The recently concluded series of federal and state elections in Nigeria was marked by strident allegations of military highhandedness and partisanship. The army was said to be in bed with the federal authorities. In the highly weaponized Rivers State, a confrontation between military personnel and heavily armed militiamen left many dead and scores wounded.
Whether it is military officiated democracy or military assisted democracy, the very idea of the armed forces actively intervening in the process of democracy, or assisting in steering electoral disputes away from nation-threatening crisis will be seen by many as a quaint anomaly if not a violent oxymoron. Bullets and ballots are not supposed to mix.
But often the reality on ground is more sobering, sometimes pointing in direction of what is known in philosophy as overdetermination, which is more complex than simple cause and effect or the more familiar linear causality. It is rather an ensemble of contradictions jostling for contention. If you are going to transit from a military-dominated authoritarian society to an imperfectly democratic one, then you must take into cognisance the heavy-handed presence of the military in the background.
In the light of this and for the sake of further illumination, perhaps it is time to extend the concept of disambiguation as it is known in other field of studies, particularly psychology and literary studies, to studies of the democratic process. To disambiguate is to rationalize by unbundling, to make something clearer by stripping it of ambiguities.
If we agree that democracy is a journey rather than a destination, then it should be obvious that there are no perfect or ideal democracies anywhere in the world. As many scholars have concluded, what we can have is the degree to which each society approximates to certain universally accepted norms of democracy, such as periodic elections to gauge the mood of the nation, a free press, freedom of association, freedom of religious worship and adherence to the rule of law.
But even here, contradictions abound. It is never a done deal. Some societies trade off certain notions of the democratic ideal for others. An intensification of one dimension is marked by a relapse in others. For example, a scrupulous adherence to the tenet of periodic elections may be accompanied by a lack of freedom of association and a ferocious repression of the press. A devious, anti-democratic despot in civvies may actually put all notions of democratic rule to sword while singing the praise of democracy to the high heavens.
Consequently, while advanced liberal democracies are characterized by a high degree of fidelity to the fundamental canons of democracy, emerging democracies of the Third World and formerly existing Socialist nations are often marked by regression, sharp retreat and unconscionable relapse to their authoritarian default setting.
In the light of this, the notion of “hybrid democracies” can be applied to the multifarious and endless possibilities inherent in emerging democracies. Within this democratic typology, it is possible to isolate features and the democratic potential of each society and to make educated guesses about the future. A rogue democracy, depending on the degree of deterioration, can also become a morbid democracy.
This is not an exercise in democratic point-scoring, but an attempt to understand the specific dynamics of different societies and how these condition and determine their mode of insertion in the global democratic process. Rather than a blanket condemnation of the military as an essentially anti-democratic institution, their patriotic and nationalist role in certain societies may be better understood and appreciated.
In virtually all the colonial nations of Africa where “national armies” originated as instruments of imperialist predation and colonial pacification of the native people, they have continued to behave true to type and in absolute fidelity to their originating summons. This is in sharp contrast to national armies which originated as a result of national struggles for independence from colonial rulers.
For example, the modern Indonesian army originated in the turmoil and turbulence of hostilities between the native Indonesians and the Dutch colonialists. The Vietnamese army emerged victorious from wars with the French and the Americans. On the eve of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Turks were lucky to have a certain Colonel Mustapha Kemal Attaturk who did not wait for imperialist cartographers before carving out the modern Turkey nation and subsequently going on a modernizing rampage.
The modern American army was a product of the American Revolution against British imperialism. It was to the eternal credit of the American military that George Washington, its founding Commander in Chief, declined suggestions that he should become a life president, thus striking a mortal blow at feudal monarchism in the new country.
Many American generals have since become president of the nation. But they dare not toy with the constitution or the institutions that breathe life into the nation. America’s most decorated general ever, the iconic Douglas MacArthur, was to find out to his own peril in a bitter confrontation with President Harry Truman.
In all these nations, the army as an authentic product of the society always acts in organic concert with the spirit and soul of the nation. This is in sharp contrast with postcolonial Africa where the colonial army usually acts against the wish and the will of the people. In a landmark development in Nigeria, the army in 1993 annulled the freest and fairest election in the history of the country, an election in which fourteen million Nigerians voted and nothing happened, except that the country is yet to completely recover from that heist.
