The first part of this treatise was written exactly twenty two years ago after the military annulled the freest and fairest presidential in the nation’s history. In that first installment, this columnist cautioned the military that its historic and professional expertise lay in a coup against the state which is usually a brisk and lightning affair ending in a matter of hours rather than a coup against political society which is often a messy and protracted affair ending in humiliation and disgrace. Five tragic years after, the military withdrew to the barracks in humiliation and disgrace.
With the clinical dismissal of the ranking echelons of the Nigerian Armed Forces this week, retired General Mohammadu Buhari has completed perhaps the most difficult aspect of regime transition from entrenched incumbency to nascent but determined opposition. Nigerians are yet to accept the scary extent of the institutional damage inflicted on the nation by the departed Jonathan administration, but It is a measure of how low our military has fallen in public esteem that nobody of note protested or regretted the summary retirement.
If anything, there were a lot of people who felt that the retirement came a bit late. Such was the wide revulsion with and the contempt for the departed military chieftains that the public openly rejoiced at what they considered a belated departure. Nobody wept for the military kingpins. They had clearly overstayed their welcome.
This column is not interested in excoriating individual officers over what is a deep systemic, structural and institutional failure. The army, in the last instance, is as good as the society which throws it up and of which it is only an organic manifestation. Like the nation itself, the army has occasionally flirted with suicide. At the last moment when darkness is all but visible, Nigeria’s legendary luck always ensures that there is a ray of light and a window of opportunity.
Only once did the luck fail, in the epic events leading to the civil war when the army completely fractured along ethnic, religious and regional lines. It is a measure of the unresolved National Question that ever since, the nation itself has survived in a precarious luminal existence with its old demons relentlessly stalking.
A deeper organic crisis is usually in progress whenever all the major institutions of the state are simultaneously and concurrently in crisis. In such circumstances and in more cohesive nations, the military as the most national and nationalist institution, acts as the principal bulwark of the realm. But in a situation where the military becomes the butt of rude and derisive jokes and are held in deep contempt by the populace, a major national disaster is in the offing. Often, it is as a result of failure in a national project.
This time around, the army truly scraped the bottom of the barrel. Having failed in its principal duty and responsibility of defending the territorial integrity of the nation, the army resorted to abusing itself. Unprecedented court-martials, desertions on an industrial scale, accusations of betrayals, ethnic and religious perfidy became the order of the day. The military began desecrating the memory and record of its own most revered and iconic commanders. When you insult yourself, you should not be surprised when others join in.
In a haunting sense, this is a coming to pass of the scary premonition and prophetic admonition of General Mamman Gulu Vatsa. As his treason trial unfolded, the Nupe war hero, combining the insight of a professional soldier with the intuition of a notable poet, cautioned his colleagues against insulting themselves. Fastening a truly unnerving gaze on the then Brigadier Yohanna Kure, the deputy chairman of the General Valentine Ndiomu led military tribunal, Vatsa calmly delivered: “When you insult yourself others will join in”.
Thirty years after, Vatsa’s ringing words have come to pass. Just as it became a willing tool in the hands of military politicians thirty years earlier, this time around, the army became a sorry tool in the hands of professional politicians. Overriding the wish and supreme will of the National Council of state which included at least four of its own former commanders in chief, it summarily imposed a six week postponement of national elections in order to give an undue and unfair advantage to the incumbent. When this was not enough, it tried its best to sabotage the outcome of already held elections.
On the road to institutional ruination which its old forebears trod at their grave peril, the military began questioning and eventually attempting to compromise the educational qualifications of its own former commander in chief. As if these grave infractions were not enough, the military High Command, in an epic and unparalleled breach of army protocol, dismissed General Obasanjo in an unsigned statement as a barely literate fellow given to wild and unwarranted tantrums, or words to that effect.
Meanwhile as they were still at this, unprecedented sleaze, high wire corruption, opulent living and conspicuous consumption which would have made the redoubtable Ottoman emperors squirm in modesty and rectitude took deep institutional roots among the ranking military Brahmins. Widespread mutinies were reported. A serving general owes his life to taking refuge in an armoured car.
The same army which had globally distinguished itself in several peace missions abroad became a pathetic shadow of its former self. Even the modest gains recorded in the war against the Boko Haram insurgents turned out to be due to the efforts of South African mercenaries surreptitiously recruited. In an unprecedented national humiliation, the Chadian army openly accused the Nigerian army of rank cowardice. For fear of endangering its expensively trained military personnel or having its sacred data compromised, the American military quietly withdrew diplomatically citing operational difficulties.
How did the Nigerian military get itself into this trough of despair and national humiliation? This is the question President Buhari must find a compelling answer and then solution. The military is the ultimate distillate of the national essence . No nation can be stable when its military is unstable. Yet each time the Nigerian military has betrayed its sacred duty and obligation to the nation, it has always come off worse than the nation itself.
