 The Nigerian Army has taken responsibility for Sunday's airstrike that left many villages killed and several others injured at Tudumbiri village in Cardinal State. This development was confirmed by Samua Ruan, the Cardinal State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs at the end of an emergency security meeting on Monday. The Cardinal State Government convened an emergency security meeting chaired by Deputy Governor Dr. Adiza Balarabi to discuss the incident. Let's take a listen. The Nigerian Army explained the circumstances which led to the unfortunate and unintended attack. The G.O.C. One Division, Nigerian Army Major General V.U. Okuru explained that the Nigerian Army was on a routine mission against terrorists, but unfortunately some members of the Tudumbiri community were affected. The Nigerian Army, the G.O.C. One Division, gave a significant effort in the search for and rescue efforts which were still ongoing, as dozens of things have been evacuated to Barrao Dukau Teaching Hospital by joining us live is Roy Okidebe, Security Consultant. Roy, good to have you on PlusPolitics. Thank you. It's always a pleasure. We do want to give us your understanding as a professional in the sector of what may have happened or what could have happened. Condolences first of all to members of family and co-villagers and indeed the government of Cardinal state but can we get an explanation of what may have happened? Okay, thank you for the opportunity and I cannot give an explanation for what has happened, I can give an analysis because the military has already come out to respond and they have taken responsibility for the unfortunate calamity but going from my experience as a military veteran I have seen that the best and first thing to do is investigation now I would like to draw our thoughts because I am happy with the current chief of defense staff with what he is doing so far for his strategic activities to upgrade intervention of insecurity parameters I know that there are certain discussions that will be going on in different areas right now and we need to look at a proper investigation a proper investigation should and would carry us to different pura of understanding now it is possible that we should be thinking of a proper investigation into the course of the calamity if we have such happening we must want to know is it an accident, an innocent accident or it was an intentional act then we also want to know is it a careless act or it was an unavoidable situation so when you put all of those discussions inside of the military intelligence system you will be able to know what happened, why it happened and why it should not happen again in the first place getting the military to even own up is a pleasant surprise to somebody like me ordinarily possible deniability would have been what one thought would have been the tradition of the military but coming out to accept capability that does not discount the importance of the investigative committee that you are requesting for suggesting but to you how does it sound that the military came out to own up for this at least the army came out to own up for this even before an investigative panel or committee has been set up like I told you earlier I served in Kaduna from one mechanized infantry division for about nine years from 1990 to 1999 and I was in the combat engineer's unit bomb disposal squad and I know that in the course of going for my airborne course 794 I was opportuned to fly over the states and during our jumps and the geographical spread of criminality and innocent citizens used to be very defined that you will know where criminals are, you will know where citizens are and it was also possible then to be able to tell citizens to withdraw so that the military can come in and eliminate the criminals now a lot of things happened in Nigeria that led to a breakdown of trust and understanding between the people and security agencies so the people became spies for the criminals the military themselves could not gain trust the police could not gain trust and use these people as their open source intelligence method and channels, sorry and this brought to the loop where the military need to covertly operate and if you want to do that you are scared of creating opportunities to have casualties so all of these backlog are some of the things that could not come to the public because the military could not openly reveal because you don't know where the criminals have their network to penetrate your activities like those ambushes that we have been seeing where soldiers are killed so I believe that the government coming out to take ownership and the chief of defense staff and the chief of army staff and all those military gamut coming to take ownership is to create another line of trust and relationship building with the people and I'm sure that this will increase the opportunities to route out all the criminal elements in the state and identify their trust spots of hideouts so that the military operations will be decisive we know that sometimes collateral damages or collateral calamities like these sometimes do happen but whilst you were responding to the last question you mentioned some very important intelligence assets women as in women intelligence element asset and also you know opens us intelligence that using telecoms and telecommunications equipment basic phone messages one wonders unfortunately you have served in the military before do our military agencies also function as we have we read widely from the equivalents in other parts of the world if we look at the relationship between the military and opportunities for them to generate open source intelligence and human intelligence you will understand that there must be a center of collaboration between the immigration services the DSS all other police special units deal with information on movement of persons and persons of high interest so you will see that these collaborations are very very sensitive because if you remember the case of Wadume where there was break of communication