Ex-military officers angry with Adamu, NDA cigarette seller

There are indications that a number of retired top military officers have been discomforted by a story of a local cigarette seller, Mallam Adamu Sule popularly known as mallam Sule in the military circle, who gave details of how a number of military officers as cadets at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), Kaduna, were collecting garri on credit from him for their sustenance during the course.
Speaking to the Daily Sun in Kano , at the weekend, a former military intelligence officer in the Army, Captain Sagir Mohammed (rtd.) refuted the claims of Adamu, who had relived his experience as a cigarette and garri seller at the NDA for 40 years.
Among those he claimed to have had personal experiences with include General Adeyinka Adebayo, Joe Garba, the Chief of Army Staff, General Danbazau, John Inienger, and Major Dangiwa Umar.
Expressing the displeasure of some of former officers, Mohammed explained that, “First and foremost, the aim of the NDA is to produce junior officers who would form the background of leaders of the military institution. So you are trained to think like an officer. That is why anything that is not in tandem with military discipline or its defined doctrines is not tolerated at the NDA. For us to see a publication that denigrates these values, that raises doubts on the integrity of some of the officers mentioned is to say the least disheartening.”
He said that the kind of insinuations made against some of the officers whose names were mentioned by the garri seller, such as John Inienger, General Salisu Ibrahim , Col Umar goes a long way to show the real intention behind the publication.
“These officers have passed through the NDA and most of them had excelled in issues of discipline, morality and the various tests of their competence. NDA gave them flags of honour and valor. Some of them fought the civil war successfully; some of them commanded the army. Some of them were state governors and proved themselves as quintessential leaders. Hence, a publication demeaning these officers must have been in bad light”
Some of the offensive portions of the narrative included where Adamu stated that every other cadet who passed through the NDA at a time must have collected cigarettes on credit from him.
Hear him again: “I have the belief that every cadet that passed through the NDA then collected items on credit from me. I used to stay beyond 12 noon when the cadets used to finish their puttee and rush to my shop to collect things like garri and sugar. I remember the day Col. Dangiwa Umar (rtd) rushed to my shop in the night with tears and hunger ravishing his stomach and no money in his pocket. He introduced himself as the son of the Wazirin Gwandu and that he was very hungry. I then gave him garri.”
But Mohammed noted that the accounts of the cigarettes seller cannot be true, adding that by the man’s own admission, he was not educated or informed enough as at the time of these encounters. “For this same man who had to be supported to keep records of his petty transactions to have transformed several times to be in a position to give us this kind of narrative, with precise technical names for military concepts simply tells us one thing, that he was only being used by some persons to embarrass his former colleagues and the material text of the interview must have been packaged elsewhere for him to just plant his picture. Or something close to that”.
He added that already, some of them had confronted the man on account of his claims, adding that surprisingly, the man responded that he only sold cigarettes to the cadets at the NDA and there was never a time that he sold garri to them.