No one with a fair knowledge of Nigeria would dispute the fact that crisis is the pivot on which the wheel of our national life rotates. It is to us what water is to fish. Being a condition precedent for our national survival, we go out of our way to create one where there is none. And there is no limit to our creative ability in this regard. When we are not fighting a civil war, Boko Haram, ISWAP and IPOB are making life miserable for hapless citizens in the North and the Southeast while the Middle Belt battles the menace of soulless murderers that go by the appellation of herdsmen.
In 2020, the world was still smarting from the devastating blow of the COVID-19 pandemic when some inebriated youths unleashed the malady of EndSARS; a nationwide protest against alleged excesses of members of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) unit of the Nigeria Police Force, which shook the nation to its very foundation. Of course, there have also been other crises of less magnitude but whose impacts are no less pernicious, the most recent being the face-off between the military and the authorities of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
For the better part of the outgoing week, a dramatic altercation between the FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and a certain Navy Lieutenant A.M. Yerima was the focus of social and traditional media. At the heart of it was a parcel of land in the nation’s capital city, Abuja, allegedly being developed by a former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Awwal Zubairu Gambo, without approval from the Federal Capital Development Authority.
As the story goes, a residential apartment was being built on the land located in an area mapped out for park and gardens. Wike, the FCT Minister and by implication the official landlord of the nation’s capital city, got wind of the development and decided to pay a visit with his retinue of aides. To their chagrin, they got to the construction site only to be confronted by Yerima, who pointedly told Wike that he would only access the construction site over his dead body, because he had an “order from above” not to let anyone in. An altercation thus ensued between the two parties with some coarse invectives from the exasperated minister.
Not surprisingly, the unusual confrontation has torn the country into two camps of Wike and Yerima supporters, each taking positions that suit their emotions and biases. While some have accused the young naval officer of being rude and disrespectful in his altercation with Wike, others say the FCT Minister should take the blame for acting infra dignitatem and disrespecting the military for dressing down a Navy Lieutenant in uniform.
Many Yerima supporters, who think nothing of the soldiers that are sleeping in trenches in Sambisa Forest prosecuting the war against Boko Haram and ISWAP, are lionizing Yerima as a hero and decorating him with garlands for guarding a private property owned by a retired officer and for confronting Wike over the matter. They would not stop to ask themselves what justification there is for deploying soldiers to guard an illegally acquired private property at a time the nation is at war with Boko Haram, ISWAP, Lakurawa, bandits, killer herdsmen, IPOB and other terrorist groups. How many soldiers would be left to prosecute these wars if every privileged officer toes Gambo’s path and deploy their underlings to guard their private properties?
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Still, we must count our luck as a nation and profusely thank Gambo or whoever had instructed Yerima to keep guard at the disputed land for limiting his brief to merely denying the minister access. What if the order he had was to shoot the minister and his entourage at sight? Of course, Yerima would have obeyed and we would by now be mourning the untimely exit of one of the most productive public officers in the nation’s history.
Fela, the late iconoclastic Afrobeats exponent had in various songs told us how robotic soldiers are when it comes to obeying the last order. The Wike-Yerima incident reminded me of the lyrics of his famous song, Zombie, wherein he sang that Zombie (referring to soldiers) would not go unless you ask him to go; he would not stop unless you ask him to stop; he would not turn unless you ask him to turn and he would not think unless you ask him to. Then he added the dreadful verse:
Tell am to go straight, na jooro jaara jooro
No break, no jam no sense, na jooro, jaara jooro
Tell am to go kill, na jooro jaara jooro
No break, no jam, no sense
Na jooro jaara jooro
Tell am to go die, na jooro jaara jooro
No break, no jam, no sense, jooro jaara jooro
Although Fela later paid dearly for this frank assessment of the military with soldiers’ violent attack on his house, the truth had been told about their mindset, which is why we must all be thankful, because the order on which Yerima acted could be worse.
