by Dare Adekanmbi
July 2, 2023
Major General Anthony Atolagbe joined the army in 1983 and retired in 2021. Before retiring, he held various top positions including being Director, Peace-keeping operations and Commander of Operations Safe Haven. He speaks exclusively with the Deputy Editor (Politics), DARE ADEKANMBI, about his retirement, the controversy over his reposting from Jos, Plateau State, to Defence Headquarters, advises the new military service chiefs on the war against terrorism, among others.
*Generals, they say, don’t retire. How has been life after retirement?*
I have always prepared for retirement because I know that the day will surely come. All I needed to do to prevent myself from suffering any form of setback or getting worried was to ensure that after service, I must be employable or I must be able to provide services that will be sought after. So, I decided to return to school. Any opportunity I had, I just logged on find a school around where I am and get one or two things to learn. This has really broadened my horizon and helped me in so many ways. Since I retired, I have not been sitting at home.
*Some people will say your retirement was premature. Is that correct?*
It was not premature. It was only perceived that way. No press man has ever called me to find out anything. Most of the things that have been written about me in the dailies and others are based on assumptions. Even if they wanted to do a research, they did not do it very well. I hit the required age for retirement, even though I may look fresh. That one is just out of my own personal endeavour to keep fit. I do a lot of sports. So, generally when people look at me, they think I am young. But I am not young. I am almost hitting 60 in a couple of years. I actually left the service at the appropriate and scheduled time.
*You joined the service in July of 198*…
That was true.
*You retired before the right age*…
Well, we don’t need to drag on this one. The issue was that there was an adjustment to the terms and conditions of service (TACOS) and they drew a line between some set of officers to be retired. The new TACOS was to start with juniour courses, while the other courses were not to benefit in the new one. People are retiring at 60 now, but mine was at 56. So, there were some senior courses that were not captured in it and it was written down clearly in the new condition of service.
*Did your retirement have anything to do with the issue that led to your being reposted out of Jos?*
That movement became a controversial matter in the public space. Some said it was because you paraded some killers suspected to be from a certain ethnic group and refused to let them be taken to Abuja to the chagrin of the immediate past president government.
Again, that is another misinformation and please for avoidance of doubt no group was targeted, I was only doing the right thing. Nobody spoke to me till today about the matter to ask questions. So, I just sit back and laugh at the quality of work that people are producing, including the pressmen,bloggers and the rest. How can you make a report about someone and you never had even one minute conversation with the person? The person I took over from spent one year in the location. I had also completed one year at that time. The incident happened in May and I would not have been allowed to remain till July if anything like that happened. So, they are just misinforming the public. People should not do things based on assumptions or facts that are not verified and stop hating.
*President Bola Tinubu appointed new service chiefs recently and the decision has been widely commended as a starting point to the re-strategising on the war against terrorism. What do you make of this?*
At the level of government, I believe most of the things they do are guided by law, especially for those who have respect for law. I believe the president must have consulted widely including the constitution and the terms and conditions of service before taking the decision. What am I saying? There are provisions in the terms and conditions of service on the number of years the service chiefs are supposed to spend in office. If you get a copy of the latest TACOS, you will see the provisions there.
*Is it the two years we know?*
Yes. But the president has the power to give them an extension of one year and if he intends to have another set of people in charge, he can do so.
*What can you say about the new chiefs? I am sure they were your juniors when you were in service.*
Yes, they were my juniors. Some of them served with me and when I was directing staff in the Staff College, they were our students. The General heading the army was directing staff when I was chief instructor at the Armed Forces Command and Staff College. So, I have been meeting them in the areas of assessing their capacities as well as work. So, I worked with the Chief of Army Staff [Major General Lagbaja] briefly at the 81 Divisin headquarters in Lagos. He is a very hardworking person. I can also say the same for others. Their pedigree must have spoken for them to have been selected. There are other considerations that the people in authority must also have considered. Some of them are in the public space and have also earned the government the commendation it is receiving. So, to some extent, I think we will get some positive and improved results from them.
