Chief of the Air Staff, Air Mashal Sadique Abubakar has charged 1,558 new recruits to respect and protect the innocent and law-abiding civilians whom they are paid to defend.
Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the NAF Basic Military Training Course (BMTC) 39/2018 over the weekend in Kaduna, the CAS further instructed recruits to treat citizens with respect saying, by so doing, they will be discharging their professional and constitutional duties.
According to the CAS, “One of the prerequisites for the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) to continually meet the imperatives of its constitutional roles is an adequate strength of vibrant manpower.
“To this end, as part of the ongoing process of building and sustaining the necessary human resource base to meet national security imperatives, the NAF has trained a total of 7,244 young Nigerians as airmen/airwomen and 400 young graduates as officers since assumption of office of the current NAF leadership in July 2015.”
The effort, he said, is aimed at boosting the capacity of the Service to sufficiently curtail insecurity in the country while also implicitly keying into the Federal Government policy of job creation for young Nigerians.
While charging the new airmen/airwomen to be resilient, tough, courageous and apolitical in the performance of their duties, Air Marshal Abubakar stated that the six months training was deliberately structured to be rigorous in order to expose them to near real-life scenarios of what the nation expects from them after graduation.
