By  Thomas Adegoke
A few weeks ago, media reports claimed that President Muhamadu Buhari directed further investigation into the arms procurement for the Army and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) from 2007 to 2015. The presidential directive followed the “Third Interim Report of the Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement” which indicted quite a number of serving and retired senior officers of the Army. Amongst those indicted by the arms probe report is Lt. Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika (rtd), the Chief of Army Staff from 2010 to 2013.
According to the highlights of the arms probe report, “the process of award, procurement and payments” during the time of Ihejirika as Chief of Army Staff “was very unprofessional and unethical”. The report also claimed that most of the contracts for arms procurement in the period under review were “characterized by lack of due process and due diligence, in breach of extant procurement regulations and tainted by corrupt practices”. However, unlike in the case of the former service chiefs in the Air Force, no humongous sums of money could be traced to Ihejirika’s bank accounts as having been parceled out regularly to him as Chief of Army staff, perhaps to the consternation of members of the arms probe committee.
All the same, in order to do justice to this matter, let us, first of all, make a very important point here. The Chief of Army Staff only approves contracts for procurement and also authorizes payment for jobs done. He is not the Chief of Logistics who issues a “Certificate of Completion” indicating that a contract has been effectively and satisfactorily executed. He is also not the Director of Procurement at Defence Headquarters who undertakes the purchase of arms for the military. He is equally not the head of the accounts department whose duty is to ensure that Withholding Tax (WHT) is deducted from the financial records on contracts before payments are made for jobs done. In other words, the Chief of Army Staff can only be liable when a technical assessment report indicates that arms recommended for purchase by him failed to meet required standards for military weapons’ system or suffered serious technical defects during combat with the enemy or military operations. When the arms probe report indicted Ihejirika because “prior to the contract awarded to China North Industries for the procurement of arms and ammunition”, he “led a delegation of officers (who were not specialists on arms and ammunition) to China, where he personally selected arms and ammunition without due diligence”, it is clear that the committee was out to play mischief. Pray, how could an investigative report pretending to be out for the truth indict Ihejirika for personally inspecting arms for purchase for the army at a time the reluctance of our traditional  arms suppliers from the West (America and Europe) to sell weapons to us, made it imperative that military contracts must be awarded without “due diligence”? As a matter of  fact, what, in the name of good judgment, would members of the committee have said of Ihejirika if, in the course of following “due process” or “due diligence”, in the award of contracts for the purchase of arms in a war situation, the Boko Haram insurgents over-ran most of Northern Nigeria?
In any case, in what context or circumstance will a Chief of Army Staff be said not to be an expert or specialist on arms and ammunition as the arms probe committee would want the world to believe in the case of Ihejirika? Nigerians, we are talking about an Ihejirika whose knowledge of the makeup and expertise in the usage of weapons is extraordinary, as could be attested to by his sterling performance in all the military courses (theory and practice) he undertook while in active service. Now, if Ihejirika, who is an acknowledged guru in the nature and structure of the weapons’ system that determines the way it operates, is not an expert or specialist on arms and ammunition, who then is? The truth is that is the arms probe report under review is simply a clear case of trying to give Ihejirika a bad name in order to hang him.
It is even sad that in an almost demonic desperation to indict Ihejirika, the arms probe committee claimed that the process deployed in the payment for the arms purchased for the army in China was fraudulent even when Nigeria did not occasion any financial loss in the engagement. How the arms probe committee came to this absurd conclusion beggars belief. As I write, there is no evidence that the Ministry of Finance queried or frowned at the idea that “all fund transfers were made through Westgate Global Trust Ltd instead of CBN to the then Defence Attache (DA) Beijing, China, who then credited China North Industries”, in one of the transactions by Ihejirika as claimed by the arms probe report. There is also no evidence that this process of payment led to a shortfall in the amount received by the China North Industries or that part of the funds for this particular arms purchase was diverted to Ihejirika’s bank accounts. If we go by our experience in South Africa where a private jet ferrying about 9 million US Dollars for the purchase of arms for the military was seized, what the arms probe committee would have done is to applaud Ihejirika for using his dexterity and wisdom to buy arms for our soldiers from China without any hassles or acts that were embarrassing to the image of Nigeria.
The point needs to be emphasized here that unusual circumstances elicit unusual strategies to get things going in order to achieve set objectives.
At the time Ihejirika was Chief of Army Staff, only a deluded mind would insist that contracts for military procurements must follow “due process” and “due diligence” when the Boko Haram insurgents were almost succeeding in setting up their “caliphate” on Nigerian territory. Similarly, only a committee out to play mischief and demonize Ihejirika in the process would recommend him to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for further investigations after purchasing well-heeled military machines and weapons that he used in dealing a death-blow to the Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East geo-political zone of the country.

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*Dr. Adegoke writes from Abuja