IRIN Special Report on plans to trim the armed forces

Nigeria plans to cut the size of its armed forces to 50,000 troops from the current 80,000 over the next four years, but officials say this will not compromise the country's peacekeeping role. Minister of Defence Theophilus Danjuma, who announced the plan on 17 August, said efficiency and professionalism would be the watchwords during the reorganisation. He added, however, that while the government was proud of the country's peacekeeping role in West Africa it was also mindful of costs. Nigeria is the dominant power in ECOMOG, the peacekeeping force of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), shouldering most of the financial burden of its interventions in civil wars since 1990, first in Liberia and later in Sierra Leone. Danjuma said that while Nigeria's prominent role in ECOMOG - the bulk of whose troops are Nigerian - was commendable, it was a heavy burden on the national economy. However, senior officials in the Defence Ministry explained that the comment did not suggest any precipitated end to Nigeria's role in peacekeeping missions in West Africa or the continent as a whole. "The reduction of the size of the armed forces is a process that will take years and not an immediate cut," Defence Ministry spokesman Colonel Godwin Ugbo told reporters in Lagos. "As he (Danjuma) said, Nigeria is still committed to peace in our region and other parts of the world." Ugbo said Danjuma had given clear modalities for the planned reduction, with emphasis on retaining the most capable people, retraining, and modernising the armed forces by replacing obsolete systems and equipment. "The end result should be a highly technical, highly professional army capable of rapid response to its responsibilities," a senior military official told IRIN. President Olusegun Obasanjo, who in February won elections that ended more than 15 years of military rule, had promised on taking office in late May to reorganise the armed forces towards complying strictly with their constitutional role and avoiding the temptation to seize power. A former military ruler who spent three years as a prisoner of late dictator Sani Abacha, Obasanjo was widely touted by his political backers as best suited to reform the institution. As part of this cleansing process, he purged more than 150 officers who had held political office since 1984 as soon as he took office. The latest plan takes the trimming down to the lower ranks. "The point is that Nigeria has never needed such a big and expensive army as we have now," political analyst Johnson Ibekwe told IRIN. "Our neighbours do not represent a big military threat, and even if we face aggression we can quickly raise the numbers through a general mobilisation." Concern about the social consequences of releasing such a large number of persons trained in the use of lethal weapons into a society rife with violent robberies is being addressed through an agreement with the U.S. and British governments which have pledged resettlement aid to the Nigerian government. At independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria's armed forces were just 10,000 strong. But their number swelled during civil war in the late 1960s' and by the time secessionist Biafra was defeated in 1970, it had topped 250,000. However, the number fell substantially in a demobilisation carried out soon afterwards. Many analysts believe that with the military holding power for all but 10 years of Nigeria's history, the tendency was to keep a relatively large army to boost the military's image of its importance. Since the country is burdened by an external debt of about US $30 billion and is experiencing economic difficulties, reducing the cost of the military appears an obvious option for a government preaching fiscal prudence. But indications are that Nigeria cannot afford to make the cuts too deep since there is a strong possibility of conflict both at home and in the region. An upsurge of violent ethnic clashes has claimed up to 1,000 lives in different parts of the country of over 108 million people since Obasanjo took office. In some cases, quelling the upheavals has required the deployment of soldiers. And the possibility of regional conflicts spilling into or otherwise affecting Nigeria is likely be a key preoccupation of the country's armed forces for years to come.