Retired General Lucky Irabor, a former Chief of Defence Staff, has revealed that a minimum of 2,700 Nigerian soldiers died between 2009 and 2021 fighting Boko Haram insurgents.
He made the statement in his new book,SCARS: Nigeria’s Journey and the Boko Haram Conundrum, which was published recently in Abuja. The retired general, who played pivotal roles in the Nigerian military campaign that enveloped the country and international peacekeeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone, characterized the cost of human lives during the war as “vast” and akin to a pandemic.
In line with Irabor’s projection, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) statistics had indicated that almost 350,000 were slain by the Boko Haram insurgency by 2020, with the majority being indirectly slain by the consequences of the war.
Irabor dismissed reports that soldiers of a specific religion or ethnicity were intentionally sent to the North-East and hence perished. In his opinion, data ooon graves of military personnel indicate categorically a balanced spread of Christian and Muslim officers who died during the war.
He referred to the murder of soldiers as a “national scar” that would remind all of the costly cost incurred in achieving the peace and harmony.
The former general also attributed the work of some nongovernmental organizations and foreign reports, specifically those of Amnesty International, as being detrimental to the military’s morale and causing the unjust punishment of Nigerian officers at the hands of the United States.
Irabor cited cases of officers like Major General L.P. Ngubane and Brigadier General R.O. Bamgboye, who were denied U.S. visas despite being cleared of any criminal activities.
Apart from reporting on military losses, Irabor broke down Nigeria’s wider security issues region by region. The origins of banditry in the North-West, he explained, were a result of low literacy, open borders, poverty rates, and competition for land and water resources which have also spread to the North-Central, fuelling herder–farmer conflict.
He also reported violent agitations by IPOB and its armed offshoot, ESN, in the South-East as terrorism, replicating the Boko Haram style and instilling mass fear during holiday seasons. In the South-South, Irabor reported complaints of perceived economic injustice with locals complaining that northern insurgencies shield illegal mining, while Niger Delta oil resources finance the federal government.
Irabor stated that the blemishes created by Boko Haram and other security issues must be a lesson for national unity and strategic peace build-up.
