Soldiers Wives Defy Military Orders,Storm Army Barrack To Protest Husbands Deployment

Wives of soldiers yesterday protested the deployment of their husbands to take on Boko Haram insurgents in areas said to have been captured by the terrorist group.
The women numbering over 100, caused pandemonium at the entrance of the 21 Armoured Brigade of the Nigeria Army, Giwa Barracks, Maiduguri, insisting that there was no way their husbands would be allowed to leave their homes to go to the hotspots to take on the terrorists with the inferior weapons they were given.
This was the second time such protest would take place in the last 24 hours as the wives of soldiers at the Maimalari Barracks, within Maiduguri had protested for the same reason a day earlier.
The women, who did not allow movement into the barracks, insisted that engaging the insurgents with the kind of weapons made available to the soldiers was nothing short of a suicide mission.
When journalists visited the barracks yesterday 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 stand the ones by Boko Haram.”
One of the women who spoke to journalists on condition of anonymity, said: “Those who their breadwinners 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 are 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 fighting equipment in order to wage the war against insurgents, as promised by the President and Commander-in-Chief in his recent address during the fundraising to assist the victims of Boko Haram insurgency headed by Gen. T. Y. Danjuma (rtd)
Many highly placed individuals including the Borno State Governor, Alhaji Kashim Shettima, had complained that the Boko Haram terrorists have sophisticated weapons and are better motivated than the Nigerian military, which the military authorities later denied.