19th December, 2023
The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Christopher Musa, lamented that Nigerian soldiers earn below N50,000 monthly salary and called for improvement.
Musa, who spoke in an interview on Channels TV said “My soldiers collect less than N50,000 as salary in a month.
“We all know the situation on the ground, my appeal is for them to have a salary worthy of the work they are doing, we deserve to have that so that it can encourage them to want to do more.”
He also decried that he and his boys collected N1,200 allowances per day for being on the field to confront terrorists and others.
“The issue of cash allowance where we feed, any time we are on operations, I as a General, I am being paid N1,200 per day with my soldiers. From the first general to the last soldier, it is the same amount, that is what we manage,” he stated.
Musa said according to the constitution, the primary responsibility of the military is territorial integrity but that if one looked at the territorial integrity, it implied that charity must begin at home.
He said the military could not be protecting territory and the home front is on fire and then sit back and watch.
According to him, over the past few years, on average, the armed forces recruited over 15,000 personnel into the system but lamented that there are no new barracks to accommodate them.
“We know the budget has captured some of it, we need to do more, we need to renovate the old ones because they have been there for ages,” he said.
Musa stated that his dream was for every officer and soldier to have an accommodation that he could look up to “and say this is my own, this is my barracks.”
He added that because of the military operations, a lot of the officers and soldiers are out there in the field.
“If these operations are over and we are to go back to the barracks, there wouldn’t be enough barracks for us,’ he decried.