By Emmanuel Nduka Obisue
A tragic sequence of events in Borno State, Northeastern Nigeria, has raised fresh questions about command failures, communication lapses, and a possible ‘mole’ leaking out military operational information, as the death of Brigadier General M. Uba continues to reverberate across the country.
Heritage Times HT recalls that the senior officer who until his death, commanded 25 Brigade of the Nigerian Army, last week Friday ran into an ISWAP ambush in the Damboa–Biu corridor while returning from a “successful routine patrol within the fringes of Sambisa Forest”. Uba was said to have successfully manoeuvred his men out of the ambush after his ground troops unknowingly advanced into an area laced with explosives. With insurgents closing in, he reportedly ordered a tactical withdrawal and urgently called for close air support.
Soon, the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) aircraft were redeployed, dispersing the attackers and enabling soldiers and members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) to regroup.
But the operation took a disturbing turn after the commander, separated from his unit, spent several hours alone in the bush, hiding and waiting for extraction. From that concealed position, he established contact with senior officers, confirmed his safety via WhatsApp video call, and even shared his live location to guide rescuers. “Are they going to pick me or direct me on where to go to? My battery is 31%. Once I See AC I can raise my peak cap. Let them hover around, they’ll see me,” his Whatsapp chat with the rescue team seen by Heritage Times HT, read.
A Rescue That Never Came In Time
Despite establishing communication, the officer remained isolated far longer than expected.
In a bid to dispel growing rumours, the Nigerian Army in a statement on Saturday by its spokesperson Lt. Col. Appolonia Anele, insisted that Gen. Uba was never captured by ISWAP terrorists, stating that he already “fought through” the ambush with his troops, and has led the “back to base”.
Security experts have since asked pointed questions around how his real-time location which became available, was not acted upon swiftly, why it took so long to launch a rescue, why NAF air assets – capable of reaching any point in Nigeria with the speed of light, failed to get to him before the insurgents did.
Questions have also been asked on why a senior commander was relying on unsecured messaging apps like Whatsapp in a live combat zone. Findings by Heritage Times HT from Engineering AT Meta indicated that while the Whatsapp platform has an ‘end-to-end encryption’, its calls can be tracked when the IP/location is known, with spywares like Pegasus and others.
“If a ragtag group of militants in bathroom slippers can consistently outmaneuver, ambush, and neutralize high-ranking officers… then the issue is no longer “bandits”. It’s infiltration. It’s people with access feeding coordinates, routes, and timing. Somebody with power is either: Helping them and definitely Profiting from the chaos. Nigeria’s security failures are too precise and too repeated to be random. And until we admit that, we’ll keep blaming the foot soldiers while the real operators hide in plain sight,” one ‘captainKayode’ wrote on X, fomerly Twitter on Tuesday.
Author and Investigative Journalist, David Hundeyin who also took to X to express concern, asked, “More importantly, who has the intelligence network and military capacity to put the drop on a whole army general? Is it really just a group of dusty, AK-47 wielding, rubber-slippers-wearing “Islamist militants” who haven’t showered for weeks that achieved such a result? Whenever we wake up”… “The first thing that came to my mind when I heard that news was that this looks like the hand of Esau and the voice of Jacob. However, has Nigerian government helped her own case? We still have “repented” informants in the military. As Igbos say, remove the hand of a monkey from a soup let’s people say you are eating a human being. Nigerian government is not helping their own cause whatsoever,” OkochaCFC opined on the matter.
NAF Promises “Smarter” Air Ops
During his operational visit to the NAF Base in Maiduguri on Monday, Nigeria’s Chief of the Air Staff, CAS Air Marshal Sunday Aneke announced that the NAF is strengthening synergy with ground forces, widening precision-strike operations, and expanding intelligence-driven missions to deny terrorists any freedom of action across the theatres of operation ever again.
“We must stay on the offensive and keep taking the fight to the enemy from the air. The nation sees your sacrifice and stands behind you. Under my leadership, the NAF will fly smarter and strike harder,” he declared.
While Nigerians continue to mourn the death of Uba whose capture and subsequent elimination is the first since the insurgency began – that a General is captured and killed in battle, efforts made to the Army Directorate of Public Relations for update on the matter proved abortive, as calls and messages put through by our Correspondent were not responded to as at the time of writing this report.
