Power struggle in the post-military Polity
Violence, pure pristine violence, seems to have become the organizing imperative of Nigeria‘s contemporary political culture and the struggle for the allocation of resources. It is a momentous irony that the departure of the military should be marked by such preposterous violence. But for those who understand the dynamics of history, civil violence often accompanies the subordination of state violence, just as some negativity is inevitable in eradicating negativity.
There are analysts who contend that this development dates back to the First Republic itself, a storied epoch that they finger as the foundation and originating organogram of the culture of political violence in post-independence Nigeria. As examples, they cite the Tiv uprising against oppression and hegemonic domination and the violent manner by which it was suppressed and the wetie political insurrection in the old west which only ended with the military mutiny of the five majors.
There was also the case of the mysterious deaths of the first children of leading political figures in the old West. Magistrate Adedapo Aderemi, Ms Omodele Akintola and the brilliant international lawyer, Segun Awolowo, all went to join their makers in mysterious circumstances. These tragic deaths cast a deep pall of gloom on a region already convulsed by violence and arson. There were all kinds of metaphysical insinuations, but we must leave it at that.
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To be sure, the politics of the modern era appears to be violence-suffused, but in a seemingly more structured manner. Both America and India, the two leading liberal democracies in the world in terms of quality and quantity, have suffered a spate of assassinations of their political leaders. Post-independence Pakistan suffered the same fate with the Bhutto politically dynasty bearing the brunt as father, daughter and son went under in a spiral of violence.
In newly independent Bangladesh, the founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, having mentally prepared himself for execution in the hands of the Pakistani leadership, was miraculously reprieved only to be wiped out shortly after independence with almost his entire family by disaffected military officers. His surviving daughter, Sheikh Hasina, has ruled the nation with an iron grip for almost two decades.
During one of the epic demonstrations which forced President Lyndon Baines Johnson into early retirement rather than reelection, a rogue protester was seen with a huge placard which read: Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now that we need you? He was directly calling for John Kennedy’s successor to be given the same treatment as his idolized and much adored predecessor.
In post-Soviet Russia after the era of Boris Yeltsin and his drunken buffooneries, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB apparatchik, has ruled the Russian rump with a combination of repression and wanton cruelty leveraged with prompt assassination. From the old oligarchs, democratic refuseniks up to the recently martyred Alexei Novalny, none of Putin’s fiercest critics has lived to tell the story.
Ever since the ascendancy of the nation-state paradigm, arms and their bearers have been central to the sanctity and perpetuation of the modern state. Even the Treaty of Westphalia was a consecration and perpetuation of the right of state violence to determine territorial integrity and national identity. The Italian city-states soon found out to their chagrin after they were overwhelmed by superior French artillery.
They discovered that in the emerging international order, the city-state has had its say and that it is better to hang together than to hang separately. This is why Putin has been able to cock a snook at western hegemony, knowing fully well that if the push comes to a shove, a nuclear confrontation will not determine who is right but who is left. It is also the reason behind Israel’s swashbuckling martial arrogance. Like a mad man, any nation ready to end the human race will always get the right of way.
But it should also be obvious that too much arms in the hands of the wrong people and too many people bearing arms beyond the surveillance of the state can imperil the coercive capacity of the state and its ability to impose its will on the nation. A state that has lost its monopoly of the instrument of terror is in terminal decline and has lost its fundamental raison d’etre.
Nigeria’s case is a unique and bizarre mélange of state impairment. You have violence consistently directed against the state and its lawful agents by non-state actors particularly after the demise of military rule. Unfortunately and tragically enough, this is the situation the nation has found itself once again with the murder of some gallant officers and men of the armed forces in the murky creeks of Okuama while on a peace mission.
The amount of money and resources it takes to train an average lieutenant not to talk of a colonel is prohibitive. For some ragtag band of hoodlums to eliminate these brave officers after subjecting them to grisly torture is an unconscionable and dastardly act which cannot be condoned.
It is useful to note that the armed forces have been travelling on the road to self-demystification for some time. We will return to this in our summation. Suffice it to note at this point that this is a problem that predates the Tinubu administration. It is also to be noted that this kind of peace mission has also come under fire from many local commentators. The army should be known for stern professionalism and not quixotic peace missions.
It is not within the remit of serious forces. An army even on a “peace mission” can only walk softly when it is carrying a heavy stick. Our colonial masters are past masters of this kind of pacification as the surviving natives learnt. Those who killed Captain Moloney in Keffi paid fully for it later in Sokoto in the hands of the no-nonsense Colonel Lugard. This kind of camaraderie with locals can only breed contempt and the collapse of state authority.
