By Jide Oluwajuyitan
Democracy has come to stay. We will not tolerate any agent of destabilization. The years of military misadventure in politics have never carried us anywhere. It is over,” That was Nigeria’s Chief of army staff, General Yusuf Buratai, recently telling Nigerians amidst depressing news from theatre of war, what he thought would be music to their ears-defence of democracy. Burantai is probably still keeping his job in spite of widespread criticism even by his Bornu state kinsmen, by assailing the president with stories of those who may be mooning about the military over his failure to find answer to the insecurity challenges of the country.
Although no one can legislate against a coup but Burutai also knows the fear of a military coup is far-fetched because the difference between our past successive military regimes and the administration of PDP/APC military ‘new-breed’ politicians is only in paradigm. But all the same, a journey through memory is imperative if only to allow our youths who know very little about the baleful legacies of the military understand that the military is the curse of the nation.
Democracy as a new value system had been abused by our political elite who in the run up to independence saw it only as a ‘means to an end’. Barely two years into the democratic dispensation, it was undermined by NCNC and NPC coalition partners. Dispute over the 1962/63 census result and the constitutional crisis that followed the disputed 1964 election forced the warring rivals to approach the military for support. That invitation was to lead to the nation being held hostage by the military for 30 years of her 39 years of independence until the birth of the 4th republic in 1999.
Behaving like an army of occupation, they destroyed everything they touched. Their first victims were their benefactors including Tafawa Balewa who as a federal minister in 1951 persuaded the British during a house debate to train fifteen Nigerian cadets annually and to set up of a military academy in Kaduna and Ahmadu Bello, who secured more opportunities for northern youths after protesting to the imperial power that “young men presented as potential officers by leaders and emirs were being turned down as academically and medically unfit”.
They then took on the institutions of society- our universities, rated among the best in the world, our virile press that fought the imperial powers to secure our independence ; our bureaucracy, the best in Africa and our civil society groups, they made impotent through promulgation of obnoxious decrees.
The assault on the nation’s buoyant economy started with Gowon’s indigenisation decree through which soldiers and their fronts seized many thriving private companies run by expatriates. This was followed by Babangida’s commercialization policy through which public enterprises were sold to soldiers and their fronts and completed by Obasanjo’s privitisation programme through which Nigeria’s total investments of over $100b sold to politicians at a little over $1b.
Then finally the military turned on itself. Confronted with the complexities of our socio-political realities over which they had little control and a task for which they were ill prepared, they embarked on self-destruction. As captured by Robin Luckman who could not resist comparing them to the heroes of the Greek tragedy. “Their violent entry into politics brought the wrath of the gods”. From Nzeogwu, through Ironsi, Murtala Mohammed, Obasanjo, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha, they all came to grief.
The nation was to become a victim of shortsighted policies of an ill-equipped military. Thus when General Gowon in 1973 gave the Udoji Award of £350m (three hundred and fifty million pounds sterling} in form of wages hike, his regime’s liberalization import policies provided incentive for the workers to spend their over £200,000,000 (two hundred million pounds sterling) arrears on imported foodstuff, clothing and other consumer goods.
While his two billion naira Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme collapsed due to lack of planning, the nation also incurred a whopping demurrage of £77,000,000 (Seventy seven million pounds sterling) from the over 400 ships which queued up in Lagos ports with 20 billion metric tonnes of cement; eight times more than the yearly capacity of the Lagos port. An investigation inquiry by Murtala Obasanjo regime found ten of Gowon’s 12 military administrators to be men with feet of clay.
General Obasanjo introduced ‘Operation Feed the Nation’ (OFN) in 1976. But that did not stop food import which was £88,000,000 (Eighty eight million pounds sterling) in 1971 from going up to £528,000,000 (Five hundred and twenty eight million pounds sterling) by 1978 . Nigeria in 1972 exported 454,000 tonnes of groundnut but by 1976 under Obasanjo, we were importing palm oil and groundnut oil. Obasanjo started wasteful spending of government money on hadj when in 1977 he frittered away £100,000,000 (One hundred million pounds sterling) on Nigerian hajj operations to Mecca.
After Obasanjo, an audit examination at the Nigerian External Telecommunications traced financial abuses back to 1978 with $53,000,000 (Fifty three million dollars) unaccounted for. The administration of the Federal Housing Scheme led to the loss of $43,000,000 (Forty three million dollars) while the renegotiations of the Jaguar jet contract saved the nation $30,000,000 (Thirty million dollars) in kickback. The board of the Federal Mortgage Bank was blamed 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”. It spoke of “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”.
But by 1988, General Babangida who literally institutionalized corruption had returned the ceased loots to their original owners while the military under him according to General Salihu Ibrahim, a onetime Chief of Army Staff had become “an army of anything is possible, where a small group constitutes themselves to a pressure group to the detriment of the army and their colleagues’’.
The military under Abacha, (1994-1998) was reduced to an army of quibbling loyalty badge- wearing ‘Generals’ such as Oladipo Diya, Jeremiah Usenis, the Bamayis, Azizas, Akhigbes, Abubakars, Oyinlolas, Adisa and Olanrewajus, who had no ambition beyond self-preservation as they watched Abacha waged war against Nigerians even as he stole over $2.7bb from the central bank.
A presidential investigations committee on arms procurement report under President Jonathan showed an extra-budgetary spending to the tune of N643.8 billion and an additional spending of about $2.2 billion in the foreign currency component even as better equipped Boko Haram insurgents chased soldiers from their barracks
The full stories of the Generals that have bewitched president Buhari is yet to unfold. What is no more a secret however is that insurgents today routinely carry out daring raids from ‘captured;’ Zambiasa forest with Bornu state capital increasingly coming under threat of take-over by the insurgents even as service chiefs jostled for sighting of military institutions in their villages.
Gowon’s “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done”; Buhari’s “we have no other country but Nigeria” ; Obasanjo’s “Nigeria must move forward in the interest of peace and stability” and Abacha’s “the Nigerian unity is not negotiable”, ignore social justice, the basis for peace and stability, a universal truth both PDP and APC have been unable to live up to since 1999.
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