The Nigerian military has denounced the version of a meeting given by the Senate President’s office when the service chiefs met with the Senate leadership on Wednesday behind closed doors.
The service chiefs led by Chief of Defence Staff, General Abayomi Olonishakin, had mid-week met with Senate President Bukola Saraki and other leaders of the red chamber.
After the meeting, Mr. Saraki’s spokesperson, Yusuph Olaniyonu, issued a press statement, saying that the service chiefs briefed the senators on “various challenges faced by the military, particularly the state of their equipment which they said required serious upgrading and restocking”.
The statement disclosed that the service chiefs also lamented that their operations had been hampered following the non-release of their vote in the 2015 supplementary budget.
“Other issues that came up for discussion was the need to continuously increase the personnel in the three branches of the military and the hindrance posed by the procurement process which they said is very slow”, Mr. Olaniyonu said.
Refuting this account of what transpired at the meeting, the Defence Headquarters in a statement signed by its spokesperson, Brig.-Gen. Rabe Abubakar, on Friday, said “As far as the military is concerned, Boko Haram insurgency is within the ambit of what the Nigerian Armed Forces can handle”.
The statement read, “The story which claimed that Service Chiefs decried inadequate equipment and non-release of 2015 military votes as the reason of continued insurgency is equally scurrilous and calculated to diminish the armed forces. The story is false and far from what happened when the service chiefs visited the leadership of the senate.
“But for avoidance of doubt, the visit of the military leadership to the senate president was purely a closed-door meeting aimed at intimating the senate about the level of successes recorded in the onslaught against Boko Haram and to assure the National Assembly and all Nigerians that the military is winning and will soon see the end of this menace called Boko Haram”.
Brig.-Gen. Abubakar added that newspaper captions, following Mr. Olaniyonu’s account, “are inappropriate and misleading designed to further confuse the general public about the situation in the North East”.
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