Retired Major General Henry Ayoola, a former commander of Operation Safe Haven, responded to the argument that the 16 soldiers slain in the Delta state hamlet of Okuama shouldn’t have interfered with the internal conflict. He disregarded discussions on whether the military should have intervened in the intercommunal conflict. He emphasized how serious the youth’s egregious conduct of beheading troops who were on duty was. He said that such boldness could not be justified or forgiven, especially in light of the sacrifices these troops had made for the good of all Nigerians.
He defended the military’s intervention as he stated that in such circumstances in Okuama, the commanding officers are compelled to proactively address potential threats before they escalate. He highlighted the widespread presence of military operations in virtually every state. He stated that this pervasive militarization signifies a departure from normalcy, indicating that the capacities of civil enforcement agencies have been surpassed by the prevailing challenges.
He said in an interview with Channels TV, ”Let’s look at it realistically. The truth of the matter is that our nation is not in a normal state. I mean virtually every state in the country today has one military operation or the other. It tells you that we are not in a normal state. So when people begin to say maybe the military shouldn’t have intervened, they are not being sincere. We have all these operations across the states and it means we have crossed that threshold of what the normal civil enforcement agencies can handle.
It must be in this kind of situation that the commanding officer will have found a way of nipping an obvious boiling issue that will eventually escalate. So they tried to pre-emptively go to try to tackle it that way. But those are not the issues right now. It doesn’t even matter if a mistake was made. The temerity of some Youths to behead soldiers on duty, there is no excuse for that audacity. These are people who have laid down their lives for the benefit of the rest, that level of temerity should not be tolerated and it should not be explained that it shouldn’t have been the military job.”
