a former military ruler, feared the army, too.
"This starvation of the military has occurred since Obasanjo, as
part of a strategy to ensure they couldn't conduct more coups,"
Campbell said.
Now, as families in Chibok pray for the return of their kidnapped
daughters, some fear it may be beyond their armed forces to get them
back, and welcome promises of assistance from China, Britain, the
United States and France.
"We don't believe there is a serious effort at a rescue," said Lawan
Abana, whose two nieces are among the abductees. "The Americans and
the others are our last hope."
($1 = 161.8500 naira)
(Additional reporting by Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg, Camillus
Eboh and Isaac Abrak in Abuja and Phillip Stewart in Washington;
Editing by Will Waterman)
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