Nigeria’s Military ranked 4th in Africa, 44th best in the World – Report

US firm Global Fire Power just unveiled its 2019 ranking of the most powerful armies in the world. The ranking put Nigeria at the 4th in Africa out of 34 countries, and 44th in the world.

Africa’s top 5 military powers are Egypt (12th in the world), Algeria (23rd in the world), South Africa (33rd), Nigeria (44th), Angola (48th) and Ethiopia (51st in the world).

Egypt has the most powerful military in the continent and the twelfth globally (out of 137 countries) with a score of 0.2283. With more than 211 jet fighters, Egypt is the ninth world’s air power while Nigeria has 8 in its arsenal.

Nigeria is credited with 120,000 (Est.) total military personnel, 77, 108, 499 available manpower (ahead of Russia and Japan with 69,640, 160 and 53, 873,803 available manpower respectively), those fit for service stood at 43, 180,760, citizens reaching military age stands at 3,454,461.

Out of the total military personnel, 120, 000 are active while none are reserved, the reports stated.

The African top 5 is immediately followed by Angola (6^th in Africa and 58^th in the world) that lost its 2018 place to Ethiopia but is ahead of Morocco with a score of 0.8154.

Morocco has the 7^th military power in Africa (61^st in the world) with a score of 0.8244. It is followed by Sudan (with a score of 1.0051), the DRC (a score of 1.0631) and Libya (a score of 1.2349).

Let’s note that the global firepower ranking is based on five criteria namely, the number of serving military members, the naval force, fuel availability for military operations, the number of jet fighters, the defence budget and logistics flexibility.

According to this “power index”, the perfect score should be 0.0000 which is, in fact, impossible to attain. The farther a country is from this score, the lower it is in the index. The index does not take nuclear power into account and does not penalize landlocked countries that have no naval powers.

Let’s also note that many countries made significant progress. For instance, Côte d’Ivoire, the 21^st military power in Africa jumped to the 104^th place in the world (119^th in 2018) while Mali (18^th in Africa) slashed the 99^th place. The world top 5 are the USA, Russia, China, India and France.

2019 African power index according to the Global Fire Power