Military worried over crop of officers produced by NDA

The hierarchy of the Nigerian armed forces has expressed worry over the crop of officers produced by the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) for the military in recent years.

This is coming just as the Nigerian Army, Nigerian Navy and the Nigerian Navy have commenced an in-house intensive military training for young officers who have just passed out from the academy and deployed to the various services to better prepare them for the enormous task expected of them.

Sources hinted that the crop of officers produced by NDA, which is responsible for the training of officers for the Nigerian armed forces, has become a great concern for the entire Nigerian armed forces as the per­formances of most of the officers who passed out from the academy in the past 11 years are nothing to write home about.

Sources say the decay in the training of officers actually started when the institution reverted to its current four-year programme as against its five years duration as well as in­terference from politicians and highly placed individuals over the day-to-day running of the institution.

A top military source, who craved ano­nymity, told Defence Report that the poor performance of these officers revealed that indeed the intensive military and academic training the NDA was known for, has de­railed.

The senior noted that unlike in the past when the services was comfortable to deploy newly graduated officers from the academy to head certain tasks and operations, that can­not happen again as most of the young of­ficers posted to their duty have been found to be doing the opposite, thus prompting the services to appoint a superior officer to su­pervise them, which should not be.

The situation is so bad that the source said: You now find officers in the rank of Ma­jor, being in charge of security checkpoints where a Second Lieutenant or a Lieutenant should be in charge of such operation if it were in those days.”

Asked what may have caused the rot in the NDA, the source revealed that the unusual romance by heads of the institutions with politicians and other top government func­tionaries for their selfish reason were some of the problems that caused the rot in the train­ing of cadets officers.

Rather than focus on the vision and ob­jectives of the founding fathers which is “to produce officers with broad-based training in both military and academic subjects de­signed to serve as a foundation for the future progressive development of officers of the Nigerian Armed forces”, the source said that is no longer the case.

According to the source, the “situation is so bad that we had to discuss the way forward for the NDA, at the just ended Chief of Army Staff Conference, held at Uyo, in December of 2014, where officers bared their minds on the kind of half baked products from the in­stitution.

“And w just pray that something is done quickly about it before the NDA becomes a regular university instead of a military train­ing institution”, the source said.

As it is now, the source described the NDA, as a glorified secondary school, where cadets call their parents to report their senior cadets for punishing them “and their parents will now put a call across to the comman­dant, such things should not happen at the academy, if we truly want a disciplined army especially if we take into consideration the activities of the Boko Haram group and the reported cases of soldiers having to abscond. I want you to know that it is the officers that lead the soldiers and so if we continue to have more halfbaked officers, we should con­tinue to expect nothing but the worse because the soldier does not give orders, the officers does”, the source pointed out.