THE WARNING from the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) on Thursday, September 4, 2025 to military veterans to vacate the premises of the Federal Ministry of Finance, Abuja, where they have been protesting the non-payment of their demobilisation allowance, rings hollow against the backdrop of years of neglect and broken promises by successive governments.
Conveyed by the Director of Defence Media Operations, Major-General Markus Kangye, while briefing newsmen on the operations of the Armed Forces, the DHQ stated that the continued protest by the veterans lacks merit.
The ongoing veterans’ protest, NATIONAL RECORD asserts, is not an isolated incident but has become a permanent syndrome of a deep-seated and systemic failure. The handling of the Security Debarment Allowance (SDA) over time reveals a distressing pattern of obfuscation, discriminatory implementation, and a profound lack of respect for those who once bore the burden of national security.
The DHQ’s justification – that retirees from January to July 2024 cannot benefit from a new minimum wage chart implemented in late July – is a masterclass in bureaucratic pedantry. While technically coherent on paper, this defence wilfully ignores the core of the veterans’ grievances – a long-standing history of exclusion and the arbitrary creation of a two-tier system of entitlement.
The current protest over payment charts is merely the latest flare-up of a wound that has been festering for years since the President Buhari administration, as evidenced by reports of veterans’ protests dating back to at least 2022, and their letters of appeal ignored since 2020.
The heart of the crisis lies in the Ministry of Defence’s initial, and seemingly deliberate, decision to commence SDA payments only for personnel retired from November 2017 onwards. This move effectively created a discriminatory chasm between the “old” and the “new” veteran, a distinction that finds no basis in the Harmonised Terms and Conditions of Service (HTACOS) that unequivocally stipulate the allowance for all personnel on retirement or death.
To tell a soldier who fought in the Civil War, endured the horrors of peacekeeping in Liberia and Sierra Leone, or sustained life-altering injuries in the North East insurgency, the generalised banditry and other forms of criminalities in all parts of the country, that their service is less valuable – or worse, not valuable enough to warrant their full entitlements – is an intolerable betrayal of the nation’s social contract with its protectors.
The Ministry of Defence’s actions speak of a strategy of calculated delay and divisive tactics. The alleged “amortised payment” of the SDA, which veterans say renders the money useless through inflation, and the snubbing of written appeals to current ministers suggest an authority hoping the problem will simply fade away.
This is not merely an administrative oversight but a profound moral failure by the relevant authorities of State who, for obvious but unsaid reason – corruption – are one way or the other incapable of paying retired personnel their rightful allowances as and when due – at the point of exit from service.
We wish to emphasise that compensation disruption such as this, in addition to its negative impact on the psychological wellbeing of retired personnel, also adversely affect esprit de corps by signalling to serving personnel that their sacrifices too are bound to be conveniently forgotten by a broadly maladministered system. It is a harrowing paradox of a State that relies on its military for survival but fails to honour its debts to those who have served.
It is a national shame every time one is forced to watch on television enduringly haggard, poverty-stricken and ageing images of our war heroes, some nursing wounds from conflicts decades past, blockading government offices to demand what is legally and morally theirs. These soul-touching images inexorably remain damning indictment of our leadership’s unconscionably poor vision and priorities.
The veterans’ demand is not for a favour but for the fruit of their labour – a right earned through sweat and blood. Their continued mistreatment is an indelible stain on the nation’s conscience, and, if we may say, a perfect indicator of the soullessness of our leaders. Any Government that cannot honour its most basic commitments to those who laid down their lives to defend the territorial integrity of Nigeria can hardly claim to uphold the values of justice and equity for any of its citizens. This sounds a loud and clear message to young and upcoming citizens that service and sacrifice have neither place nor value in our political economy; and until this message is fundamentally rewritten through concrete action, no mantra – either of Change or Renewed Hope – will remain a phantom rhetoric and hollow.
NATIONAL RECORD, therefore, is of the unshakeable belief that the DHQ is wrong to have simply labelled the veterans’ protests as “without merit” and therefore demand their cessation. Instead, we advocate that organised labour and the progressive civil society should join the protests and escalate it beyond the gates of the Federal Ministry of Finance.
For us, the onus is not on the veterans to vacate the premises of the Federal Ministry of Finance, but rather on the Tinubu Administration to vacate this odious culture of government indifference and seeming lack of empathy.
We are also of the view that a lasting solution to this institutional indolence and indifference must come to end if we are ready and committed to moving our society beyond this crass and primitive tendency to one to is ready to embrace decency and civility as provided for in international conventions and charters as proclaimed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations (UN).
To achieve this requires more than a temporary placation by resolving the current impasse with military veterans; it demands a transparent and comprehensive review through a thorough and genuine engagement on how to permanently end this endemic dehumanisation of not only our veterans but also everyone who had served the nation in one way or the other.
