On May 27, 1999,
Nigeria inaugurated its first civilian government in fifteen years since the
last experiment in civilian rule was aborted in 1984. With the new start, I am sure that most
Nigerians who care about such things thought and expected that we were not just
enthroning rulers who are civilians but that we were putting in place the
foundations of truly democratic governance that would endeavor to expunge from
our public life forever all, I mean all, vestiges of military rule. By the latter I mean both the preponderant
commandist temperament of military rulers and the ubiquitous presence of men
and women in uniform—military and paramilitary—from our public spaces and
functions. Many of us felt that we would
begin to see all facets of military rule recede to such a point that the
military and auxilliary institutions will become practically invisible in our
public life. The armed forces will
retire to their bases, barracks and cantonments, other paramilitary forces—Customs,
Immigration, Prisons, and Police—will become less militarized and more civil as
they ought to be in a democratic setting.
In light of the above
expectations, as an observer of the Nigerian scene, I have often wondered if
the military ever vacated political power or exited public life in
Nigeria. There are so many pointers to
the sordid fact that the military never left.
Indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that either by design or default
what we have at present in Nigeria is military rule in mufti. This point is apt to be misunderstood. So let me make clear that I am not suggesting
that the spaces afforded by democracy to Nigerians to choose their own rulers
and run their own lives according to their own scripts have not expanded
exponentially since civil rule was restored.
The recent spate of judgments against the military, the police, and
other agents of government for violating the fundamental human rights of
Nigerians represent a welcome departure from the pervasive culture of impunity
that characterized military rule and corroded the public ethics of all
Nigerians while it lasted.
I hasten to point out
that celebrating small victories is not the hallmark of true democracies. Life should be so routinely led in freedom
and dignity that acts that occasion litigation to assert rights would become
the absolute exceptions. In our public
life we should not have to be reminded every day, almost fifteen years into
democratic rule, of the ultimate icon of military rule: the ubiquitous presence
of military and other groups in our public lives\spaces complete with their
inevitable side arms, with the fear that they evoke in ordinary people.
What do I mean when I
say that the military never left? How
many ways can I spell this out? Here are
some. When the military handed over
power to civilians, they did so on the basis of a constitution that sealed in
some dubious legality all the commandist structures that military rule had
forced upon the country. By definition,
the military could not have, even if they wanted to, preserved the federal
structure of the country. This is key to
everything else. In the name of forging,
forcing was more like it, national unity the military, outside of dividing the
country into more states, turned the country into a unitary state and ensured
that the governance of the country proceeded along lines more attuned to
military needs for order and discipline than the nurturing of a fragile
federation to maturity. They, in effect,
scuttled the Nigerian federation. The constitution
they forced their civilian successors to accept incorporated all the
distortions perpetrated by the military rulers.
Let us, even for
current purposes, ignore the contradictions and inconsistencies contained in
the constitution and well-known by now.
The truth of the matter is that there is absolutely nothing, repeat
absolutely nothing that is federal about the 1999 Nigerian constitution. There are no federating units: they can be
federating only if they are autonomous.
There is no state autonomy
under the constitution. A federal
government-appointed institution, INEC, runs even gubernatorial and state
assembly elections in the states. The
governors that are elected as a result are mere military
governors-in-mufti. Just as their
military predecessors had no autonomy from their Commander-in-Chief, our
current crop of governors, never mind that they are elected, are summoned at
will by the president. It is no
different from the commander-in-chief ordering around the erstwhile military
governors of old. There are very few
things—the principal one being being in control of his state’s share of the
blood money that is shared out centrally in Abuja on a formula determined by
the central government while it subsisted under the military. That is not what happens in a federal
state. But that is a subject for a
future blog.
Governors are
constitutionally supposed to be the chief security officers in their
states. As things stand and as we have
witnessed repeatedly in state after state, this is one huge but bad joke. Under the military the
military governor himself was a part of the armed forces. There were military formations all across the
country. Given the command structure
that subordinated the police to the military rulers, the governor could direct
the police formation in his state and when that was not available, the federal
control was always there.
At present, the
governors have no security formations to control. All the security formations,
especially the police, are under the control of the president at the
centre. What makes it a sick joke is
that the governors go along with the pretence that they are chief security
officers until crises break out in their states or they are at cross purposes
with the centre and they are shown to be exactly what they are: rank-less
military governors in mufti whose will is directed by the commander-in-chief in
Abuja. Their impotence is there for all
to see. Their humiliation cannot be good
for democracy. And things don’t have to
be this way.
The governors
themselves behave in their states like military governors of old. They pay unannounced visits to places to play
gotcha with unsuspecting civil servants and unwitting contractors. This they do more for drama than for
effects. If such visits had worked in
the past when they were the preferred vehicle of enforcing discipline and
punctuality on the part of those who received such visits, I do not think that
the problems would have persisted. They
do persist.
Governors dress down
their commissioners; they sometimes turn dog-catchers to catch late-comer civil
servants and lock them out of their offices.
They order local government chairpersons around, dissolve local
government councils at will, and some even argue against local government autonomy. It is as if they think that ever widening
circles of castrated officials would ameliorate the dire effects of their own
castration by constitutional chicanery perpetrated by the military before they
supposedly left office. They play god;
if they think their parties cannot win local government elections, they simply
don’t hold them.
One of the worst
aberrations of military rule in our polity and sustained by our current
civilian rulers concerns the judiciary.
States no longer have final say in who become their chief judges or even
judges in them. Some quasi-military
National Judicial Council now vets the appointment process for judges at all
levels in the country. How the centre is
supposed to have the familiarity with local candidates necessary to know who is
best qualified—qualification includes much more than years at the bar—is
something that escapes me.
On a final, lighter
note, it is only fair that as the governors are beholden to the president,
their wives, too, are beholden to the First Lady. The relationship between the real First lady
and the associate first ladies in the states could not have been more
hierarchical if they were all to be members of military officers’ wives
association. They are at her beck and
call. She sends them, as did military
First Ladies of old, to represent her at events that she could not be present
at. The basis for such delegation—I am
assuming it is not coming from friendship or some sorority relations—remains
murky to me outside of my contention
that this is a carryover from the military destruction of the federal system.
Since a future blog
will deal with what a true federal system should look like and how it should
run, I refrain from offering any ideas in the present discussion.
If anyone is in doubt
regarding the continuing military presence in our public life all she need do
is look at the overwhelming presence of uniformed personnel at public events
from an alphabet soup of security-related outfits: NSCDC, FRSC, Customs and Excise,
Immigration, Police, and the military.
The president seems to think that he is president if he does not have a
uniformed person standing behind him as he conducts official business. The ongoing crisis in Rivers State has
brought to light the ugly reality that soldiers are needed to protect a
governor, from what, I don’t know. For
if the reports are to be believed, Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State is not in any danger
from the electorate that twice endorsed him.
When we shall have
evolved a government that is secure in its power without having to embody it in
obvious force, represented in its visible reliance on men and women in arms, only
then can we say without fear of contradiction that the military have left. We are nowhere near that day yet in our polity.
