Why terrorists are penetrating Nigeria -Ex-aviation minister

Osita Chidoka, a former Minister of Aviation has said that terrorists in Nigeria are aware that the country is broke and so intensifying attacks on the government.

The former minister spoke on a Channels Television interview programme on Friday.

Chidoka said, “The fact is Nigeria is in a complex and complicated situation now. The complicated situation is worsened by economic problem.

“This is the root of the problem in Nigeria. They [Federal Government] can not raise the funding to continue to carry out operations in the Northwest and Northeast.

“If you can not control the oil theft in the Niger Delta, I mean in the last three months, NNPC has come with the fact that they don’t have any money to pay [the Federal Government]. They said ‘we don’t have any money because we are using it for subsidy’.

“There is no way the institutions of government could be well funded, absolutely no way because the government is not receiving any revenue.

“The fact that we are borrowing from the Central Bank, the fact that we are printing currency and we are finding ways and means to fund our budget is already a red flag.

“The terrorists know that the Nigerian state is at its weakest level, it has no revenue, it has no monopoly of violence, it has no unity behind it, it has no national consensus supporting it.

“That, for me, is the biggest problem that Nigeria is facing. The terror organisations now have RPGs, they now have anti-aircraft, they have sophisticated weapons and they know that the Nigerian state is on its knees. The Nigerian state is now fully comatose.”

He also said the military had no business taking part in the internal security of the country, saying military personnel are not trained to do law enforcement.

Noting that with the deployment of the military, it was obvious that the policing system in the country had failed, Chidika added, “In the last seven years, nobody has made an effort to rehabilitate the Mobile Police Force into a competent fighting force that we can use for internal security.”