*Nigeria’s military is regarded as one of the best in the world. Our men are selected for peace keeping operations in parts of Africa and the world. Why then is it difficult for them to end terrorism in the country after more than a decade of fighting terrorists? What do you think the country or its military is not doing right in this area?*
Terrorism is not a basket ball or a football game and you will see that even around the world. Terrorism is not peculiar to Nigeria. The inability to reduce it to zero per cent is also not peculiar to Nigeria. Let the pubic be first of all aware of some of the things that are associated with terrorism and the fight against it. If you talk about our involvement in peace-keeping operations, I am lucky to have been in such operations about eight times. So, I can speak conveniently about our involvement outside the country. Nigerians are sought after to hold some key appointments in peace keeping missions outside Nigeria. Some of us were deployed for such operations various and good capacities because of our competence and our display of intellect when we go outside. I can tell you a good number of our officers are well trained and are professionally competent.
Regarding terrorism within the country, there are so many factors that are responsible. Terrorism has an aspect of guerilla warfare and it is not like the conventional warfare which is what we were trained in. Terrorism is a sort of operation that a group of people can just deliver terror in small groups, like carrying a bomb in your body and bringing a whole building down. Even in advanced countries, you will see somebody will just hold a gun and walk in to a concert and bring about 50 or more down people down. Those are the kind of things were experiencing in the country. The troops needed time to start getting trained along those lines and get used to that kind of operations. A lot of personnel were taken outside the country to places like Belarus, South Africa and other places for training on special operations of that nature. And then, we did not have the required assets, both air assets and other military assets that we require to deliver the required punch.
But thanks to the last government that made procurements for some fighter aircrafts I like to put them, which have changed the face of the warfare. I am aware that the insurgents have been severely degraded and they are disorientated right now, even though we still hear about some pockets of attacks in some isolated places. What the people in the theatres need to do is to continue to contain the attacks. Stop the terrorists before they strike. That is, being proactive. Get the necessary intelligence that they require and then ensure they do a lot of force protection on their own personnel so that they can reduce own casualties.
Like I advised sometime ago, when they finish clearing a particular area they should not leave the place empty. They should do an assessment of the level of threats and own capacity required in such a place and deploy people there accordingly. If it is military and mobile policemen or counter-terror police they need to put there, let them put them there. If it is the regular policemen they want to put, let them do so. Where they think it is only military men that need to fight in that environment, let them put them there. But they should not leave any space unprotected and perhaps assume the place has been cleared and nobody will come there again. The terrorists don’t have a home or a base. They just appear anywhere to deliver destruction and terror.
*Some people are of the view that insurgency is taking too much time to quell because of corruption among the top military brass, especially when it comes to arms procurement and so on. These military chiefs have made an industry of the war against insurgency allegedly.*
I don’t have any information to confirm any of those. It is just in the news. I have not seen anybody that has been taken to court. So, where people just put their information in the air, they should come out and back it up with facts. If they find anybody culpable, let them get such a person. But if there is nobody that has been brought before any court of law, I don’t think it is right to just continue saying what is not verified. Some officers are in courts but they don’t represent the face of the Armed Forces of Nigeria.
*Is the military under-staffed? We heard of stories of some soldiers deserting from the auxiliary and resigning from the military in large numbers under the immediate past government*…
That information about people resigning in large numbers, I did not witness it. Some of these things are just a result of speaking to a few people and then putting up stories from that, let them always dig in to the roots. The information needed to have been verified from the various services concerned before people just want to sell their tabloids and things like that.
Concerning the second leg of the question, there is what we call military capability study which allows for an evaluation of all forces that are available to you.
Something of that nature under a different name was done recently but where is the document and are there resources to implement . The military capability study will evaluate what is the threat that is there? What is the capability of you being able to contain the threat? This will take you down to the right kind of personnel and equipment to deploy. Would you likely engage more specially trained officers like special forces? When you do that kind of review, it will tell you whether you need special forces more in the future operations because it will take care of both the contemporary and future plans. Then you will now be able to say if it goes along this line, I will need to recruit more hands. So, except that kind of things is done, people should not just sit down and say we don’t have enough men. It may be true that we don’t have the spread across the places they are operating. But it may not translate to not having enough men. If you have some people who are having as many as 10 aides in their houses, how do you say the military does not have enough men where they are supposed to keep maybe two or three? There is the need to do a proper house cleaning. Where are the men deployed? What are they doing? Some people, as I know it, have more than the required number of aides. When we are able to do all this we will know if there is need to recruit more hands or take some people from these other things they are not supposed to be doing and bring them into the core service. So, it may not be that the military does not have enough personnel.
