This piece “In Defence of General Danjuma” was first published in The Guardian on July 2, 1988. It is as relevant today as it was 29 years ago.
There is an on-going war by plebeians against General Theophilus Danjuma (rtd), a hero of war and a hero of peace. They have taken up arms against him precisely because he had said there might be no democracy in his lifetime and that there has never been a civilian government worth defending. But sadly, his adversaries who are now pitched in a battle royal against him know very little about this courageous man with a heart of steel who can lay equal claims to being a hero of war as well as radical intellectual.
In July 1966, when an armed mob turned against their superior officers in Abeokuta and Ibadan, Danjuma, then a Major in the Nigerian Army, selected the most able loyal northern soldiers (there were only 50 Yoruba soldiers out of 500 based in Ibadan and 26 out of a battalion based in Abeokuta in July 1966) to replace Major General Aguiyi Ironsi’s normal guards. Thereafter, he preceded single handedly to arrest his General. He had told Major General Ironsi with bravado “you are under arrest, you organized the killings of our brothers in January… you will answer for your action”. The rest is history.
This act of bravery is not the only thing that marked out Danjuma. He was to become the most positive influence for sustaining the Nigerian federation when the armed rabble in Lagos headed by our hallowed late General Murtala Mohammed and Martins Adamu insisted, after ferrying their families out of Lagos in a hi-jacked British Airways VC-10 airline, that the north must secede from the federation. Their other objective was to sink Lagos with dynamite. General Danjuma was apparently one of the few sane soldiers that averted that calamity.
General Danjuma was to later become one of the best Chiefs of Army Staff Nigeria has ever produced. He established the Staff College at Jaji for the training of unduly radical officers, demobilized the mostly illiterate ex-service men that had then become an albatross for General Gowon. Above all, he built befitting officers mess for his men.
General Danjuma’s adversaries who may not know or appreciate the above achievements may also not know that his disenchantment with democracy or what Schumpeter aptly described as “the rule of politicians” did not start yesterday. About 10 years ago, he had refused to see 13 years of military rule as an aberration.
To him then, the intensive preparation for civilian rule did not mean a return to democracy. His thesis: “we have never had a democracy in Nigeria precisely because Nigeria’s grasp of democracy and her commitment to the rule of law is extremely tenuous relative to some countries of the West”. To him therefore, it was a fallacy to talk of a return to democracy. His verdict: “the more I wonder whether democracy is possible in a country where the easiest means of becoming a national hero is to assault the police and where everybody threatens secession whenever his petty ego is hurt”. To him therefore, “democracy will remain a mirage in Nigeria for as long as the politician is not prepared to respect all processes of democracy”. That was in 1978.
We can easily see General Danjuma as a man who abhors “religious bigotry and parochialism” and to whom pretence of any form has always been abhorrent and has remained consistent. This is one reason he is shoulder high above many of his inconsistent fair-weather adversaries who have today taken up “arms” against him.
We can easily understand the problem of his adversaries. The Democrat is a newspaper that only thrives at the advent of civilian rule. We can also sympathize with The Guardian’s slavish commitment to liberal democracy and abhorrence for “unlettered” soldier’s rule. One can similarly understand the problem of Haruna Mohammed who was sincere enough to admit that General Danjuma has always faulted his now predictable stand on national issues. Ditto for the Maiganis, the faceless Candidos and Abba Dabos. We know where their interest lies. But the strength of General Danjuma seems to end with the above weaknesses of his adversaries.
It appears to me that his thesis, like most of all soldiers’ and politicians’ suffers from what Karl Popper describes as “poverty of historicism”. Because of the brevity of time, his theory has no universal applicability. When he first propounded his theory in 1978, the civilian had only ruled for barely six years as against the military’s 12 years of socio-political and economic chaos. His exposure in politics, which was the only basis for his pessimism, is too short to support the force of his assertions. His other thesis that there has never been a civilian government worth defending easily raises the question of whether there has ever been a military regime worth defending.
If his righteous indignation is based on the financial indiscipline of the discredited politicians, we can assuage his injured moral sensibility by reminding our highly respected General Danjuma that the miasma of hopelessness that today characterizes our economy and the current unprecedented human suffering were indeed nurtured by the military politicians during our profligate years of abundance. If on the other hand, his raw feelings were a reaction to the pervasive corruption that has become synonymous with our system; we can chill these feelings by admitting that neither soldiers nor politicians enjoy any credibility.
The verdict is that we are all guilty. Under the military for instance, an audit examination at the Nigerian External Telecommunications traced financial abuses back to 1978 with $53 million dollars unaccounted for. The administration of the Federal Housing Scheme led to the loss of $43 million dollars while the renegotiations of the Jaguar jet contract saved the nation $30 million dollars in kickback.
In the same vein, the chairman of the investigation panel into the activities of board members notably those of the Federal Mortgage Bank blamed them for “acting in concert to render the bank impotent by systematic plundering and looting of treasuries”, and for the Delta Steel Company of “stupendous fraud”. The siphoning of millions of naira from the National Youth Service Corps, the widespread corruption at the Abuja Capital Development Authority, the illegal export of refined petroleum products that was then costing the country over one million dollars a day were all products of a conspiracy between the proprietary classes, consisted of the bureaucracy, military elite, business class and other marketable professionals who share identical interests.
If, therefore, financial indiscipline, lack of control in the public economy and privatization of public funds are joint efforts of all the ravaging elites, it becomes difficult to make a distinction between civilian and military governments. In our peculiar historical circumstances, perhaps it is even more difficult to make a distinction between civilian democracy and military regime.
