By Best Orinya
Nigerians hardly agree or indulge themselves in collective appreciation of the performance of any public officer. It is like a cherished culture of endless criticism, the people hate to relinquish. It is worse when the matter at stake concerns a national issue and the personality at the epicenter of the heat delights more in verbal justification than action.
But, there appears to be a unanimous consensus on how the current Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai has handled the ongoing war on Boko Haram insurgents in the North-eastern part of Nigeria. The war on terror is a global phenomenon, but since terrorists took a firm, offensive grip on Nigerians, the country has known no peace.. It was like a puzzle that can never be solved. But Gen. Buratai has given Nigerians hope of survival and dignity in their darkest hour, much as he has vibrated deadly labyrinths.
Until his appointment on July 13, 2015, by President Muhammadu Buhari, as Nigeria’s COAS, Gen. Buratai was the Commander of the Multinational Joint Task Force, headquartered in the Republic of Chad. He succeeded Gen. Kenneth Tobias Jacob Minimah as COAS.
Credentials of the Borno-born Army General are replete with trappings of excellence whatever he has served the country. As Commander 2 Brigade covering other parts of the Niger Delta region, where he doubled as the Sector Commander Joint Task Force Operation Pulo Shield, Buratai brought respite to Nigerians in the restive Niger Delta region by significantly curtailing oil theft, piracy, kidnapping and armed robbery through relentless security surveillance and operations.
But, what appears to have shot him to limelight is his new job as COAS. Many attest that upon his appointment as the Army’s helmsman, Buratai deemed it a personal mission to rescue his people. But, when he vowed to confront the insurgent’s headlong, the terrorists mistook his outburst as the same empty bragging of his predecessors.
Administering their usual baptism of fire on whoever dares them, the insurgents immediately unleashed an attack on his hometown in Biu LGA of Borno, killing and destroying houses. While the action of the Islamic sect members was meant to permanently silence Gen. Buratai, it surprisingly rather emboldened him.
And with President Muhammadu Buhari’s relocation of the military command structure to the epicenter of the Boko Haram war, Buratai perceived it a rare opportunity to again excel in his military career. Son of Alhaji Yusuf Buratai, a World War II veteran, the COAS reminisced his father’s admonishments to him at a tender age, when he opted for the military service. He remembered that his father, now aged told him to strive to excel and always be loyal to his superiors and constituted authority and to distance himself from any form of vice. So, he considered failing Nigeria in the insurgency war as failing his own biological father.
Therefore, having climbed the ladder in his military career to get to the peak, Gen. Buratai damned the coziness of his office in Abuja, laced his boots, cocked his guns and personally led troops to the battlefield. It was a marked departure from the disposition of COAS before his arrival on the scene.
To demonstrate that he is an Army General with proper grasp and briefs of his new assignment, Buratai restructured the Nigerian Army hierarchy by deploying his subordinates to superintend on new command stations or areas. He set out to task with a singular mission; firstly, to boost the very low morale of troops, which hitherto made them dread war and by extension, to also extract a commitment from soldiers that insurgency is a war that must be won in record time, to enable soldiers get back to their regular duties.
Thereafter, Buratai frequently toured the zone embattled by insurgency war, even to dreaded Boko Haram-controlled zones. It was on one of such missions that his convoy was ambushed while travelling to Maiduguri-Gamboru-Ngala. No senior officer of his ranking or portfolio had rendered himself to be caught in the crossfire of insurgents in the past. But Buratai braved the odds and did not only deflate the potency of the terrorists who attacked his convoy, but also arrested some of them who later made useful confessions.
It is clear that the Nigerian Army under Buratai’s watch has stamped its statement that the dreaded Sambisa Forest, where Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram terrorists were held captive for months, unchallenged, was not only demystified, but also demolished. He proceeded to belittle the once fortified haven of the insurgents by establishing a military presence in Sambisa Forest.
Explaining his tactics, Buratai said, having studied the insurgency war in the North East, he decided to adopt the same guerrilla approach used by the terrorists by introducing motorbike battalion to move swiftly against terrorists anytime. There is no innovation that simple with such positive impact that cannot attract world acclaim in the comity of Army Generals anywhere in the world.
He simply explained it as, “We are using the same guerrilla strategy adopted by the terrorists. We are giving them back their own strategy. We have motorbike battalion which has added more capacity as well as the ability to move quickly to wherever the terrorists are.”
•Orinya is an academic staff at Federal University Wukari, Taraba State.