A Borno elder, Dr Bulama Mali Gubio, has called for the prosecution of the immediate past Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh, at the International Criminal Court, ICC, for deliberately leading an ill-equipped military that allowed Boko Haram terrorists to massacre thousands of lives in North-east Nigeria.
Gubio said he was not in any way impressed with the belated confession of the former CDS.
The retired tehcnocrat, a former head of the Borno State civil service, insisted that it was very disappointing that Badeh, who is from the North-east, would deliberately collude with the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan to sanction the killings of his own people by not voicing out the fact that the Nigerian military under his command had no requisite equipment to tackle the Boko Haram insurgency.
“My personal view and comment on the pronouncement of the former Chief of Defence Staff is that we are very much surprised that AVM Alex Badeh who is from the North-east would act in the manner he did during his time as Nigeria’s defence chief.
“If he knew that the military under his command was ill-equipped, he should have since voiced out his concerns. But he kept quiet and refused to talk! We all knew how our stateqA governor, Kashim Shettima, was nearly removed as the then presidency and even the military were threatening total state of emergency on Borno and so on, all because he came out to state the truth. It was God that saved Borno at that time,” Gubio stated.
According to him, Badeh had accepted that he deliberately led a military without ammunition in the war against Boko Haram, meaning, according to him, that he colluded with the government of former president Jonathan to watch the people of the North-east massacred by Boko Haram.
“It was really sad that when our governor was crying out that his people were being killed mercilessly by Boko Haram terrorists because Boko Haram had better equipment than the Nigerian soldiers, the military under Alex Badeh’s command as well as the government of former president Jonathan were busy denying it.
“There is no two ways about it; he (Alex Badeh) deliberately presided over an ill-equipped military. So, we call on President Muhammadu Buhari to take up this matter as voluntarily presented by Alex Badeh and join it with the indictments made in the Amnesty International reports on Boko Haram, to ensure that he and others that were so indicted face trial at the ICC. They have to explain to the world why the people of Borno particularly, and the North-east in general were allowed to be so massacred,” he said.
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