With several code-named military operations presently launched across the country, and each aimed at maintaining peace, law and order in one location and region or the other as the case may be, many Nigerians are beginning to wonder over who actually runs the country – the elected civilian potentates or soldiers. For while the elected political leaders are ensconced in the opulence and pomp of their gilded and forbidding government houses as well as sundry official residences, the lot of keeping the country intact and running, may have been abandoned to the security agencies with the military leaving the barracks to take the lead. For instance, there is the ‘Operation Lafiya Dole’ under which auspices the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East of the country is contained. Then came the ‘Operation Delta Shield’ which has been replaced by ‘Operation Delta Safe’ perhaps for want of a more palatable name. Others include the now trending ‘Operation Python Dance 11” for the South East zone – so named as its forerunner ‘Operation Python Dance 1’ was held last year. Already the military is planning to make ‘Operation Python Dance’ an annual routine in the zone, ostensibly as a response to expected future flashpoints from there. Also in the sequence is the forthcoming ‘Operation Crocodile Smile’ for the same Niger Delta and is intended for consolidating the gains of the military in the designated area.
Meanwhile the deployment of these military assets have been met with stringent uproar from both political and opinion leaders calling for their withdrawal on the basis of recorded sordid outcomes from clashes between the deployed military and host civilian communities. Indeed, as evidence abounds, hardly is there any military deployment in any part of the country without corresponding cases of civilian casualties. For instance, while the ‘Operation Lafiya Dole’ in the North East has its own measure of collateral consequences in terms of unintended civilian casualties, so it is with the other operations. Hence it is indisputable that the deployment of military forces into civilian host communities often attracts avoidable and painful consequences.
Yet the point should not be missed that the forces are not deployed for a jamboree. Rather they are mobilised to address situations of anomy which if left unchecked would not only threaten but may even compromise the country’s sovereignty. This is why it remains a matter of deep concern for all who wish this country well, that it requires a rash of military deployments around her territory to keep it intact and running, more so during a democratic dispensation whereby governance should be conducted as prescribed by a Constitution and therefore law and order. Adopting a cause and effect calculus to model the political processes of the country, would be wrong to contend that the military deployments are a consequence of failure of the civil authorities to avert situations that would attract the former into relevance? Put succinctly is the civilians that are wittingly and otherwise inviting the military into action to quell problems that are created by the acts of commission and omission of the former?
With the benefit of historical insights, it would seem that once more the complement of circumstances associated with serial failure of civil rule are making the quest for alternatives to the present political order, thinkable. Already random musings in several circles border on comparisons between the present state of affairs in the country under civil rule and the typical situation under military dictatorship, with many unable to make a distinction between the two. While some Nigerians may still be consoled by the generic argument that the best military dictatorship is worse than the worst civilian misrule, some other opinion circles see such argument as hollow, and easily justify their position with the glaring instances of blatant abuse of power by the “elected” civilian authorities.
The return of democracy on 1999 was intended to launch the country into a new dispensation of good governance, given the sense of loss which most Nigerians shared after decades of suffocating military rule. The legitimate expectations of Nigerians were around the conduct of governance away from the incontinences of the past, which featured some better forgotten political outrages. Rather than such expectations materializing, the country is witnessing a resurgence of the very tendencies that crippled its ascendancy into a viable democracy that provided good governance for its citizenry.
As is easily recalled, it was exactly the playout of circumstances of political intolerance and intrigues that are similar to the present state of affairs that triggered the cataclysmic turn of events in the early 1960s which snow-balled into the prolonged crises and eventual intervention of the military through the series of coup incidents. History records that it was the power-show between the political leadership of sections of the country that were mis-managed and defied resolution by the Nigeria Police, and thus attracted the deployment of the military. One thing led to another until first batch of military coupists would cite the crises as the alibi for their intervention in governance. The eventual result of that enterprise is there for all to see, including the blame sharing aspect.
In the light of the foregoing therefore, it needs not be emphasized that with the expansion of the threshold of military deployments for keeping peace in various parts of the country, civil authority is gradually losing grip of governance, thereby paving the way for its own downfall, as was the case in the early sixties. For to contend that military take- over of power in Nigeria, is in all practical sense wishful thinking. Only good governance as shall be by consensus is the antidote for coups in Nigeria, and so far that is not on ground.
