Terrorists will no longer move freely to slaughter citizens - NAF

The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) on Wednesday said that Boko Haram terrorists would no longer be allowed to move freely to slaughter citizens or capture military units in the North-East.

The Chief of Air Staff (CAS), AVM Sadique Abubakar, gave the assurance in Abuja while delivering his remark at a 2-day seminar on Standards and Evaluation, organised by NAF.

The theme of the seminar is: "The Imperative of Standards and Evaluation in the Nigerian Air Force’’.

According to him, NAF remains totally committed to global best practices even in the present war against insurgency and will strive to provide the enabling environment for national development.

"So far, the air operations in the North-East are creating the enabling environment for the army to move unhindered in the conduct of their operation.

"We have substantially degraded the capacity of the terrorists to move freely in Toyota Hilux vehicles ravaging villages and murdering innocent citizens.

"God willing, they will never move freely again to slaughter our citizens or capture our military units.

Abubakar said that NAF regarded safety as a core function and as such it would strive to develop, implement, maintain and constantly review its safety strategies to ensure that operations were conducted with acceptable risk level.

He said that the Standard and Evaluation Branch was one of the most important branches in the NAF.

"Because once you have a sound standard and evaluation branch, people would operate according to standard.

"This will prevent us from running into problems of safety, because people will be operating according to the laid down regulations of safety, especially at times such as now when you have scarcity of resources.

"We cannot afford to lose anything, whether our pilot or equipment," he said.

The CAS said that the NAF would promote collaboration with Nigerian Universities and research agencies with a view to giving additional boost to its efforts at research and development.

"We have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with 15 Nigerian universities; right now as I speak to you we are working on an issue with Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria.

"We are trying to invite these universities for us to see how we can partner with them, especially as regards maintenance of our helicopters and other machines.

"We cannot continue to rely on foreign vendors. Within the Nigerian universities, we have people that are competent; all we need to do is to get them, partner with them and solve our problems."

On the recent NAF Helicopter crash in Kaduna, Abubakar said, " I don't want to preempt the report, we have set up a board to look at what really happened with regards to the crash in Kaduna.

"But what I can tell you is that the standard and evaluation branch is working round the clock to ensure that we operate within those standards and very soon, we will have a clear picture of what really happened," he said.

The CAS, however, urged the standard and evaluation branch to sensitise all stakeholders on how to properly maintain the equipment, personnel and assets entrusted to them in order to derive maximum value from them.