Democracy and the spectre of remilitarisation
After almost three decades of uninterrupted peace and tranquility, post-military democracy in Nigeria has entered an interesting phase. What with the uncovering of a plot by some military personnel to forcibly terminate the civilian administration in the country in a bloodfest that would have made the first military uprising in the country look like a Christmas carol. The whole plot was beginning to be enveloped in a fictional halo with initial vehement denial followed by protracted silence and an eerie make belief that all was well.
That was until the gory details began to seep into the public domain. But having escaped the worst of the devil’s scenarios, this is where utmost caution and maximum circumspection are also required. As the dragnet seems to spread hauling in more influential suspects and the hitherto unknown depth of the plot comes to worrisome focus, the government will need all the tact and wisdom it could muster to manage the fall-out and possible international backlash.
Obviously miffed and displeased that men under his command could contemplate such a dastardly act not to talk of putting him near the top of the list of principal targets, the former Chief of Defence Staff now Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa, has been making apocalyptic statements about the wages of military rebellion. This is injudicious and akin to prejudging the outcome of the trial. It should be noted that this is the first time in the history of the country that a public military arraignment for coup-plotting will be taking place under the auspices of a civilian administration. Complications and legal entanglement loom, so is mismanagement of critical information.
In retrospect, perhaps it was a tad optimistic and probably naïve to imagine that we have permanently seen off the back of military interlopers in our political process. Having battled them to terminal weariness and institutional exhaustion, many had hope that this would be enough to deter the military class from ever contemplating a disruption of the country’s political progress again. Although they had been forced to retreat to the barracks with their tail between their legs, suffering heavy blows to their prestige and professional standing in the society, it was not enough to prevent their heirs from dreaming of la gloire. Their forebears having tasted sour grapes, the children’s teeth are permanently set at the edge. Whatever the terrible casualties and the threat of summary execution, coup-making is the occupational opium of a particular class of soldiers particularly on the West African sub-continent. The reasons are both historical and sociological.
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Arms and their bearers with their monopoly of the instrument of violence and coercion are fundamental and instrumental to the maintenance and perpetuation of the state and its principal institutions, whether modern, traditional or ancient. It is said that the state began when traditional marauders offered protection to those they have oppressed and terrorized in exchange for certain privileges. With that human society evolved apace and division of labour took root with the former tormentors maintaining internal order while warding off external predators. This is the origin of states, empires and nations.
No matter the evolutionary trajectory of different segments of human society and whatever its colouration or incarnation, the role of the state as the prime custodian and monopolist of power and coaxed cooperation appears sacrosanct and often seems divinely ordained. The centrality of arms and their bearers to this arrangement cannot be overemphasized. This centrality looms even larger in all its patriarchal and authoritarian essence in nations where there is no elite consensus, where the instruments of governance are weak and enfeebled by human and political frailties, where the authority and legitimacy of the democratic order are vanishing and where the state itself has become a macabre joke as a result of the activities of non-state and anti-state actors. This is where and when the bearers of arms could turn their weapons on the state and the society at large.
This centrality of arms and their bearers appears to be the bane of most postcolonial nations inaugurated by colonial force of arms, particularly on the West African subcontinent where you have coup-prone and coup-ridden nations struggling with existential traumas as a result of the inability of the political elite to reorganize and reinvent the scrambled pieces left behind for them by departing colonial masters. By its classic definition, a coup d’etat is a seminal rupture, a violent abridgement; an abrogation and decapitation of the state by force of arms. In West Africa, only Senegal and Cameroons- in spite of its doddering and amnesiac leader- have been spared the irruption of post-independence military violence. The rest have at one time or the other come under the hammer of armed rule. As we speak, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Gabon are under one form of military rule or the other, with Benin Republic recently close to toppling over.
It is an intriguing irony that Nigeria, the jewel in the crown of a Black Renaissance, has been spared the best and worst of military rule. The best of military rule occurs when the military, despite its fundamental illegitimacy, acts as a modernizing and catalyzing agent spurring the nation to momentous infrastructural heights and accelerated economic development which in turn facilitates the emergence of a buoyant and economically independent political society which is the bedrock of national stability and a sine qua non for democratic advancement in any nation. This was what seemed to have happened in Indonesia, Turkey , Egypt and in Ghana and Rwanda to a lesser extent.
