A 76-year-old veteran, Col Nasiru Salami, has revealed that retirees of the Nigerian Army are poorly treated by military authorities.
Salami said this as Nigeria marks the 2025 Armed Forces Remembrance Day on Wednesday.
Speaking when he appeared on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief show on January 15, 2025, Salami revealed that he joined the Nigerian Army in October 1967.
According to the veteran who is now the Secretary of the Nigerian Legion, Lagos Chapter, he was drafted to fight in the Biafra war after just six weeks of training.
He said he almost lost his right foot in the war he spent 11 months fighting, adding that a plastic material was used to augment his leg to enable him return to the battlefield when he got injured.
Lamenting the treatment suffered by veterans, the septuagenarian said he won’t advise his children to join the Nigerian Army.
“For now, I will never recommend any of my children to join the Nigerian Army,” he said.
“I am their father and they are seeing me now that my life is not to their expectation. They would want me to be higher than this, full of joy and other things that would make them happy. How would I now encourage them to join the army?
“I have two graduates now and I said to them: ‘Never you think of going to join the army. If you want to join, maybe the Navy or the Air Force. I’ve not been there but I’ve been seeing them and I’ve been hearing about them because they are treated better’.”
He lamented that the Nigerian government is yet to pay war bonuses to him and over 24,000 members of the legion after the war, in addition to retirement packages.
“We are asking for war bonus, those of us who fought the war. I retired in December 1983 and they promised us heaven and earth that they would give us our war bonus but up till now, we have not seen it,” he said.
Salami concluded by appealing to the government to come to the aide of members of the legion who sacrificed a lot for the country.
Source: www.mynigeria.com
