Army chief Waidi Shaibu has told senior personnel that sharper training routines and deliberate career mapping are the only routes to a force that can outthink today's threats. Speaking on Tuesday through Maj.-Gen. Aminu Garba at the maiden Army Headquarters Department of Personnel Management Career Planning Seminar in Abuja, the COAS said modern battlefields reward armies that anticipate rather than react. He hinged his command philosophy on "how well we manage and develop our personnel," insisting that postings must match competence, skills and mission needs. Digitalising soldiers' records, already under way, will end the opacity that has long dogged deployments, he added.
Maj.-Gen. Adewale Adekeye, overseeing personnel, admitted that bungled Confidential Evaluation Reports have stalled promotions for years. Established in 2023 from the merger of the Central Army Records Office and the Directorate of Manning, his department is racing to upload Harmonised Terms and Conditions of Service online and teach troops how to guard their CER folders. The three-day seminar will also walk participants through resettlement planning, military law, insurance and the career damage wrought by substance abuse.
Shaibu's admission that soldiers have been shoved into slots they are not trained for is a rare acknowledgement that the Army has been fighting an insurgency with a posting system that still operates like a civil-service lottery. When competence is secondary, casualties rise and public trust erodes.
The timing matters: the same week the COAS spoke, Borno communities are again counting losses to ISWAP raids. A military that cannot guarantee the right squad arrives at the right battlefield leaves civilians paying the price in graves and ransom. Adekeye's revelation that bungled paperwork alone has truncated careers shows how administrative sloth bleeds into battlefield weakness.
For the corporal in Maiduguri who has spent five years in a signals unit despite graduating top of his infantry class, the seminar is either a real promise of merit-based postings or another PowerPoint ritual. If digital records truly replace the brown-envelope culture, his next promotion board will test the system; if not, the best minds will keep leaving for private security gigs where skills decide pay.
This push to professionalise personnel management mirrors the Navy's recent centralised promotion exams and the Air Force's new performance dashboard. Service chiefs seem to have realised that buying new platforms is pointless when the wrong hands are steering them.
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