The worst of military rule occurs when army dominion mutates or ossifies into a privatized kleptocracy under a leader and his gang which shuts out the prospects of genuine egalitarian development and economic progress. The nation reels from abject poverty and the whimsical cruelties of absolutist rule. It is a double jeopardy, neither democracy nor development. Yet if Nigeria seems to miss out on its visionary military messiah who would have gifted the country with landmark political reconfiguration and accelerated economic growth, the centrifugal forces and micro-pluralism of power centres that gives the country a negative equilibrium that has also made it impossible for a brutal despot to last for long.
The bitter and protracted struggle of the Nigerian people which eventually saw off military rule attests to this capacity for heroic resistance. As the history of the First Republic and the aborted Babangida Transition also attest, whenever the injury and casus belli are located in the most politically conscious and advanced sectors of the multi-national society, one can be sure that something will give eventually. Elementary political wisdom suggests that one does not toy or tangle with the tail of the cobra for trifles.
It is perhaps this capacity for resistance and innate abhorrence of tyranny that has bred a certain complacency and languid somnolence in the Fourth Republic. In our collective innocence, we might have come to the idyllic conclusion that military irruption after twenty seven years of uninterrupted civilian rule has become a terminal aberration. In any case, the country has become so radically reconfigured, its military installations so decentralized and the communication network so devolved that no reasonable or rational soldier will attempt any “I Brigadier Konkobilo” fancy stuff without contemplating the grave and suicidal consequences of such infantile folly. This is why the news of the putative putsch must have jolted many. But we have forgotten that every Rome must produce its own barbarians and that eternal vigilance is the price of democratic freedom.
Perhaps institutional memory might be of some help. Whether seen or unseen, whether active or inactive, the military have always loomed large in the post-independence political imaginary of the nation. Military gossip has it that General Mohammadu Buhari, in his customary self-righteousness, used to privately dismiss and sneer at his military nemesis and bête noire, General Ibrahim Babangida, as one of those politicized soldiers he did not wish to have anything to do with. Perhaps Buhari was referring to Babangida’s cosmopolitan suavity and his urban ubiquity which did not conform with his (Buhari’s) rigid model of the puritanical officer. Yet on balance and in the final analysis, no officer has proved more dangerously politicized than the general from Daura.
Before the first coup, military life was shrouded in secrecy, stealth and remote inaccessibility. The barracks were off-limit and off-bounds to those who had no business there. Military ranks elicited generalized awe but they made no sense to the wider public. As a youth, the writer remembers a rare and iconic picture of Brigadier Julius Ademulegun flanked by two other military top guns splashed on the front page of the Daily Times in late 1964. Yours sincerely then asked his father whether the man was the head of his organization, by which one meant the Boys’ Brigade. The old man screamed in consternation at the impertinence. “Come and hear this boy ooo!!! Don’t you know that these are the people who can scatter the country?”
A few months after, the military did scatter the country. Unfortunately, the brigadier was among the prime casualties and up till this moment, his body and that of Latifa, his spouse, have not been found. Gleanings from credible intelligence sources of the period suggest that it was not the first time elements in the army had canvassed for a forcible take-over of the country. In 1964 during a brief constitutional crisis when the president, Nnamdi Azikiwe, declined to call on the prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, to constitute a new cabinet on the grounds of the widespread irregularities that characterized the elections, it was reported that a group of officers approached Zik to endorse a forcible termination of the government. But the shrewd and wily Owelle of Onitsha demurred. He was possibly aware of the extant balance of force and the fact that he did not have the constitutional right to deploy troops. When the military eventually struck a year and a few months after, Zik was at sea undertaking a luxury cruise in the Caribbean.
Even then, had the democratic tradition and culture been stronger and more vibrant and had the fragile elite consensus held together in the face of crisis and uncertainty, the rump of Balewa’s cabinet as led by the then Senate President Nwafor Orizu would have fought off the minatory intimidation and blackmailing antics of General Aguiyi-Ironsi. But holding each other in bitter distrust and resentment, they caved in, ushering their country through the dark passage of hell. Judging by current development, it would seem that the political class in Nigeria have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
