The African Democratic Congress (ADC) presidential candidate Dumebi Kachikwu has urged the Federal Government should recruit more people into the military as part of measures to tackle insecurity in Nigeria.
Kachikwu gave the advice during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Wednesday.
The ADC presidential flagbearer argued that the country is battling security challenges on multiple fronts.
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“The whole country is at war. We have large areas of Nigeria that we now call ungoverned spaces. So, this military is severely challenged and they don’t have enough at this point,” he said.
“So, we have the Civil Defence and the police who are trained in the art of bearing arms but they are not trained the way soldiers are trained. So, we need to give them strategic training for a month or two for them to get to the point where they can react like the soldiers and join that effort.
“If we have 200,000 people join this war, on multi-war fronts, we would chase these people out. But we must understand that this war has been sustained for over a decade now. This is short-term. So, in the medium term, we must start recruiting massively. It takes about seven months to get a civilian to be a soldier, and another two to three years in the art of warfare – bearing different arms and what have you. So, we must start recruiting to get to the point of readiness but we are not doing this.”
