A former Spokesperson of the Nigerian Airforce, Sadeeq Shehu, has said that more military officers are being promoted to the rank of general than necessary.
Shehu said the high number of generals in the military is due mostly to outside pressure, noting that having more generals than necessary is against the national interest.
Shehu said this during an appearance on Arise Television on Friday, amid reports of a possible mass retirement of generals.
It was learnt that over 100 generals in the army, comprising Major Generals, Brigadier-Generals and some Colonels were recently told to proceed on retirement by the military authorities.
Daily Post reports that the signal which gave July 3, 2023, as the deadline for the officers to retire from the service, cuts across the Army, Navy and Air Force and follows the appointment of new service chiefs by President Bola Tinubu.
Shehu said that having too many generals contributes to a “bloated military structure”, stressing that the anomaly became noticeable as far back as 2012.
“What does bloated military structure do? It costs a lot of money, let’s be honest with ourselves. There’s no money you can pay a soldier for risking his life. Whatever you give a general after serving for 30, 35 years, he is worth it because they go to the bush, stay awake while other people are sleeping.
“However, in order to be fair to the taxpayer, you should be able to produce only generals that are necessary to carry out the job. You don’t just give general rank because you want to favour somebody.
“Another issue I want the government to look at is this desperation for people to become major generals,” Shehu said.
According to him, the craving for the general rank is mostly based on monetary gains.
“It started recently. If you look at the salary structure of the services as is usual, a lieutenant will earn higher than a sub-lieutenant, a captain will earn higher than a lieutenant, and so on, but the gap is proportionate between these ranks until you reach brigadier and major-general and equivalent. There, the gap is almost like three times.
“There’s nobody that doesn’t like money. There’s nobody that doesn’t like allowances. What we have now is pressure being mounted on the services. A service knows it needs only 50 major generals but pressure from senators, traditional rulers, the chief’s wife, will make a chief that knows he only needs 50 to end up promoting 100 major generals. In the end, who loses? It’s the national interest that is affected.
“Apart from losing money, when you have too many generals; we now have generals, with due respect, who are doing the actual work of colonels. And that’s because we have so many (generals).
“In fact, there are some that if they don’t go to work for one week, no one will look for them because they don’t even have any specific work to do. But they are there to collect their salaries and allowances.”
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