The federal authorities need to move quickly to reassure the nation that the mysterious and almost spontaneous resurgence of mass abductions and kidnapping in the entire north and the recrudescence of banditry and generalized violence in the south after a lull is not a coordinated attempt by some sinister forces of hegemonic domination to undermine and bring to heel a fledgling administration.
It all looks like a consuming game of political chess otherwise known as the politics of exhaustion or attrition. You wear your opponent down by relentlessly piling up pressure and through a combination of psychological destabilization and political disorientation. If it were to be true that the old landlords of Nigeria who are distressed by the current feeding arrangement are the ones testing Tinubu’s military mettle and capacity to contain engulfing insurgency, then the struggle for allocation of resources has reached an ominous conjuncture.
Tinubu’s ascendancy represents a fundamental reset of Nigeria’s post-military politics and its old certainties and assumptions. How it plays out is another matter entirely. It is a radical rupture with the immediate past historically if not ideologically. It is the fundamental disruption the starry-eyed adherents of the “obedient” movement were hoping for except that it is not their man who is at the helm of affairs. That would have been a bridge too far.
The reasons are not far-fetched. Tinubu is the first political thoroughbred to rule Nigeria after the departure of the military. He is not a retired military general. Neither is he related by blood to the old military aristocracy and oligarchy. He can also not be said to be a candidate of one of the dominant members of the old selectorate. He has risen to the presidency through his own steam and by sheer stubborn persistence despite the iron hurdles erected by his own party and its henchmen.
One never knows what bruised egos and a battered sense of entitlement do to undermine human capacity for rational evaluation. Otherwise, it ought to be clear to the conservative oligarchs bent on subverting and undermining the new administration that Tinubu represents the best prospects of saving them from themselves. Broadly speaking, he is not fundamentally opposed to their economic interests. What he will not allow is for them to think they can bluff and bluster their way with him.
Meanwhile, rumbling and grumbling in the background is the protocol of Elders who continue to insist that the only way forward is the immediate and wholesale adoption of the 2014 Jonathan Conference even when they know that this is like flagging a red flag before a dominant APC administration. Its core members not only cold-shouldered the conference but have held its resolutions in bitter contempt ever since.
Unless there is a drastic reconfiguration of the subsisting balance of political forces, this is nothing but mischief-laden political tomfoolery which does not conduce to cobbling together the substantial consensus needed to drive the much needed constitutional makeover of the country.
In a multi-ethnic country fractured along fundamental fault lines, realpolitik is not about who is right or wrong but who is sober and more adept at elite deal making. We must rediscover the spirit of the Westminster Conference which allowed our founding fathers to overcome their platform inflexibility in order to arrive at a tolerable consensus about the best form of federalism for the nation.
Let us get this clear. There can be only one president and Commander- in- Chief at a time. But this is a double-edged sword. It also means that the buck stops at the president’s table. No one else will carry the can. For tactical respite and to ensure the overall success of his administration, the president may need to consult more widely and broadly even when it means a détente and reapproachment with known political adversaries.
The president should not listen to those who are bent on perpetuating old enmities for the sake of personal advantages. The peremptory and rather desultory manner in which the Oronsaye report was adopted for implementation after lying in the cooler for decades does not show clarity of thought or a deep engagement with emergent realities. There is time for everything. The National Question is an amoebic formation which assumes different guises and disguises at different times.
We must conclude by returning to the tragedy of the officers and men murdered in cold blood by hoodlums. Our security forces have been overwhelmed before by deranged misfits in possession of commensurate firepower. Nothing happened beyond the summary incineration and complete decimation of their ancestral homesteads. After that everything went back to business as usual. But the danger keeps creeping back.
The current mishap provides the Tinubu administration the opportunity for a complete and wholesale revamping and reorganization of our armed forces to make them amenable to the emergent realities of asymmetrical warfare which calls for the deployment of fresh thinking and new technologies. The truth is that our armed forces are overexposed, a situation in which familiarity breeds utter contempt.
In a chilling blast from the past, it will be recalled that one of the reasons cited by the mutinous majors that terminated the First Republic was the deployment of military personnel to quell civil uprising. It is alleged that both Colonel Pam and Colonel Abogo Largema were marked for elimination for their role in suppressing the Tiv uprising.
There ought to be a buffer force which is well-equipped and technologically sophisticated enough to pick up the faintest adverse rumblings from anywhere in the country. Perhaps this is the time to revisit the idea of a National Guard mooted during the Babangida regime. After much preparation and much money disbursed, the project was summarily liquidated for obvious reasons by General Abacha upon coming to power. The goggled despot could not abide the idea of a rival strike force within the army.
The putative commander of the National Guard and one of General Babangida’s blue-eyed boys has never recovered from the severe torture he received in the hands of Abacha’s Special Squad. Several decades later, it is both the nation and its armed forces that have been taken hostage.