and the military and the police had an altercation that was bloody if you remember there are other cases where military convoys are ambushed so sensitivity of information exchange has grown so thick and I want to tell you that use of technology should have been a strong advantage but you remember recently where an airline that took off landed in a state where it was not its destination and that happened in Nigeria so definitely the use of intelligence via telecommunications via information technology via cyber operational activities is also possibly handicapped by our abilities in Nigeria for specific and our training curriculum abilities for our personnel so these are so many challenges that may call into our use of the web space our lack of opportunity to have our own cyber operational basis our data control incapacity for now you know all of those things we bottle up into handicapped and vulnerabilities the military is always very very concerned about protecting its personnel and sometimes in the bit to do that given what we have just portrayed now in the backdrop of the sensitivity of information sharing and the fact that some elements of community sometimes sometimes serve as intelligence getting agents for rebels and insurgents inevitably in such an environment misapps like this I am choosing my words carefully because you can explain the way the fact that 30 human lives innocent lives have been lost inevitably in the milieu of distrust in the milieu of a partner that wants to have gleaned from your responses it is almost inevitable that this this kind of misapps may happen again how would you respond to that? in operational environment there are accidents now the casualty rate for accidents is usually reduced if there was proper incident and accident investigation one challenge we have is our lack of closure proper closure and proper implementation of resolutions now we quickly start to raise committees the committees they go into investigation and they get a resolution now implementation becomes a problem now for power adventure let's use this scenario for an example power adventure it was a technology glitch and the committee now finds out that oh great let me give you one good example during the time of the Kaduna train abduction the minister made him come on TV and he said that the train was asked to run without fully implementing security details so when I saw that I was framed because we are quick to launch Nigeria air we are quick to launch a world project we are quick to launch we are not careful to implement safety and security measures that is why private security is not respected in Nigeria if you look right now we have the association of license private security in Nigeria I am a member and I see the world government of that association holding the headbed of private security in Nigeria and so many of us consult internationally and it takes us right now I am talking with so many people and we are consulting on security but will my country take from it so if you look at the expectations that we should have the opportunities to determine future occurrences then we must investigate this we must investigate those that happened before we must put in measures to reduce to the barest minimum possibilities of real occurrence once we can have possibilities of real occurrence reduced then we cannot look at human failure then we can look at upgrading the curriculum then we can look at the opportunities of exposure for personnel then we can look at the possibility of criminal intervention into the process and say was it a terrorist attempt attack so once we can dispel all of this we put the time measures implementation then we will say that occurrence tomorrow is to the barest minimum we are very discreet about the way you are making the point but any intelligent listener can glean from your remarks that you are not too optimistic that the right things are being done with the view to unraveling what may have been the cause or causes of this unfortunate misapp and apart from that one is sitting there thinking with defense taking the larger chunk of budgets in recent times in fact the newly proposed budget defense comes top so are we just sometimes throwing lousy money at some of these things without the requisite cultural change attitudinal change knowledge change operational change that are imperative for us to see a positive a positive movement of the DA let me appreciate you I can see very well that you have the spirit of discernment especially professional security spirit of discernment now there are things that we cannot say on air especially with our current level of training and liaison capabilities but one thing is sure I appreciate your last question the defense budget that we talk about most times if it is deployed towards procurement and equipment it's also usually a failure because I used to tell people if you come to America here now you will see that the motivation of the troops the welfare of the troops and the other paraphernalias like health education for their kids accommodation and the care for veterans when you exit those are the people that are going to hold the gun going to fly the jet fighter going to operate the drones sitting in a military so if you look at your defense budget and you generate your priorities towards procurement procurement procurement then you have already started to fail now let me come back to where I want to agree with you that I was trying to cut off some things let me open up some areas now if you look at the military military operation have civilian casualties why? because there is the possibility and the reality that the criminal elements being sought after live within the civilian entities the operation, the hibernate cohabit and if that is the case do you deploy military? because if you cut the enemy we have to go now we really have to go thank you very much quite an interesting engagement looking forward to another opportunity with you I think your intellectual persona apart from your expertise is very stimulating thank you thank you sir