When he passed last week after a long battle with illness, the applause was faint and muted, minus an engaging editorial and one or two public commentators who recognized his true heroic worth and sterling contribution to the evolution of the military profession in post-independence Nigeria. Major General Chris Mohammed Alli was a soldiers’ soldier in every sense: noble, brave, bold, forthright and professional to the core.
The last time we met, it was obvious that he was not in the best of physical conditions. It was a few years back at a clothier’s emporium owned by a Nigerian of Ijesha royal descent on Edgware Road in West End London. If one was astonished by the growing decline, one did not let it on. In these climes, military juggernauts appear to be indestructible.
The general sat on a chair that had been provided for the purpose. It was clear that he was in some discomfort as he beamed what seemed like a cross between a grin and a grimace. We could only manage a few pleasantries before one disappeared among the maze of sartorial extravaganza.
The former Chief of Army Staff was a gallant and chivalrous officer driven by an unusual passion for social and political justice. It was this passion for justice that led him on a collision course with his superiors in the military after the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the country. It eventually earned him a dismissal from service.
It is a tribute to the courage, professionalism and fair-mindedness of the current leadership of the military that they recognize the qualities of their former boss and swiftly put in place the appropriate measures to celebrate and honour the illustrious departed .Among other things, flags are to be flown at a half-mast for three days.
Yet it may appear curious and ironic that apart from the military authorities which recognized his stature and contribution, the public response to the demise was tame and low-keyed. The people have since moved on, confronted by new existential threats and political challenges. Even the newspapers and magazines that hailed him as a hero of the June 12 struggle have long disappeared or mutated into something else.
In a society without much institutional memory and without a tradition of long-distance protest, this is quite understandable. It is almost thirty years since Major General Chris Mohammed Alli disappeared from public consciousness after being ousted as Chief of Army Staff in a dramatic night of the long knives which sent shock waves through the entire military establishment. Even then, Alli was never one to play to the gallery. He shunned publicity and the klieg light like a plague, believing that a true officer could be seen but never to be heard.
Neither an activist in uniform nor a politicized officer, Alli, until he breathed his last, held on to his belief that the annulment of the June 12, 1993 was a political misadventure, an error of judgment which would cost the institution dearly. The military had no business in politics, he insisted. Quiet, serious-minded and quite cerebral Alli also enjoyed his drink and was a gentleman officer to the core.
The paradox of Alli’s career lies in the fact that although naturally rebellious, he was not a professional agitator or an in your face military rebel. It was a case of loyal dissent. He made his point within a certain code of courtesy and civility without degenerating into rudeness and rancour. He could disagree with his superiors without being disagreeable. He was reformist rather than revolutionary.
Despite his open hostility to the annulment, this was probably what preserved his career for such a long time and saved him from more severe and punitive retribution in the hands of the no-nonsense general from Kano. His appointment as army boss was a sop to the radical elements in the forces following a particularly rowdy session at Victoria Island after Abacha took over.
The infantry general from Kano needed that respite to gather his aces together for the inevitable showdown with the rump of the prodemocracy forces in the military as well as civil society. It was said that General Abacha despite being mildly irritated by Chris Alli’s aluta antics treated him with wary bemusement until matters came to a head and one of them had to go. A veteran of several military ambuscades, Abacha had the patience of a coiled cobra waiting for the right moment to strike.
The dark-goggled general was a shrewd and gifted military tactician who knew where the real levers of power lay when it came to open confrontation between the two forces. How many divisions can Chris muster, as Joseph Stalin was said to have asked of the pope when he was punching above his weight. As Alli would have discovered on that night, the army chief of staff was a mere staff of the chief of the army staff.
The spontaneous outburst that Chris Alli might have been hoping for did not materialize. Many in the officer-corps who felt affronted by the annulment and the incarceration of the winner of the election did not feel sufficiently roused or convinced enough to mount a challenge to the system. It would take another four years for the army to exhaust its political and historic possibilities.
As it happens in nations, classes, institutions and societies, what was unfolding was a case of uneven development of political consciousness among individuals, sections, groups and segments within the same professional formation.
At any moment in the life of any organization, there is residual consciousness which is formed by accretions from the past and a reactionary impulse to cling to these. Then there is primary consciousness which is the dominant and dominating worldview in the formation and there is emergent consciousness which are new ideas emerging and yet to withstand the test of realities. It is an eternal battle in which progressive breakthroughs are often followed by counterrevolutionary pushbacks.
Major General Chris Mohammed Alli was at the vanguard of consciousness in a conservative military institution that owes its origins and roots to colonial occupation. He paid a terrible price for this. But it could have been worse.
It is a universal phenomenon. As it has been observed by Louis Althusser, western intellectual tradition often makes the intellectual orphan to pay a terrible price, it is a price which ranges from exclusion, alienation, incarceration, madness and even death.
Alli was somehow lucky. Long before his death, he had secured and cemented his reputation as a thinking soldier and a military intellectual with the publication of a hefty tome titled The Federal Republic of Nigerian Army: The Siege of a Nation. The allusion to Von Bismarck’s Prussian army is unmistakable.
It was said that whereas in Europe, other countries produced armies, in emergent Germany, it was the army that produced a country. In post-independence Nigeria, the army appropriated the nation. The Prussia/ Germany army either directly or by proxy cost the world two global wars. The Nigerian Army managed one local war and was only preparing for another before it succumbed.
This was the road to personal ruin and professional ruination, Alli seemed to be telling his compatriots. For over thirty years, the Nigerian military held the nation to ransom until it ended in mutual ruination for army and nation. This was never the road to travel, Alli insisted with the benefit of deep cogitation and the authority of personal entanglement.
As it has been noted by many, history is a cruel and unforgiving taskmaster when it comes to making amends or settling account either in open defiance of current developments or in furtive deference to the inevitable. Thirty years after the Nigerian military committed its gravest error of judgment, it is celebrating the passing of a man who not only stood firmly against the error but lost his commission in the process.
It is a measure of how far both the nation and its military have come that in the very week the army is mourning the loss of its old chief who fell in controversial circumstances almost thirty years earlier, it was also welcoming its first indigenously produced military professor in Lieutenant Colonel Abubakar- Sirajo Imam.
For a long time, yours sincerely wondered whether this strange anomaly of a general who is also a professor was the exclusive preserve of the old Soviet military. Now, it has berthed in Nigeria. It is a perfect symmetry. History will always vindicate the just. Chris Alli, the quintessential military intellectual, would be chuckling in his grave. May his noble soul be granted eternal repose.
