The leading challenger for the Nigerian presidency, Muhammadu Buhari, has vowed to defeat Boko Haram insurgents in the north of the country by providing government forces with better equipment, more training and more accurate intelligence.

Buhari, a former military leader, said if the government of President Goodluck Jonathan had deployed the same resources to fighting Boko Haram as it had to political ends, the army would have rescued the more than 270 schoolgirls abducted by the extremist movement in Chibok last April.

Buhari’s party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), has claimed that more than twice the number of security forces were deployed to Ekiti state last year during a heavily disputed regional election than were sent into battle against Boko Haram.

“This clearly indicates to us that the government’s priority is to rig elections, not to secure the country,” Buhari said at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London on Thursday.

He severely criticised comments made by Nigeria’s national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki, at the same venue in January, in which he blamed the army’s defeats at the hands of Boko Haram on cowardice in the ranks.

“The fact that the Nigerian military is labelled as cowards by the national security adviser here in Chatham House is professionally most unfortunate,” Buhari told the Guardian in an interview.

“I as a retired general, and a former head of state, have always known about our soldiers. They are capable, they are well-trained and patriotic and always ready to do their duty to the service of their country,” he said. “You can bear witness to the gallantry of our military in Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur and many other parts of the world, but in the matter of the insurgency our soldiers have neither received the necessary support nor the required incentives to tackle this problem.”

He added: “We believe that there is faulty intelligence and analysis. They ought to know [the location of] the Chibok girls, who have been abducted for more than 10 months now.”

He said the Nigerian parliament had been thwarted in its attempts to find out what had happened to the “trillions of naira” allocated to defence procurement. He called it “a big disgrace” that the army could not secure the 14 local government districts lost to Boko Haram.

In recent weeks the insurgents have been pushed back but Buhari questioned claims by the Nigerian army chief that the war was almost over. “Go as the international press and verify what they have claimed,” Buhari said. He also alluded to the fact that much of the military success on the ground against Boko Haram has been achieved by Chadian troops.

“The government has not made any effort towards a multi-dimensional response to this problem, leading to a situation in which we have become dependent on our neighbours to come to our rescue,” Buhari said.

He claimed that if he was elected in the closely contested presidential elections on 28 March, “the world will have no cause to worry about Nigeria. It will be able to help itself”.

He said: “Nigeria will return to its stabilising role in west Africa and no inch of Nigerian territory will ever be lost to the enemy because we will pay attention to the welfare of our soldiers in and out of service. We will give them adequate and modern arms and ammunition to work with. We will improve intelligence-gathering and border patrols.”

The election has already been postponed by six weeks because of security problems, but Buhari said he would oppose any further extensions.

He was speaking at Chatham House as rival crowds of government and opposition supporters chanted on the streets outside. Buhari’s presence in London has become a burning political issue in Nigeria after his critics claimed that the 72-year-old former soldier, who ran a two-year military government after a 1983 coup, was too old and frail to run the government.

“After visiting 35 states and holding town hall meetings in Lagos, in Kano, in Abuja, and then having forced on me six weeks of holidays, I have come away from Nigeria to have some relative peace. That’s what brought me here,” he said, denying any health problems.



His aides said he was due to return to Nigeria over the weekend.