Soldiers who petitioned Buhari over welfare scheme are fake – Army. By Nsikak Nseyen

The Nigerian Army has reacted to a letter by Non Commissioned Officers (NCO) and Senior Non Commissioned Officers (SNCO) rejecting the proposed Nigerian Army Welfare Housing Scheme (NAWHS) The group had in a letter to President Muhammadu Buhari described the proposed Nigerian Army Welfare Housing Scheme as mere fraud. The open letter co-signed by 05NA/57/2084 SGT Yusuf Shetima,04NA/55/0925 CPL James Ibok, 09NA/62/5578 LCPL Danladi Ibrahim,11NA/66/10622 LCPL Afolabi Showumi and 13NA/70/11034 PTE Lucky Dolph, accused the Commissioned Officers of “eating fat” while they starved. ”We write to reject the proposed plan of the Nigerian Army to further increase their tempo in a way of continuous swindling and to put us and our family into persistent suffering of hunger and starvation. ‘The Nigerian Army have devised a means of taking or collecting it back from us the Scarce Skill Allowance (SSA) under the guise of a useless, fraudulent and so called Nigerian Army Welfare Housing Scheme (NAWHS).” But reacting, the Director Army Public Relations Officer, Brigadier General Mohammed Yerima, said the signatories who claimed to be writing on behalf of NA soldiers are fictitious names and numbers which are non-existent in the Nigerian Army records. According to him, the report was made to disabuse the minds of members of the general public. ”The attention of the Nigerian Army has been drawn to the referenced story being circulated in the social media and the following is our response which is simply to disabuse the minds of members of the general public. ”That the current Chief of Army Staff met an Army Housing Scheme in the pipeline and constituted a Committee to understudy its feasibility and desirability. Questionnaire was subsequently designed by the Committee for soldiers to bare their minds on the scheme and to ascertain those who are interested in it. It was still at this stage of administering the questionnaire to soldiers that agent provocateurs seized the moment to demonize the scheme with toxic narratives. ”Members of the Nigerian Army have established mechanisms of responding to administrative issues and resort to social media is not one of them. ”Any personnel caught using social media to engage the authorities will be severely dealt with. It is however curious that a scheme meant to benefit soldiers and families could be so fragrantly twisted in the social media user names and numbers that are alien to the Nigerian Army.”