Nigeria’s Soldiers Have Become Businessmen. The Country Is Paying in Blood.
The Nigerian military does not need more money. It needs to rediscover what it means to fight.
Nigeria spent ₦5.41 trillion — nearly $4 billion — on defence in 2026. ISWAP still overran at least 15 military bases in 2025, captured and executed a Brigadier General, and deployed armed drones that outmatched the defending units. The money went somewhere. It did not go to the soldier.
A Nigerian private earns between $31 and $38 per month. Soldiers spend three to five years deployed without rotation, creating conditions for mass desertion. Meanwhile, the generals build empires. A former head of one of the arms of the military deposited $5.1 billion from the military budget into the accounts of two companies where he is the beneficial owner and sole signatory. This is not aberration. This is the system.
The 2025 Government Defence Integrity Index assessed Nigeria at high to critical risk of corruption across all five risk areas: financial, operational, personnel, political, and procurement. Military operations scored the lowest of any category — a rating of just 12 out of 100. Band F. Not one of the 17 assessed countries has a military doctrine that addresses corruption risks at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.
The comparison that haunts me is Iraq before the fall of Mosul in 2014. When 1,500 ISIS fighters routed 60,000 Iraqi soldiers, the collapse came not from lack of firepower but from corruption. Nigeria is walking the same road, with one critical difference: it is a slow bleed rather than a single catastrophe, which gives political leaders the cover to do nothing indefinitely.
The solution my generation understood is the solution Nigeria must return to — the professional formation of officers. Sandhurst. The British Staff College. The kind of rigorous, ethics-grounded, esprit de corps-building institution that produces soldiers, not contractors with ranks, not political appointees in uniform, not businessmen with medals.
Defence spending transparency is particularly fragile. There are significant gaps, secret expenditures, and military-owned enterprises that serve commanders rather than the nation. No army can fight when its officers are invested in the enemy’s economy of extraction.
The United States launched 16 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Lakurawa camps in Sokoto State on Christmas Day 2025 and deployed troops to Bauchi Airfield. That is the clearest possible verdict on where Nigeria stands. A sovereign nation of 220 million people required a foreign power to strike targets on its own soil because its own military could not — or would not.
The humiliation should be irreversible. It is not. Within weeks, Abuja had moved on to the next political crisis. The ghosts of Brigadier General Musa Uba and the hundreds of civilians slaughtered in overrun villages received no accountability. They received condolence statements.
Esprit de corps is not a slogan. It is the invisible architecture of a fighting force — the belief that the man beside you will not run, will not sell the ammunition, will not negotiate with the enemy for a percentage. That architecture has collapsed in Nigeria. Rebuilding it requires more than budget lines and procurement reforms. It requires sending a generation of officers back to school — not Abuja finishing schools, but real military academies where character is forged under pressure and where corruption is treated not as a lifestyle choice but as treason.
Nigeria once produced soldiers the world respected. It can again. But not under a chain of command where the uniform is worn as a business licence.
The country does not need more generals. It needs more soldiers.
— Kio Amachree, President, Worldview International
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