The House of Representatives has assured the Nigerian Air force of its continuous support with regard to the fighting of crime in Nigeria.
Making this pledge was the chairman, House Committee on Air Force, Shehu Koko who alongside with other members of the committee paid an oversight visit to the headquarters of the Nigerian Air Force.
We are here on an assessment visit to know the level of work done by the force and to commend the Nigeria Air force for making use of the fund in their disposal judiciously,” Koko said.
He commended the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal, Sadique Abubakar, as well as officers and men of the force for their continuous efforts in making research, capacity and weapons development.
The Chairman assured the NAF that the Committee would do everything within its power to address some of the teething challenges confronting the Service with regard to operational effectiveness.
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In his response, Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar urged the Committee to work towards increasing the budget of the Force to enable it with its obligations.
He thanked the Committee for taking out time to tour the NAF Units on oversight visit
He disclosed how the young pilots in Maiduguri, were extremely excited to have the members of the National Assembly in Maiduguri to see first-hand what they were doing. He however hoped that, from time to time, the Committee would be available to interact more with the young pilots. This, he said, would go a long way to boost their morale.
The CAS expressed his gratitude to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, President Muhammadu Buhari, the entire National Assembly members and the House Committee on Air Force, and for their continued support to the NAF which had enabled the induction of 22 brand new aircraft into the Service in the last 5 years.
According to him, “the last time the NAF had this huge number of aircraft inducted into the Service, was in the 1980s. We are also expecting 17 more aircraft, including 12 Super Tucano. Six of these aircraft have so far been produced and some of our pilots and technicians are currently undergoing training in the USA so as to effectively man the aircraft, which are expected to arrive in Nigeria by the second quarter of 2021”.
According to him, “If you look at Nigeria, where we have conflicts; the Northeast, the North central the Northwest, we are talking about an area of about 705,000 square kilometers. How do you keep an eye on every inch of that land to ensure that insecurity will not thrive, and some of these areas are not accessible to our ground troops. The only way of covering that huge space, including forests, is to have adequate number of serviceable aircraft to give the desired result. That is why we are concentrating on capacity building. We have trained quite a large number of pilots and are expecting some that are currently undergoing training outside the Country. We have also enhanced our capacity to train our pilots in Kaduna. Before 2015, we had only 3 trainer aircraft. Now, we have 15 that conduct training which has made our training faster and easier”, the CAS said.
Speaking on the efforts of the NAF in the area of Force Protection, the CAS stated that deliberate steps had been taken to build the capacity of Regiment and Special Forces (SF) personnel. “In the past, we had inadequate number of Regiment and SF personnel. Whenever there were Internal Security (IS) challenges in Nigeria and the NAF was tasked to support other security agencies, we had to deploy technicians and others for such assignments. What we have simply done is to scale up the training for the SF elements and deploy them for IS instead of the technicians who are now allowed to carry on with their aircraft maintenance activities. This has impacted positively on our serviceability status. In 2015, the NAF’s serviceability status ranged between 33 and 35% and today we have a status within the range of 83 – 84% because our technicians are no longer involved in IS duties. We have our SF elements in strategic places around the Country and they are deployed for IS, whenever we are called upon”, Air Marshal Abubakar stated.
