Army warns Fayose”, screamed the Nigerian Tribune front page lead headline of August 4.
Since 1999, that would appear the first time a newspaper would report a seeming headlong clash between the military and any democratic institution.
After coming a sad cropper under Sani Abacha, necessitating a scramble back to the barracks, the Nigerian military had worn its “submission to civil authorities” like a cloak of garish colours — and just as well.
From the coup hero, interventionist swagger, that ended the 1st Republic, it had staggered, through several phases, to its professional ruin.
The early years of innocence came under Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi and Yakubu Gowon. The mirage of the military as the messiah was raised, albeit controversially, under Murtala Mohammed. But it was also dashed under Olusegun Obasanjo, his successor after a failed coup, who birthed the Shehu Shagari civilian interregnum.
Muhammadu Buhari, with Babatunde Idiagbon, boasted the franchise of the military as harsh dictatorship, without the civil pretences of the years of innocence, epitomized by Gen. Gowon.
But the first steps to eternal disgrace would come during the wayward power years of Ibrahim Babangida, when a hitherto collective junta morphed into a lone, reckless risk taker.
That, of course, would fire the final institutional burial, in the grave of politics and misgovernment, under the stark Abacha.
But Abdulsalami Abubakar, the last of the military rulers, would play the army tortoise, leading the soldiers back to the barracks, but not before they had earned utter disgrace!
Still, the army, at the return to democracy, would endure more institutional buffeting — and rightly so — with elected President Obasanjo purging it of the so-called “political soldiers”.
Though that entailed severe institutional blood-letting, it was widely acclaimed in the polity — imperative to keep the military re-focused to its core defence duty, from the fatal distraction of politics.
So, if the military always trumpeted its “subordination to civil authorities”, as imposed by the Constitution, it knew where it was coming from.
Not so, Peter Ayodele Fayose, second-term Ekiti governor who, with his indecorous conduct, would pass as Nigeria’s most indelicate governor.
Ironically, the crude Fayose is a creation of Obasanjo’s sweet-and-sour public persona, just as the “civil” military, as constituted today.
Obasanjo purged the military of political soldiers. But he also inspired the rise of Fayose, with his PDP’s garrison-like take-over of the South West in 2003, after drawing electoral blanks in 1999.
Indeed, the earliest manifestation of Fayose, as the most virulent strain of gubernatorial unreason that Nigeria ever knew, started when he put second-term Lagos governor, Bola Tinubu, with other esteemed guests, under virtual house arrest.
That was in the Iyin Ekiti country of home of the late Gen. Adeyinka Adebayo. Tinubu and co were there for a social event. It was 2003.
That was clear outlawry. A sitting governor, by the 1999 Constitution, is free from arrest or any form of restriction. Yet, because it was against the opposition, the Obasanjo presidency, which controlled lawful coercion, looked elsewhere.
Today however, Fayose, Obasanjo’s Frankenstein, anti-opposition monster of yore, is busy pouncing on and running his mouth on the old man. Indeed, what goes around comes around!
Though Fayose exited in a blaze of odium in his first coming (2003-2006), he has, in his second coming, broken every basic etiquette of polite society; driving his high office to the sewers.
His morbid electioneering newspaper advert, predicted the “death” in office, of the then APC presidential candidate Buhari, should he win; simply because President Umaru Yar’Adua died in office, and the trio of Abacha, Murtala and Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, all northern leaders, also did. That was well and truly shocking.
In his high morbid fever, though, he conveniently forgot President Shehu Shagari, from the same political geography, didn’t only survive his tenure, he is today alive and well.
Still, if Fayose’s sewer manners could be excused by his crude verbal spits, it was even more shocking that news media that claim to be epitome of decency, for whatever windfall, could stain their front pages with such lunacy.
Now Fayose, with Femi Fani-Kayode, are caught in their own warp of malice, on the Buhari health question. The more they pine, to fulfil an evil prophesy, the more the Almighty Himself appears to decree they labour in vain. Problem is, they seem too consumed by hate to listen!
It is this penchant to bristle and bustle; and yammer whatever absurdity off the subconscious, that has pushed Fayose to his latest, if needless, military controversy.
Though not many appear to notice it now, that flippancy has ruptured the delicate protocol between the civil authorities and the military; prompting the military to tell Fayose to go smash his head against the Olosunta rock in Ikere-Ekiti, instead of dabbling into defence matters he knew nothing about.
“Governor Ayodele Fayose should stop politicizing the military and military op(eration)s; seek other avenues for your relevance,” the army riposted in a brutal putdown. That portrayed the governor as an idle busybody.
That the army, which should be seen and seldom be heard in a democracy, should treat a governor with such contempt, should normally alarm anyone.
But no one appears alarmed in Fayose’s case. That is indicative of how low he has crashed his high office.
In his usual garrulous manner, Fayose had alleged, mimicking Transparency International (TI), widespread corruption in the anti-corruption war.
“The fight against Boko Haram,” Fayose claimed by a release by Lere Olayinka, his media factotum, “has become a cash cow for some top military officers and corrupt politicians in the Buhari government, with the creation of fake defence contracts and laundering the proceeds abroad in the UK, US and elsewhere.”
But the snag is the TI charge is so open-ended you couldn’t say it was referring to the present, or the Jonathan military command! Besides, must an elected governor run his mouth over hazy defence matters?
Sadly, indecorum ruptures the order of things faster that most would admit. When the Murtala regime barked “with immediate effect”, it elicited thunderous cheers. But that military impunity, creeping then, but entrenched before long, not only ruined the military themselves, but also smashed state institutions.
A military-elected governor confrontation, which the flippant Fayose has sparked, cannot be good for our democracy. Indeed, it is a dangerous call, which should alarm everyone.
That is why Fayose must cease blighting his high office, while the military too should resist any provocation to play in the Fayose sewers.
Nigerians should honour and respect the military for their supreme chore to die, so the rest of us can live. But the military too should live by the democratic code of total subordination to civil authority.
