Command and Control Centre (My brain-child gets a nod)

In the speech he delivered, after being sworn at the Eagle Square yesterday, President Buhari promised to relocate the command and control centre of the counter-insurgency operations from Abuja to Maiduguri, because victory cannot be achieved by basing the command centre so far away.  In his own words ‘The command center will be relocated to […]

In the speech he delivered, after being sworn at the Eagle Square yesterday, President Buhari promised to relocate the command and control centre of the counter-insurgency operations from Abuja to Maiduguri, because victory cannot be achieved by basing the command centre so far away.  In his own words ‘The command center will be relocated to Maiduguri and remain there until Boko Haram is completely subdued. But we cannot claim to have defeated Boko Haram without rescuing the Chibok girls and all other innocent persons held hostage by the insurgents. This government will do all it can to rescue them alive.’
In a piece I called ‘To the grieving mothers of Chibok’, which was published in this column on the 26th of April last year, I advocated a similar solution in the following words ‘In any country where the leadership is alive to its responsibility, by now all our service chiefs will be around Sambisa forests, personally commanding the search and rescue efforts being done by their men. And as their commander-in-chief, the president ought to be somewhere within the government house in Maiduguri overseeing the whole operation first hand.’
I was truly elated to hear President Buhari saying that a security threat of this magnitude cannot be fought by remote-control. But I withdraw my suggestion that the president should be within the confines of Maiduguri government house to oversee the operation. With the numerous problems bequeathed to him by the last administration, which all require immediate attention, the new president cannot relocate from Abuja and achieve much. Yet what he can do is to post the current chief of defence staff and all present service chiefs to Maiduguri to command and control this counter- insurgency directly. My humble suggestion here is that Air Chief Marshal Badeh should take the place of the C-in-C at the Borno command center while the service chiefs must physically go into Sambisa and similar Boko Haram hideouts to execute the war. These chiefs must not be allowed to retire until they have successfully defeated Boko Haram insurgents.
Air Marshal Badeh had on several occasions raised our hopes that the Chibok girls’ location was known, that plans were being made to rescue them without wasting them as collateral damage and also that the insurgency will end since early last year. But none of his predictions has come to pass. He and his team must be held accountable for the failure the fight against Boko Haram has become and they must be made to justify what had been spent in the war by personally going to Borno to fight it.
Though President Buhari had promised that ‘For now the Armed Forces will be fully charged with prosecuting the fight against Boko haram. We shall overhaul the rules of engagement to avoid human rights violations in operations. We shall improve operational and legal mechanisms so that disciplinary steps are taken against proven human right violations by the Armed Forces…’ These out-going chiefs must be made to remain in place to execute this war to its logical conclusion.
On the whole, the presidential speech was short and sharp but full of promise. The change we hoped and prayed for might finally be within reach. We hope our journey towards a safe, secure and prosperous nation has begun; with the new leadership that was inaugurated yesterday. Long live Nigeria!