A former aviation minister, Osita Chidoka, has said terrorists in Nigeria are aware that the country is broke, saying that is why they are intensifying attacks on the government.
Chidoka disclosed this while discussing the security situation in Nigeria on Channels Television on Friday.
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“The fact is Nigeria is in a complex and complicated situation now. The complicated situation is worsened by economic problem.
“This is the root of the problem in Nigeria. They [Federal Government] can not raise the funding to continue to carry out operations in the Northwest and Northeast.
“If you can not control the oil theft in the Niger Delta, I mean in the last three months, NNPC has come with the fact that they don’t have any money to pay [the federal government]. They said ‘we don’t have any money because we are using it for subsidy’.
“There is no way the institutions of government could be well funded, absolutely no way because the government is not receiving any revenue.
“The fact that we are borrowing from the Central Bank, the fact that we are printing currency and we are finding ways and means to fund our budget is already a red flag.
“The terrorists know that the Nigerian state is at its weakest level, it has no revenue, it has no monopoly of violence, it has no unity behind it, it has no national consensus supporting it.
“That, for me, is the biggest problem that Nigeria is facing. The terror organisations now have RPGs, they now have anti-aircraft, they have sophisticated weapons and they know that the Nigerian state is on its knees. The Nigerian state is now fully comatose.”
He also said the military has no business participating in the internal security of the country, saying military personnel are not trained to do law enforcement.
Chidoka said, with the deployment of the military, it was obvious the policing system in the country had failed.
“In the last seven years, nobody has made effort to rehabilitate the Mobile Police Force into a competent fighting force that we can use for internal security,” he added.
The former minister said history had shown that the military was not made for operations bordering on internal security, recalling that the Colombians had to form a specialised force to deal with its own insurrection.
He called for better supervision of the service chiefs by the president in order to get the best results from their activities.