You cannot give what you don’t have. This is not a question of Africa being the Dark Continent or its nations playing hosts to savage military brutes. It is a question of implacable fidelity to the iron law of institutional development. Some significant but countervailing developments on the much besmirched continent attest to this fact.
In Zimbabwe last year and Algeria this past week, national armies did the needful by removing ossified and doddering leaders who have become a menace to their respective countries without firing a shot and without attempting to take over the reins of power. This was the only way to kick start the frozen dialectic of history and the aborted momentum of democratic rule.
It will be recalled that both armies are product of nationalist struggles against imperialism. The backbone of the Zimbabwean army consists of the storied veterans of the struggle against the old Rhodesian White settler-class. They may be slammed for internal pacification such as witnessed during the invasion of Matabeleland. But they were there for their country when it needed them most.
The modern Algerian army evolved from the protracted and brutal war of independence against France. It was a war fought with appalling brutality on both sides. But the indigenous military force never wavered. In 1992, the Algerian military was there to prevent a hostile takeover of the country by Islamic fundamentalists which would have put the nation firmly in the orbit of Iran with dire consequences for the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa.
The origins of what we once described in this column as “Guerrilla Democracy” in Africa can be traced to colonial armies that have outlived their usefulness and had become an obstacle to their nations. In Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the old colonial armies had to be destroyed by guerrilla insurrection before the nations and the post-colonial state can be reconstituted.
The unfortunate result is the emergence of former warlords who are mortally afraid of their nations sliding back into chaos, anarchy and even genocide once they leave. In these hybrid democracies, economic freedom, security of life and rising national prosperity supersede the formal tenets of classical democracy. It is an awful trade off but that is the reality of the nations.
But one can be sure that when the people eventually get tired of this authoritarian democracy, the nationalist armies, listening in to the mood of the nation, will throw their former benefactors on the track. This is the difference between armies that evolved out of the need to protect the people’s right and armies founded on the need to suppress the people’s right.
This is the best theoretical context to discuss the controversial involvement of the Nigerian military in the last election. In fairness to the Nigerian Army, it has been on its best behaviour after retreating to the barracks twenty years ago having exhausted its historic and political possibilities. There have been occasional lapses such as when the old institutional bugbear of authoritarian intolerance and repressive brutality return to haunt it. But on the whole, the threat of military intervention has receded to the remote background.
What is confronting the Nigerian military is what is known in psychoanalysis as the return of the repressed. In the Rivers State, the military confronted well-armed militia men whose principal preoccupation is not just electoral mayhem but state decapitation or state incapacitation as the case may be. It was a recipe for industrial bloodletting and only caution and restraint averted what could have snowballed into a national meltdown.
Twenty years after the military withdrawal from formal politics, the National Question has worsened. Nigeria is embroiled by a security nightmare in which several parts of the country have become no-go areas as a result of insurgency, ethnic conflagration, religious insurrection, kidnapping and a looming economic maelstrom arising from lack of responsible and responsive governance.
The background reason for this is the fact that the political, social, historic and economic structure which permitted military overreach in 1993 remains intact and untouched. The political class is heavily dominated by the military and their paramilitary subalterns. But as it is said, anybody can make a throne of bayonets for himself. But whether he will be able to sit in it is another matter.
Unless we go back to basics and where the rains started beating us, a million elections cannot resolve the quagmire. As a minimum condition for ameliorating the misery of the nation, President Buhari must set in motion the machinery for a comprehensive overhaul of the security architecture of the country. Drawn into internal security operations in about thirty two states, the army is overstretched and occasionally outwitted by rogue masters of asymmetrical warfare.
It is also obvious that the military is institutionally ill-designed to undertake internal security operations, despite the reality of a hopelessly demoralised and ill-equipped police force. There is an urgent need for a buffer force to undertake internal security operations. If anything, what the military operation in Rivers State has done is to further alienate the people from federal authorities.
If we want to preserve our fledgling democracy, we must always bear it in mind that it was military resentment against internal security operations among the Tiv people that ended the First Republic. Meanwhile, this column welcomes the intemperate and unwise tyrant, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, to the club of better forgotten African military despots. With three leaders in forty eight hours, Sudan may well be a case of what Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Nigeria’s iconic gadfly, famously dismissed as “Army Arrangement”. But it is morning yet on creation day.