*How much of a problem is political interference from those in power in the operations of the military chiefs? I interviewed a lecturer who spoke about security cherry picking: go after this one, leave that one and so on.*
I was at least at the centre of one of the military operations conducted in Nigeria. To this very date, no political leader ever called me. No minister or anybody called me about our operations. If it is that prevalent, there should have been somebody calling me at a particular point in time. So, I don’t know the people they are calling. Perhaps maybe they know that I know my job. Some people will tell them ‘that General is well exposed and knows the rule.’ I never experienced it. It may happen to a few, but it is not prevalent. It is not something you can beat your chest and say this is how it has been.
*What is your counsel to the new service chiefs on how they should go about their assignment?*
They are quite experienced in the task they have been given. They have been there. The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) was the theatre commander in the North-East. From that, he can have a very broad spectrum of what it will require to handle the rest of the other areas. So also are the other service chiefs. They must have been GOCs which will have exposed them to the challenges to confront both land, maritime and air forces. I think having the CDS on top means he will be able to give adequate guidance to the rest of the chiefs.
I look forward to a set of service chiefs that are receptive to ideas from no matter how junior the person bringing the ideas is, not just to surround themselves with their a few of their friends or those who are saying ‘yes, sir’ to them. It will be nice for the system to give equal opportunities to their juniors. Their juniors may even criticize them. They should take it in good faith and see how they can address the issues, especially if the criticism contains some elements of good reasoning. The officers under their commands also need a lot of international exposure. When they go out, they learn a lot of ideas from other militaries and the places they are working and they are able to bring some of these ideas to bear to improve our own system. This is something I have benefited so much from to the extent that I can speak almost on every aspect of military undertakings in combat, peace-keeping and any field of research. Currently, I consult for African Union part time in some areas of security sector reform, review of African stand-by force and so on. The exposure I have is giving me that ability to do some work.
*What is the role of the Chief of Defence Staff who is like a General without troops and is he not subordinated to the Chief of Army Staff in reality?*
That information, as far as I know today, is not correct. There have been several reviews of some of our modules and TACOS, which is already in circulation. I was chairman for the review of the one for the soldiers, ratings and airmen. They called it harmonised terms and condition of service 2017. The job of the CDS is well spelt out there and he is not the puppet that people think he is. Most of the operations in Nigeria come under the CDS. I don’t have any evidence to substantiate that the CDS is just sitting down and doing nothing. That may be in the past and because of certain lacuna in earlier TACOS. With what we have now, it is not possible to say such a thing. If you have anybody you can ask for a copy and you will see that the CDS is more or less in charge as you will find in the UK and other countries around the world.
*The appointment of Nuhu Ribadu generated a controversy. Some people feared he may not enjoy the cooperation of the military service chiefs who are likely to see him as more or less a civilian because of his background in the police. Any merit in such claim?*
I don’t know where it is written that the NSA must be an ex-military person. People should read. When they read, they get informed. The more I have read has informed me so much about how things work out. The more I have travelled and participated at workshops with officers from other countries have raised my level of reasoning and thinking. What am I saying? There is no such provision in the constitution or Terrorist Act or anywhere that the choice of NSA should be based on the person being an ex-military person. Number two, we have a peculiar situation here and if the president feels it should be a military person, that is the thinking of the commander-in-chief and its final no argument. If he chooses to pick another person, so be it. He could even have also picked a civilian who has no military or policing background and that is what happens in other modern countries. When you look at the list of NSAs in the US for instance, you can handpick those of them that were ex-military people.
Refusing to get informed makes people to just carry rumour or discuss unimaginable stories. Let me use this medium to inform people that the internet is there to check facts. What does the law of the country say? What is done in other countries? These are things that should guide our submissions.
There is a line of communication that is written down. Don’t forget, the NSA is an adviser to the president and he can convey directives from the president to pass some information to service chiefs. So, if somebody tells you that the president says you should assemble in his office, will you say you are not going? And especially if things like this are written down, then let us see who will not follow them. If somebody does not follow them, then the person will know what will come his way. Some of these things are captured in certain documents here and there for people and know what to do at the appropriate time.
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