Osita Chidoka, a former minister of aviation, claimed that terrorists in Nigeria are stepping up their attacks on the government because they are aware that the nation is in financial trouble.
On Friday, Chidoka said this while speaking on Channels Television on the security situation in Nigeria.
“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.”
Additionally, he asserted that the military has no place being involved in the nation's internal security because they lack the necessary training to carry out law enforcement.
According to Chidoka, the military's presence made it clear that the nation's enforcement apparatus was ineffective.
“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 noted that Colombians had to create a specialised army to handle their own insurgency and claimed that history had demonstrated that the military was not designed for operations involving internal security.
To gain the best outcomes from their efforts, he demanded that the president improve his oversight of the service chiefs.