The fact is that some armies are simply not made for certain things. For example, the American military can pulverize any nation at short notice, but it has shown consistently that it is not good at nation-building and rebuilding. Americans don’t do nations. This is because America was not conceived or founded as an imperial colonizing nation. The only time America ever successfully did nation-rebuilding was on the fertile soil of Japanese cohesive and organic nationhood.
But by the same token, armies founded on the principles of the defence of the nation against external aggression are never good at internal aggression against their own people. To carry out a successful coup, you must be ready to fire on your own people. When the crack Soviet army attempted a coup for the first time in its history against Mikhail Gorbachev, it was so inept and amateurish that it became the butt of jokes from security experts across the globe.
The imperial Russian army was not founded as an army of internal occupation but as a defender of the Russian people. Such was its comical bungling on this occasion that it even allowed a half-drunk Boris Yeltsin to mount one of its own tanks to rail against the coup. When one of the coup plotters, a war veteran and most decorated national hero, was eventually traced to his bleak quarters, the four-star general had already hung himself by his own bootstraps. His only earthly possessions were his boots and medals.
With its roots in colonial predation and its origins as an instrument of imperial pacification of the natives, the army often behaves like a son whose father has eaten sour grapes. Yet despite this ancestral curse, the Nigerian military has produced some exceptional officers who have been a source of pride to their uniform and their nation. After each misdemeanor, the military has also attempted to reform and redeem itself.
The problem with past military reforms is that they neither went deep enough, nor did they attempt to address the institutional roots of the problems. For example, the Obasanjo post-military rule reform which saw to the prompt retirement of politically exposed officers was a brilliant exercise in de-militarization.
But because it did not ask the right questions or probe in the right direction, it merely secured presidential incumbency rather than institutionalize military neutrality in political struggles. Once you are out of power, you are out of the power loop. A terror machine is an equal opportunity terrorist which does not recognize original ownership.
Obasanjo who once regarded himself as the father of the nation would have been miffed by the incorrigible disrespect of the sons he left behind in the military. For the Owu-born military avatar, it was indeed a miraculous reprieve from a second demystification. As he himself would later put it, it was like standing in front of a moving train.
Perhaps, then, those who insist that the problem of the nation and its errant military is a reflection of the structural misconfiguration of the colonial contraption called Nigeria have a major point. Right from independence, every ascendant group in power has tried to barricade itself in the presidency, sealing off the state and creating a political logjam which can only be prised open through a combination of cunning, blackmail and outright force.
Obasanjo also did the same thing and was in fact scheming to rule the nation in perpetuity. But his nationalist instincts prevented a relapse into the regionalization and ethnicization of the army. Throughout his eight years as a civilian president he did not appoint a member of his own ethnic stock as army commander and neither did he unduly disrupt the chain of command.
In the case of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, they could hardly help themselves. Under their watch, the old demons of ethnicity and regionality which have haunted the military since 1966 reared their abysmal heads once again. In the dying days of the Yar’Adua presidency, a major apocalypse loomed in military formations throughout the country. Only Nigeria’s legendary luck sustained it through the crisis of succession.
But it is with the Jonathan presidency that we can see what havoc an embattled and insecure minority president can wreak on the major institutions of a multi-national country. Jonathan simply took the judiciary, the legislature, the party formations and the military to the cleaners.
Despite his pan-Nigerian mandate, Jonathan, in an attempt to perpetuate his rule and in what many observers saw as a return to the Abacha years, simply privatized the military in an open and flagrant disregard for seniority and distinction. After decades of chafing under majority oppressive rule, if the country does not want a minority president, it can as well go to blazes.
Having bent the stick of state in the other direction by acting in political extremis, Jonathan has left Buhari with the short end of the wrong stick. But going by the quality of the new service chiefs and his NSA, President Buhari has shown that he is probing in the right direction even if tentatively. It is instructive to note that both the new Chief of Defence Staff, General Gabriel Abayomi Olonishakin and the National Security Adviser, retired Major General Munguno, are former Commandants of TRADOC based in Minna.
In the military, TRADOC is regarded as the ultimate dead-end of the professionally up-ended; a warehouse for the upright but uproarious career officer and military intellectual. Its most iconic commandant till date is another military refusenik, the illustrious General Ishola Williams who famously exchanged his uniform for civvies on the very day General Sanni Abacha came to power.
Snooper personally knew the new Defence Chief from his Ife days. He combines the rugged bravery of the exceptional career officer with the forthrightness and integrity of his hardy Ekiti forbears. Munguno, a Kings College product like Ishola Williams, is also known to have had a running battle with his erstwhile military superiors before being quietly eased out.
It should be clear by now that a reform of the military institution cannot be complete without a reform of the structural debility which has hobbled the nation. Whenever a nation is stranded in the jungle of aborted nationhood, the military must also miss its way. It is an iron law of societal evolution.
President Buhari has his work cut out for him. Perhaps it is time to look beyond the structure of the military to the very structure of the nation of which the military is but an organic actuality. The military should now take to heart, the words of Mamman Vatsa, one of its most outstanding products. When you insult yourself, others will join in.
