By Pascal Chimezie
What is this new campaign to entice Igbo youths to join the Nigeria Army? Is it a set up for an agenda? Or does Brigadier-General Chima Ekeator led enlightenment team sent by the Nigeria Army authority to Southeast, holding townhall meetings, to persuade Igbo youths to take active part in the ongoing 2025 Army (free) recruitment mean well? Just how important is the Southeast to the Nigeria Army that it had to set up an enlightenment team, headed by an Igbo Army officer, for such a campaign?
Why have we not seen similar enlightenment campaigns for the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) cadet courses? Is the Army only interested in recruiting foot soldiers of Igbo extraction that could easily be undermined during deployment to hotbeds of insurgency? How many soldiers have voluntarily resigned their commission from the Nigeria Army in recent years? And what were their reasons or complaints? Have those issues been addressed?
How many Igbo officers do we have in the top echelon of the Nigeria Army as we speak? And how many of them sit at the National Security Council meeting? How many of them take part in recruitment policy and decision making?
Brigadier-General Chima Ekeator was reported to have said that while a state like Enugu in the Southeast, allotted about 200 slots in the recruitment drive, had barely filled up 100 slots, a state like Kaduna state, in the Northwest, had recorded about 3,000 applicants.
Why should anybody be making comparisms with intakes from Kaduna state, or any states in the North, with those of Enugu, or other Southeast states?
The Army could afford to recruit as many as it wishes from the states in the North without much hassle and headache. Unlike the Igbos, the Northerners are not mainly into commerce which Igbos had been derided by as their mainstay, away from politics and power! Again, the Nigeria Army had been recruiting some ‘repentant, deradicalized and rehabilitaled’ bandits and boko haram terrorists into the Army for quite some time. Although we have no information about similar exercise extended to the Southeast for those the Army frequently tagged ‘Ipob/Esn terrorists’ who are ‘repentant, deradicalized and rehabilitated.’ Or does it mean these ones are more hardened and unrepentant and, therefore, could not be integrated and absolved into the Army?
The Nigeria Army needs to come clean in its current recruitment campaign in the Southeast. Nigeria itself needs to tell itself the home truth. A deliberate policy of exclusionism and marginalization, unofficial as it might seem, cannot be an ingredient of unity and peaceful coexistence in a multiethnic and multicultural society such as Nigeria.
Just three years ago, 2022, one of my relatives’ daughter applied for Batch 33 Naval recruitment. She passed the examination and was shortlisted. She went to Port Harcourt for final screening and interview. And she did well. In the end, the name that was published to take the slot of Imo state was one ‘Abdulahi Ahmed’, a Northerner, for the same Medical Assistant the young girl struggled! The same thing was noticed in names published for Abia state. Northern names for Southeast slots. We cried blue murder. But to who do we complain?
We never imagined, nor envisaged that a time like this would come when Nigeria Army would come to appeal to Ndigbo for interest to join the Army; the Nigeria Army which Igbos were among the early crop of its well refined, highly educated and enlightened officers. Yet, it was by the same Army that the Igbos suffered a brutal genocide and continuous persecution till date, just for an incident that could be described as purely military affair in 1966. There was indeed a country.
Pascal Chimezie is former Secretary Ohanaeze Ndigbo Ikeja Chapter and can be reached through his mail, chimeziepascal@gmail.com
