How Not To Honour Army Chief And Other Fallen Heroes

By Casmir Nwafor

On Friday 21 May 2021, Nigerians were jolted by the shocking news of the demise of the country’s Army Chief and other key senior officers of his headquarters among others in a plane crash in Kaduna.

This is a COAS who having served bravely in the Theatre of Operations in the North East became the COAS with a zeal to flush the terrorists out of the North East. Surely he was making inroad into the terrorists dens. Unfortunately instead of allowing him to concentrate on the North East agenda, he was distracted and overstretched to move South East, South South and even South West.

Despite all these, he kept faith with the onerous tasks under his responsibilities. This is a man who has spent more than half of his years serving Nigeria and putting his life on the line. He carried on with this task until his painful demise on 21 May 2021.

It is therefore very painful that the Federal Government did not really show the required respect and honour to the Chief and the men that died with him. There ought to have been a brief address of the Press or the nation by the President but this was never done. Even to be at the burial event was not too much a task to ask from his Commander-in-Chief. Ordinarily, following such tragedy, the national flags ought to be flown at half mast but for this clueless FG it was just this night of 23 May 2021 (more than 24 hours after the sad event) that the FG deemed it necessary to order the needful on the flags flying at half-mast.

Indeed this is a VERY BAD WAY to honour our Army Chief. What kind of message is the FG trying to send to the military? What type of morale is it trying to build in the troops who lay down their lives day and night in selfless service to their fatherland? How will a soldier feel after seeing his Army Chief treated like this, who is he then and what will be his fate? This has been going on for long where the President hardly attend burial of military men who laid down their lives for the country. One is more touched because the President being a retired Army Officer ought to know better.

On this note I thank the Chief of Defence Staff in his resolve for the Defence Headquarters to investigate this sad crash. I plead with him to also look into the maintenance of these military aircraft, three of which have crashed within the last four months. What is their maintenance culture and how flyworthy are they? We don’t want to have this crash anymore. We can’t be wasting such brilliant officers and expect to move forward as a military to win battles.

May the Souls of the COAS and others that laid down their lives with him rest in peace Amen.

• Capt Casmir Nwafor (Retd) wrote this piece from Lagos