Military Coups and Morbid Wish
The United States National Intelligence Council provoked outrage in Nigeria when it published a May 2005 controversial report, ‘Mapping SubSaharan Africa’s Future’. Under the sub-heading ‘Downside Risks’, the report stated that “while currently Nigeria’s leaders are locked in a bad marriage that all dislike but dare not leave, there are possibilities that could disrupt the precarious equilibrium in Abuja. The most important would be a junior officer coup that could destabilize the country to the extent that open warfare breaks out in many places in a sustained manner.”
Quite naturally, many Nigerians were aghast by the US report coming just six years after the exit of the military. In his response at the time, then President Olusegun Obasanjo dismissed most of the assumptions that informed the conclusion. But he also noted most poignantly: “It is important for us to know that we are being rated low, not because of what is happening to us from outside but because of what we do to, for and by ourselves internally…” Whatever he may have meant, my reading of Obasanjo’s response is that whether as individuals or as a nation, we are the architects of our own fortunes or misfortunes.
It is within that context that I want to situate what is fast becoming an open invitation for military takeover of power on the continent, following recent palace coups in both Niger Republic and Gabon. In a trending video titled ‘Togo should be next’, a young Togolese x-rayed political developments in his country—where Faure Gnassingbe who succeeded his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema in 2005 is now also plotting for his son to succeed him—and concluded with a question on the seriousness of both ECOWAS and the African Union. He extended his analysis to Equatorial Guinea, where President Teodore Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (who first came to power through a military coup in 1979 before winning a succession of sham elections) “has appointed his son as vice president, heir apparent and successor”, Cote D’Voire where President Alassane Ouattara has manipulated both the legislature and judiciary to give himself an extraconstitutional third term and Cameroon where the 90-year-old Paul Biya remains in power after 41 years despite being marooned mostly in Geneva, Switzerland. When you add Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni who has been in power since 1986, Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, also in his fifth decade in power, Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki who has been president since independence in 1993 and others, you get a picture of a continent where power holders are not accountable to the people.
Of course, the situation in Nigeria is different from the scenario painted by the Togolese because we hold periodic elections in our country. No president has been able to stay beyond two terms of eight years—though not for lack of trying. We have also had an incumbent president defeated in an election. However, disappointment with the outcome of the 2023 general election has apparently led some of our young people to also engage in coup-baiting. It is a dangerous gambit. Most of us may not have witnessed the coup and countercoup that upended the First Republic and shattered the peace and prosperity of Nigeria, but we were around during the military era preceding the Second Republic in 1979 and the period after, between December 1983 and May 1999. The experience of those years is enough for us to say ‘Never Again’ to any suggestion of
military rule in our country. That we can even talk about military coup is one of the dividends of democracy. Under the military, any journalist who wrote a column with my chosen headline would not sleep in his house that day, assuming he survives to tell the story.
I am aware that the only government most Nigerians (given our demographics) have experienced is the current civilian dispensation that is now 24 years old. But it is important to understand that things are not going to get better should there be a coup in Nigeria. Things are likely to get worse, on all counts. Under a military regime, the first thing to be suspended is the Constitution and the rights and liberties it confers on citizens. Suppression of the media will be automatic, and the courts will lose the limited powers they have to adjudicate over those freedoms. Military rule is about impunity and those who can abuse their authority to deny fellow citizens their fundamental rights would have no qualms appropriating to themselves what belongs to the public. With decrees and edicts, crimes and punishment can be invented at will to deal with ‘subversive elements’—just about anybody who disagrees with them. Retroactive laws, including to kill citizens (as it happened to Bartholomew Owoh, Lawal Ojuolape and
Bernard Ogedengbe) and torture could become routine again. On the economic front, things will likely spiral out of control because of international pressure and sanctions that would follow, as we saw in the nineties.
General Abdulsalami Abubakar was the last military leader in Nigeria, only stepping in after the death of General Sani Abacha to restore civil rule within ten months as promised. So, effectively, the last military regime in Nigeria, in the real sense of it, was that of the late Abacha. Interested readers can download free copies of my book, ‘The Last 100 Days of Abacha’ from my web portal, olusegunadeniyi.com, for glimpses of what transpired when the resources and institutions of state were pressed into the service of one man and his political aspiration.
At that dark period in our history, Nigeria was rendered a pariah state, with the economy in tatters. But it was in Abacha’s attempt to foist himself on us as another African ‘life president’ that we were confronted with unprecedented brutality.
NOTE: Interested readers can read the conclusion online.