Dear Ken:
It's so easy to fall for propaganda. Yes, the Nigerian military can't fight because the government and the army stole the money meant for procurement. However, it's much more complicated than that. For one much more nuanced perspective, please see the paper abstract below, and get the full gist by clicking on the URL provided for the rest of the paper.
Peace as always!
Okey
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Okey C. Iheduru, "Social Transformation and Military Leadership: The Nigerian Army and Fourth Generation Wars" in Ebenezer Obadare and Wale Adebanwi, eds., Governance and the Crisis of Rule in Contemporary Africa: Leadership in Transformation (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015), pp. 235-264.
Abstract:
Whereas the role of the military in African politics continues to receive wide attention, the internal leadership process of the armed forces has practically become an analytic black hole. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna by using the Nigerian Army (NA) as a case study of "context specific leadership events" as a framework to understand the conditions under which leadership is produced, and how those conditions shape their leadership paths. The most important context-specific event in the Fourth Republic (1999-present) has been the series of efforts to "transform," re-professionalize, and "re-invent the military as a political actor" for democratic stability after 29 years of military dictatorship. These efforts culminated in the adoption and implementation of a "Nigerian Army Transformation Agenda" from October 2010 until 14 January 2014 that sought "To transform the Nigerian Army into a force better able to meet contemporary challenges." The "transformation" agenda, however, coincided with and was truncated by the emergence of the Boko Haram Islamist terrorist insurgency whose battlefield successes have cast serious doubt on the organizational effectiveness and combat readiness of Nigeria's armed forces in a changed asymmetric war environment or "Fourth Generation wars." Extant studies of civil-military relations and security sector reforms assume that civilian leaders will prioritize control over the military or even actively participate in, or structure, the military's concept of transformation. In Nigeria, those attempts were largely cosmetic and lacked civilian control and guidance to the military to truly eradicate old habits of human rights abuses, corruption, nepotism, deterioration of professionalism, and the privileging of organizational and individual material interests. In this vacuum, the NA designed and implemented a narrowly defined "Nigerian army transformation agenda" (NATA) from 2010 until 14 January 2014. Although it led to laudable changes within the NA, the "transformation" merely addressed the symptoms rather than the real problems and sources of institutional decay, and thus failed to prepare the NA to respond to the biggest security threat Nigeria has faced since the end of the civil war in 1970. The resultant inability to defeat the insurgency by a once revered army exemplifies the limits of contemporary leadership in Africa's conventional armed forces. Several factors — the cascading effects of failed or incomplete transformation; the impediments created by entrenched military organizational interests; the politicization of the military and insertion of its leadership into the crossfire of Nigeria's ever-widening fault lines in the run-up to the 2015 presidential elections; the ambivalence of African rulers and their foreign partners about enhancing the capacity of African armies; inter-service rivalry and institutionalized corruption; and the increasing realization that Fourth Generation wars are becoming un-winnable — all help explain the paradox of a transformative leadership and the failure or ineffectiveness of institutional response to threats to stability and national security.
Read the rest of the paper at: SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2592798
On Tue, May 3, 2016 at 4:54 AM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
the govt stole the money for army procurements
http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-36155883
--
kenneth w. harrow
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu
--
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