The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Christopher Musa, has revealed that military personnel are paid N50,000 as monthly salary while he and other officers, regardless of rank, are paid N1,200 daily as operation allowance.
He disclosed this while speaking about the welfare of soldiers on Channels TV on Tuesday. “The issue of cash allowance where we feed, any time we are on operations, I as a General, I am being paid N1,200 per day with my soldiers. From the first general to the last soldier, it is the same amount; that is what we manage.
My soldiers collect less than N50,000 as salary in a month. We all know the situation on the ground; my appeal is for them to have a salary that is worthy of the work they are doing; we deserve to have that so that it can encourage them to want to do more,” he said.
He, therefore, called for an increase in soldiers’ salaries, as they deserve to be paid more for the work they do, adding that although an average of 15,000 personnel has been recruited over the years, there has been no corresponding increase in the number of barracks.
He said, “If you look at the constitution, our primary responsibility is territorial integrity but if you look at the territorial integrity, it implies that charity begins at home. We can not be protecting territory and the home front is on fire and then sit back and watch.
“Over the past few years, on average, the armed forces recruited over 15,000 personnel into the system, but we are not building new barracks. We know budget has captured some of it, we need to do more, we need to renovate the old ones because they have been there for ages. My dream is for every officer and soldier to have an accommodation that he can look up and say, this is my own, this is my barracks. Because of the operations we are conducting, a lot of the officers and soldiers are out there in the field. If to say these operations are over and we too are to go back to the barracks, there wouldn’t be enough barracks for us.”
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