A NATION NEGLECTS ITS VETERANS AT ITS PERIL

Veterans’ welfare is an investment in present and future national security, writes K BOLANLE ATI-JOHN

On 19 August 2026, Nigeria witnessed an encounter that should never be dismissed as an ordinary pension protest. Military veterans seeking the implementation of consequential adjustments to their pensions attempted to reach the Ministry of Defence in Abuja. Media reports and available footage show serving military personnel, police officers and other security operatives forming a security cordon that prevented the veterans from assembling directly before the ministry.

The symbolism was deeply troubling. Today’s soldiers were positioned between yesterday’s soldiers and the institution responsible for honouring their service.

The veterans were not an invading force approaching a military objective. They were former servicemen peacefully seeking pension adjustments which they say arise from recent increases in the remuneration of serving personnel. Yet men who had once defended the state found themselves confronting the security architecture of that same state merely to have their grievances heard.

The more direct service basis for the veterans’ claim lies in the Harmonised Terms and Conditions of Service for the Armed Forces of Nigeria. Chapter 22 places military pensions and gratuities under the Armed Forces Pensions Act and provides that their computation should be based on the full Consolidated Armed Forces Salary Structure. The protesting veterans therefore argue that an upward revision of the salary structure for serving personnel should carry a corresponding adjustment to existing military pensions. Otherwise, earlier retirees would remain tied to an obsolete salary structure while personnel retiring after the increase receive substantially higher pensions for equivalent ranks and years of service. Their demand is therefore not for a discretionary favour, but for the consistent application of the military’s own conditions of service across serving and retired generations.

Following the protest, the defence authorities said the veterans’ concerns were receiving attention. The Chief of Defence Staff reportedly stated that the pension exercise was intended to be inclusive and that implementation was ongoing, while the Ministry of Defence promised continued engagement towards a fair and sustainable resolution. Those assurances are welcome. They do not, however, answer the question the incident actually raises: why must veterans repeatedly resort to public protest before established welfare concerns receive visible urgency?

Veterans’ welfare is commonly discussed as a pension, humanitarian or ceremonial matter. That understanding is dangerously incomplete. The treatment of veterans affects military morale, institutional loyalty, recruitment, retention, force cohesion and operational readiness. It can also determine whether a country retains the strategic value of its former personnel or permits economic hardship and institutional alienation to create vulnerabilities that hostile actors may exploit.

Veterans’ welfare is therefore not merely an obligation arising from the past. It is an investment in present and future national security.

Military service is not an ordinary employment relationship. The state requires military personnel to surrender freedoms enjoyed by other citizens, obey lawful commands, endure repeated separation from their families and accept the possibility of injury, disability or death.

In return, an enduring covenant is created. The serviceman undertakes to defend the nation, while the nation undertakes not to abandon him when his active usefulness has ended.

Pensions and other retirement benefits are not charity. They are deferred compensation for service already rendered and risks already carried. A veteran asking for an entitlement arising from applicable pension provisions is not seeking political patronage. He is asking the state to honour its side of an established covenant.

The human consequences are immediate. Many veterans live with chronic injuries, illnesses and psychological wounds, including post-traumatic stress disorder, often arising from prolonged deployments and exposure to combat. Veterans’ representatives say that some can no longer afford essential medicines, specialist consultations or sustained mental-health care, and that colleagues continue to die prematurely while their welfare claims remain unresolved. To the bureaucracy, this may appear to be a delayed calculation. To the veteran, it may mean the difference between filling a prescription and going without treatment. Where a veteran’s income determines access to medication and care, delayed adjustment is no longer merely a financial matter. It can become a matter of survival.

When that covenant is broken, the effects do not remain confined to the retired community. Every serving soldier, rating and airman observes how those who came before them are treated. They understand that retirement is not an abstract condition. It is their own approaching future, and every person who stood behind that security cordon on 19 August was looking at a possible version of himself in ten, twenty or thirty years.

Military effectiveness rests on more than weapons, platforms and numerical strength. It also depends upon confidence: that personnel believe in their commanders, their institutions and the country whose interests they are ordered to defend, and that sacrifice will not be forgotten once the uniform is removed.

The strategic chain is straightforward: veterans’ welfare shapes institutional trust; trust influences morale and cohesion; morale and cohesion affect operational effectiveness; operational effectiveness determines national security.

A country that weakens confidence in the future welfare of its military personnel may eventually struggle to attract and retain capable people, and families will become reluctant to encourage their children into a profession that demands extraordinary sacrifice without credible protection afterwards. Poor veterans’ welfare can therefore degrade the quality of the future force long before the consequences become visible on the battlefield.

