I would like
to begin this piece with an apology. Revd. Fr. Uwem Akpan, S.J., I am yet
to read your critically acclaimed book, Say You’re One of Them.
I promise that I do plan to read it someday soon. But, as you can see
from my title, I have taken what I can only hope is not undue liberty to vary
your title for the limited purpose of this article. I apologize. I
hope that what follows, at least, provides some mitigation.
The Nigerian
Army just celebrated another of its annual Army Days. And the President
and his Minister of State for Defence were on hand to celebrate with the
institution. Ordinarily, there would be no quibble about the President’s
attendance: after all, he is the Commander-in-Chief of Nigeria’s armed
forces. Nor would anyone think that it is out of place for the minister
of defence or her junior minister to felicitate with the army or any other wing
of the nation’s armed forces. I must point out, though, that in the
specific context of Nigeria and our recent history, there may be some ground
for some of us to be ambivalent about and\or possibly object to the full
throttle participation of the president and his junior minister in such
commemorations. I belong to the latter group.
Even then,
my objection to the president’s participation is mild compared to my absolute
objection to and total disgust with the manner of his participation as well as
that of his cabinet member: for the umpteenth time in the tenure of President
Jonathan, he and his minister of state for defence, Olusola Obada, turned out
in military uniforms! [https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4XYc9WusY4pvbOAv52RGekkVqEzz7cawiXLWBq4421Rl_xkgBNDcNac5Rr8X7ZNfIUFLqLrlg-UmPJNa3EBye9XRhwcAkxz4nX3hUKrCvHSLsXJX-z9s3YP1-qlEK_dTny5_u0CuWpyK3/s1600/JONATHAN.jpg]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XYjk0uXVhP4]
From the first time a few years back that I noticed this unthinking and
disgusting behavior, I was flabbergasted by it. I refrained from
commenting because I was sure that there are enough educated, yes, educated,
members of the president’s entourage who know better than to allow him to continue
to do his best imitations of our home video police\military officer-types; that
is, that they would tell him to put a halt to his Samanja proclivities.
Obviously, either they themselves do not know any better or he is one obdurate
principal. I cannot permit myself to think that they all believe that
this is something to encourage, maybe to be proud of even.
A ní ká
jèkuru kó tán láwo, e tún ngbon owó è sáwo. When the military left in 1999, the aim, if I
understood it, was over time to remove the last piece of military rule’s
footprint from our public life. This is not done merely by having
elections and having civilian rulers in place. No, stamping out the
scourge of the military’s intervention in our public life means the purging of all military
presence from our polity. It means that the military revert to where they
used to be in the sixties: in their barracks, out of sight and only seen at
national day commemorations and similar ceremonies. Period. I have
no doubt that they were celebrating army days back then and I do not recall
images of the military on television when I was first introduced to watching
television in 1964.
But what I
have said so far regarding the military’s invisibility from public life back in
the day pales into insignificance compared to the more fundamental reason why
the military are not a regular part of public life: the principle of the civilian
control of men and women under arms. This is a principle that is an
element of the wider doctrine of the separation of powers in the modern state.
We do not
need to full blown analysis of the doctrine in the present context.
First, the modern state separates power among its principal components—the
legislature, the executive, and the judiciary—in order to ensure that tyranny,
the concentration of power in one person or institution is preempted. And
each division of the state is meant to jealously guard its power against
encroachment by the others and to check the others in order thereby to ensure
that tyranny is not established over the people.
Second, the
original theorists of the modern state were wary of standing, professional
armies. They held that the defence of the republic over which the state
rules must be the business of all citizens with each citizen available, barring
any disabilities, for military duty when occasions called for it. When
the growing complexity of the modern polity made citizen armies less
practicable or less effective, one of the ways in which they kept the standing
army from holding the state it is commissioned to defend hostage is by
instituting the principle of absolute civil supremacy over armed force and
subjecting professional soldiers, especially their officers, to supreme control
by civilian authorities represented by the elected representatives of the
people. Officers of the professional forces receive their commissions
from the people and the most senior among them hold their positions at the
pleasure of the civil authorities embodied primarily in the president of the
country.
What are the
implications of what I have said so far? As president, yes, you are the
Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian armed forces. But what does that
mean? It means this. You are not a member of the
armed forces that you command. You are not the most
senior officer of those forces. No one expects you to be conversant with
the art of war or the intricacies of military strategies and tactics. The
reason that you are the commander in chief is not because you are part of the
military. You are precisely because we do not want the military thinking
that they are a law unto themselves or that the defence of the realm—their
primary charge—is a task in which they have the last word. The military
do not levy wars; they fight them after the civil authorities, led by you, have
decided that war is an appropriate response in the relevant situation.
You are commander in chief to make the military realize that in war, the people
whom you represent are with them and when war shall begin or when it shall end
are political, not military decisions. In all, yes, you are the
boss of the Nigerian military. But you are not the boss as in
being a general in the army or the equivalent in the navy or air force.
Even a Field Marshall is inferior to you.
This is all
because as the president, the representative of the people in whom the
sovereign power resides in the modern state, you, sir, cannot be a member of
the armed forces. You are not a superior office to the generals and the
admirals. You are not an officer at all.
By the way,
what rank insignia do you wear? Field Marshal? Or the kind of rogue
rank that Master Sergeant Samuel Doe knew he had to invent if he was going to
show his supremacy to the officers of the then Liberian armed forces: he called
himself “Commander General”. It does not matter.
You do not
grant commissions to officers of the Nigerian armed forces because you are
their commander in chief; it is because you are the president acting as a
surrogate for the electorate. As a part of this important segment of modern
society every member of the electorate is superior to the highest officer who
owes his or her commission to the will of this electorate embodied in you,
their elected representative.
If the
people are beyond rank, you, too, are or should be beyond rank. When you
clad yourself in military fatigues; when you pretend to be a naval officer;
when the person you have designated to bear your authority over the armed
forces, your minister, shows up clad in military fatigues to represent your
authority, you both diminish your office; you turn yourself into the equivalent
of those you are by virtue of your office superior to by definition. I
dare say that you and your minister abase—yes, you lower yourselves and your
respective offices—by wearing uniforms.
The
principle of civilian control of the military is attenuated when you become one
of them. Of course, in monarchies, some kings and other potentates wear
uniforms. In most cases, though, they are honorary members of certain
regiments or divisions. In any case, monarchs can make whatever fools of
themselves they care. It is unseemly for the embodiment of popular
sovereignty to degrade the office by appearing to be an officer of the armed
forces.
We should be
doing all we can to extirpate the footprint of military rule from our public
life. That process is not helped by our elected officials or their
surrogates becoming a part of them.
For the sake
of all that matters in our march away from the madness of military rule please,
Mr. President, say you’re not one of them. And act as if you believe it.
Fr. Akpan, I
apologize.
