THE MILITARY NEVER LEFT

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.