In response to the rising spate of insecurity, the Federal Government has spent an additional N14 billion on various military equipment between September and October 2024, according to Saturday PUNCH.
In the first seven months of this year, the government had spent N63.6 billion to procure equipment and ammunition for the military and the Office of the National Security Adviser.
Checks by Saturday PUNCH using GovSpend, a civic tech platform that tracks and analyses Federal Government’s spending, showed that on 16 April 2024, the government, through the Ministry of Defence, paid N990 million to a company named Equipment and Protective Applications International Limited for the procurement of ammunition.
Similarly, on 22 April 2024, the ministry paid N941 million to the same company for “the procurement of light tactical armoured vehicles, heavy anti-mine armoured vehicles, and ammunition for the Armed Forces of Nigeria”.
The defence ministry also paid N3.2 billion for “the procurement of bullet-resistant guard booths with surveillance capacity and proximity detectors for the Armed Forces of Nigeria”, on 2 July 2024.
The ministry also deployed the sum of N33 billion in five tranches on 26 July 2024, through its naira transit account for the purchase of critical and urgent operational equipment for the military.
A payment of N3 billion was also made on 27 July 2024, by the Defence Headquarters for “critical and urgent operational support to procure operational requirements (balance of 50 per cent of the 2023 supplementary appropriation)”.
The government also made a payment of N22 billion to ONSA as a special intervention for the procurement of essential equipment on 31 July 2024.
Further checks on the GovSpend tracking platform, however, showed that between September and October, a total sum of N14 billion was doled out by the defence headquarters for various military equipment.
On 13 September, the defence ministry doled out N4 billion for “Procurement of critical combat equipment for Nigerian armed forces”.
Similarly, on 9 October, the Nigerian Air Force made payments in two tranches for the purchase of defence equipment. The first was N5.2 billion, while the second was N1.2 billion.
On 23 October, another N4 billion was released by the Ministry of Defence for the same purposes, indicating that the government had spent a total sum of N77.6 billion on arms purchases in the first 10 months of 2024.
An analysis of the yearly budgets of the Defence Ministry and eight other armed forces shows that the government spent N231.27 billion on the procurement of arms and ammunition for security agencies and officers between 2020 and 2023.
According to the analysis, the government allotted N11.72 billion in 2020, N10.78 billion in 2021, N9.64 billion in 2022, N47.02 billion and a supplementary budget of N184.25 billion in 2023, making a total of N231.27 billion
It was also gathered that the government also spent the sum of N115 billion on the importation of arms and ammunition during the same period.
Justifying the huge arms procurement budgets, the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Christopher Musa, while appearing before the House of Representatives alongside other security chiefs in 2023, said ammunition expenditure should not be seen as huge because it is in dollars, as Nigeria does not manufacture military hardware.
