SAY YOU'RE NOT ONE OF THEM

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.