I'm sanitising arms procurement - Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari said yesterday that he has been ur¬gently and appropriately restoring order, due process and probity to the procure¬ment processes of the nation’s Armed Forces.
He spoke at the Presiden¬tial Villa during a meeting with the British Secretary of State for Defence, Mr Mi¬chael Fallon, who was ac¬companied by Nigeria’s Min¬ister of Defence, Mansur Dan Ali.
The President lamented that the proper procurement of equipment for the nation’s military was abused and be¬came open to corruption and shady deals under the last ad¬ministration.
“They just put foreign exchange in a briefcase and travelled to procure equip-ment for the military. That is why we have found ourselves in the crisis we are now fac¬ing,” said Buhari, according to a Villa statement issued after the meeting.
Welcoming the offer by the British government to assist Nigeria in defence procure¬ments, intelligence gathering and training, the President restated his conviction that the international community must collaborate more and work with greater unity of purpose to overcome global terrorism.
According to him, “ter¬rorism has become very sophisticated now. If devel¬oped nations can be attacked, and hundreds of lives lost, how much more developing countries?
“In the West African sub-region, Nigeria is the main battleground of the Boko Haram insurgency. We have made a lot of progress against the terrorists, but we will wel¬come more assistance from our friends and the interna¬tional community.”
Fallon said he was in the country to see what more Britain could do to support Nigeria in battling terrorism and violent extremism.
“Groups like Boko Haram don’t believe in democracy and freedom of choice, so it’s a common fight for us all,” he told Buhari.
Speaking to journalists af¬ter the meeting, Fallon said “we have been discussing to¬day what probably we can do to step up Nigeria in the area of full training on how to deal with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and what can be done to improve the intel¬ligence you need to deal with terrorism.