The overwhelming majority of veterans remain disciplined, patriotic and law-abiding even under severe hardship, and their conduct during the Abuja protest was exactly that. Nothing here should be read as portraying Nigerian veterans as a threat to their country. The danger lies elsewhere: in what prolonged neglect does to the small minority at the margins, and in what that means for national planning.

Veterans are not an ordinary distressed population. They carry operational knowledge, leadership experience, technical skills and strong professional networks in intelligence, communications, engineering, logistics, weapons and strategic planning. These are national assets when veterans remain respected, engaged and productively integrated. They may become national vulnerabilities if prolonged deprivation and institutional alienation leave even a small minority susceptible to exploitation by the criminal networks, insurgencies and armed groups Nigeria already confronts.

Two episodes illustrate the structural risk, not as predictions for Nigeria but as evidence of a pattern history has repeated across very different political contexts. After the First World War, German veterans returning to economic collapse and national humiliation swelled the Freikorps and allied paramilitary formations. Hundreds of thousands of men became involved in such formations, elements of which later fed the Sturmabteilung. After 2003, the dissolution of Iraq’s armed forces displaced hundreds of thousands of trained personnel with no income or place in the new order. Subsequent assessments found reintegration efforts insufficient to prevent some from joining the insurgency.

Neither case argues that grievance causes disloyalty. Both show that when states allow trained personnel to become alienated and economically desperate, the capability those personnel carry does not disappear. It becomes available to whoever offers it purpose. This is not an accusation against veterans. It is the logic of preventive security: a serious state closes foreseeable vulnerabilities before adversaries exploit them.

The proper response is not to regard veterans with suspicion. It is to recognise them as a continuing reserve of national capability. Nigeria’s veterans collectively hold decades of experience in command, peacekeeping, intelligence, maritime operations, logistics, engineering, medicine and crisis management, from the Civil War generation through ECOMOG veterans of Liberia and Sierra Leone to those who have fought terrorism and insurgency at home.

A serious national veterans’ policy would preserve and mobilise this knowledge rather than let it lapse into grievance. Concretely, that means:

Predictable pension reviews and adjustments implemented whenever changes to the Armed Forces salary structure and the applicable military pension framework require them, not only after protest; Reliable healthcare and disability support, administered without a second bureaucratic battle;

Transition training and employment programmes that convert military skill into civilian livelihood;

Structured reserve and advisory roles, including mentorship, military education, strategic research and emergency planning, that keep veterans within the institutional family rather than outside it.

No veteran should have to fight a second battle against bureaucracy to receive what was earned in the first. And no policy that only reacts to demonstrations will ever close this gap. The calculation, funding and communication of adjustments must happen before veterans are forced onto the street to demand them.

Nigeria must stop treating veterans’ affairs as a residual welfare responsibility. Veterans’ welfare belongs within the national security architecture alongside recruitment, training, equipment and operational readiness because a country cannot credibly ask its military for unlimited sacrifice while offering uncertain protection afterwards. Serving and retired personnel are not competing communities; they are successive generations of the same institution.

This is also a matter of how Nigeria is read from outside. Foreign governments and adversaries do not measure national power only by troop counts and defence budgets. They ask whether a state can sustain the people upon whom its security depends. A government that leaves consequential pension adjustments unresolved for more than a year while sustaining the official convoys, residences and allowances of political office cannot plausibly plead scarcity.

If restraint were shared, delay might be understood as the cost of a genuine emergency. When restraint falls only on those who served while privilege is preserved for those who govern, the problem is no longer scarcity. It is a question of priorities, and it invites both domestic resentment and international doubt about Nigeria’s strategic seriousness.

The Abuja protest should be understood as more than a disagreement over pension calculations. It was an institutional warning, delivered with remarkable restraint by people who had already given much of their lives to the nation. The responsibility that restraint has earned now sits with the state: give effect to the applicable military pension framework, resolve and implement the consequential adjustment, and build the anticipatory system of automatic reviews, transition support and structured reserve roles that makes the next protest unnecessary.

Caring for veterans is not charity, patronage or ceremonial gratitude. It is a legally grounded obligation and an indispensable component of security policy. A nation that neglects its veterans does more than dishonour its past. It tells everyone still serving exactly what their own future is worth.

Rear Admiral Ati-John (Rtd) is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Defence College, Abuja, and writes from Lagos.