Arms procurement: Nigeria, S/Africa future acquisitions to be on govt to govt agreement

From Molly Kilete. Abuja

The Federal Government yesterday said further acquisition of military equipment and hardwares for the Armed Forces would be executed purely on government to government agreement and procedures.
This, it said had become necessary to reduce the illegality in the procurement of arms for the military, which is now under probe.
It said it could no longer tolerate the situation where fake and substandard weapons are supplied to the Nigerian armed forces.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, Ambassador Danjuma Sheni, and his South African counterpart, Dr. Sam Gulube, who made this known to newsmen, said the relevant agencies in both countries would work to fine-tune the procedures with a view to making hardware acquisition faster and hitch-free.
Sheni said other areas of the planned new military pact with South Africa include training and technology transfer in the areas of space technology and military medicine.
“We have agreed on certain agenda items including, but not limited to issues of military training, platform acquisitions, vehicles mainly for our military establishment.
“We have emphasised in our discussions that given our level of security threats, the acquisition of military hardware and platforms would be fast-tracked with our South African brothers.
“In that context, we have also agreed that a technical team consisting of our experts from the various services will, within a very short time, go to South Africa to ascertain our requirements and needs.
“In the overall military relationship, we emphasized the new procurement policy of the Nigerian government which is based on government to government procurement. We agreed that this new procurement procedure will be our guiding principle in the processes we intend to engage in,’’ Sheni said.
He added that cooperation and collaboration in the area of space development, which would be private sector driven and military medicine, featured prominently in the deliberations.
On his part, South Africa’s Dr. Sam Gulube assured his Nigerian counterparts that South Africa would work with the Federal Government’s new military procurement policy.
He said South Africa would respect Nigeria’s new regulatory environment in the procurement of military acquisitions and capabilities.