ARMS PROCUREMENT BTW NIGERIA/SOUTH AFRICA TO BE GUIDED BY BILATERAL AGREEMENT.
The Federal government said on Thursday that henceforth, acquisition of military platforms and equipment for the Nigerian Armed Forces from South Africa will be guided by a government to government procedure.
This is part of resolutions reached at the end of a two-day meeting of the Nigeria-South Africa Defence Committee (DEFCOM) held in Abuja between July 20th and 21st 2016.
Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence Amb. Danjuma Sheni and his South African counterpart, Dr Sam Gulube both confirmed the resolution at the end of the committee’s deliberations on Thursday at the ministry of Defence.
The two country’s officials said the relevant agencies in both countries would work on fine-tuning the procedures with a view to making hardware acquisition faster and hitch-free.
Amb. Sheni explained that the discussions were based on considerations that were beneficial to both South Africa and Nigeria adding that other areas of the planned new military pact with South Africa included training and technology transfer in the areas of space technology and military medicine.
His words, “We have agreed on certain agenda items including but not limited to issues of military training, platform acquisitions; vehicles mainly for our military establishment.
“We have emphasized in our discussions that given our level of security threats the acquisition of military hardware and platforms would be fast tracked with our South African brothers.
“In that context, we have also agreed that a technical team consisting of our experts from the various services will within a very short time go to South Africa to ascertain our requirements and needs.
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“In the overall military relationship, we emphasized the new procurement policy of the Nigerian government which is based on government to government procurement.
“We agreed that this new procurement procedure will be our guiding principle in the processes we intend to engage in,’’ Sheni said.
He added that cooperation and collaboration in the area of space development which would be private sector driven and military medicine featured prominently in the deliberations.
South Africa’s Dr Sam Gulube on his part assured that country would work with the Federal Government’s new military procurement policy.
His words, “The meetings we have had over the past two days cover the areas of training; we have been able to identify a number of training opportunities that are available here in Nigeria and in South Africa.
“We also looked at the area of military acquisitions and capabilities, we learned of various regulatory environments that exist in Nigeria especially with the new government with specific policies that guide the procurement of such military capabilities.
“We are happy to inform that such acquisition on the part of Nigeria would now be governed by government to government agreement.
“I promise that when I get back to South Africa I will be facilitating such government to government military acquisition programme.
“This is to enable Nigeria attend to the urgent need of enhancing the capability of the Nigerian Armed Forces to address the various security challenges confronting Nigeria” he said.
Gulube allayed fears that the new Nigeria-South Africa defence pact would be beneficial to one party, stressing that both countries had a lot to learn and gain from one another especially in the areas of capacity building.
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