Soldiers’ wives protests; ...stop husbands from confronting Boko Haram

In a second time in two days, wives of soldiers protested the deployment of their husbands to take on Boko Haram insurgents in area said to be captured by the terrorist group.

The women numbering over 100 caused near pandemonium at the entrance of the 21 Armoured Brigade of the Nigeria Army, Giwa Barrack, Maiduguri with protest that there was no way their husbands would be allowed to leave homes to go to the captured towns of Damboa and Gwoza to take on the terrorists with the inferior weapons they were given.


The early protest was by wives of soldiers at the Maimalari barrack, within Maiduguri a day earlier.

The women who did not allow movement into the barrack, insisted that engaging the insurgents with the kind of weapons made available to the soldiers was nothing short of suicide mission.

When journalists visited the barrack on Monday afternoon, the gates leading to it were locked, as the women in their hundreds protested at the entrance of the gate, with many of them shouting “we won’t allow our husbands to be killed, as the military authorities refused to equip them with sophisticated weapons that can matched the one of Boko Haram.”

One of the women who spoke to journalists on condition of anonymity said that “those that their bread winners were killed in the course of defending their fatherland were suffering, as the government has not done anything for them to alleviate their sufferings.”

“As soldiers, our husbands are supposed to defend their fatherland in the face of both external and internal aggression as enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but that could only be done when they were supplied with modern war equipment and properly motivated as obtained in countries in other parts of the world,” she stated.

The women called on the Federal Government to supply better working equipment in order to wage the war against insurgents, as promised by the president and commander in Chief in his recent address during the fund raising to assist the victims of Boko Haram insurgency headed by Gen. T Y Danjuma (Rtd)

It could be recalled that many highly placed individuals including the Borno State Governor, Alhaji Kashim Shettima have complained that the Boko Haram terrorists have sophisticated weapons and better motivated than the Nigerian military, which the military authorities later denied.