A former Chief of Army Staff, General Ishola Williams (rtd), has said that he would have preferred being from a different country other than Nigeria.
General Williams who joined the military in 1964 rose through the ranks to become the commandant of Army Signals, Commander of Training and Doctrine (TRADOC) and Chief of Defence Training and Planning, from where he left the Army in July 1993.
In an interview with Trust TV’s Reminiscences, the former Head of Nigeria Army said he would have preferred to be born a Namibian and not a Nigerian, because it is small but organised.
Recounting his past days, he said he left the army without any plan and with empty bank account even when he needed money to run a non-governmental organisation.
He said, “I think I left on November 20 or so, 1993 and had to decide what I was going to do with myself. I left without any plan or preparation, even with an empty bank account.
“Some people tried to help me. Somebody gave me a car but there was too much wahala with it, so I had to dump it and started taking public transport.
“People offered me an office where I could sit and work for some time, while some people were trying to encourage me to be in business.
One of them was trying to encourage me to be a cement distributor but I had to deposit a huge amount of money.
But I had a single naira bank account, so how could I deposit a huge amount of money? There were many others like that.
“Painfully, a few people in the North were ready to encourage me to engage in contracts, but my own people in the South asked where I was when my colleagues were making money.
I already had it at the back of my mind that I was going to run a non-governmental organisation, but I needed money to do it.
So, I told myself that if I could get a contract I could use what I got to run the organisation. I was not interested in business for the sake of making profit. That’s how I started running this organisation.
“We were doing projects, but to get people to account for the money and deliver up to the standard expected of them, even as professors, was challenging; only very few complied. Some died without accounting for the money, up to the point that I was taken to court.”
He recalled how members of the NGO he worked with insisted that “Next time I will come as a Namibian, not a Nigerian!”
