Nigeria In Search Of A Stable Civil-military System

J. ’Bayo Adekson, J. 'Bayo Adekson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367019099
• eBook ISBN: 9780429724718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a critical study of the evolution and conduct of military government as well as civil-military relations in Nigeria since 1970, examining the essentially military clauses of both the draft and final Constitution drawn up for post-1979 Nigeria.

1
The five ‘D’s of contemporary Nigerian civil-military thought

Civil-military thought, whether explicitly formulated or largely implicit, may be defined as a set of dominantly held ideas about the structure and role of the military at any given time within a particular society, interpreting that society’s history and providing a basis for the evaluation of new experience. This chapter of the study aims at reconstructing the major themes in the civil-military thought of postcivil war Nigeria. The data comes partly from a crude content analysis¹ of some of the major newspapers in the country² covering the period 1970–79, selected with the view to highlighting certain coverage characteristics, i.e. regional and/or state differences within the federation, variation in culture, and political attitudes due to differential military exposure. The selected newspapers were combed for data in their public opinion (or letters to the editor) columns, editorials, articles, and official reports. The unit of analysis used while examining them was the theme approach, with our attention focused not just on headlines, clauses, and sentences, but even paragraphs iillustrations and entire stories, provided of course they were of civil military relevance or importance.

During the three years preceding the return to civil rule in Nigeria, there were a number of specifically military essays in the form of seminar papers written by some Nigerian scholars examining the place of the Nigerian military within the emerging constitutional framework, or prescribing changes in the Nigerian structure of civil-military relations in the light of the country’s post-war experience. Among these essays may be mentioned Ayuba Kadzai’s ‘Fundamental Ideas for the Reconstruction of our Armed Forces’;³ Henry Ejembi’s ‘Nigerian Politics: Civilian or Military Supremacy?’;⁴ Chuba Okadigbo’s ‘The Draft Constitution and the Nigerian Armed Forces: Isolation or Participation?’;⁵ Chukwudum Uche’s ‘The Armed Forces, the Draft Constitution and the Next Republic’;⁶ and the present author’s own ‘Military Clauses of the new Nigerian Draft Constitution: A Critical Analysis’.⁷ Of course, before 1976 there had been one or two intellectual writings regarding the military, of which the most notable was that by the former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe, entitled ‘Stability in Nigeria after Military Rule: an Analysis of Political Theory’.⁸

Nor, in reconstructing the major themes of contemporary Nigerian civil-military thought, would it be complete or fair to leave out what some of the articulate members of the military profession had to say of themselves, about their profession, and the nature of their regime, even if largely self-serving in nature. Finally, there were the views of thousands of others, including civil servants, politicians old and new, pressure group leaders and functional elite members, expressed in one forum or another, including radio and television programmes, that might have dealt with anything military.

The foregoing were the sources tapped, from which information was collected and analysed in reconstructing the five major themes—what this chapter styles as the five ‘D’s—of Nigerian civil-military thought since 1970. The themes are defence, development, demobilisation, demilitarisation, and democratisation. Representing different though interrelated facets of the evolution of military government in Nigeria and of the most politically significant ideas about society and the State after the civil war, the themes are discussed below beginning with defence.

Defence

Most Nigerians today may disagree on ‘how much of defence spending is enough?’, but only a few of them will contest the point that enough defence is the amount required to safeguard the country’s integrity and interests. It is important to emphasise this despite, or even because of, public demands for increased development, demobilisation, demilitarisation, and democratisation during the nine year period 1970–79.

The need for defence, however, had not been generally felt to be necessary before this. Certainly, in the period before 1966 most of the Nigerian influentials, though for divergent reasons, tended to have been either essentially amilitarist in their ideas, or in support of nothing more than ceremonial armed forces small in size and with little equipment.⁹ Then came the coup of 15 January, 1966, whose execution was marked by an obvious dispersal rather than concentration of force, for reasons not the least of which was the under-sized nature of the army itself relative to the size of the territory and population which it was supposed to control. This fact, in conjunction with a host of other complex factors, would have led to the disintegration of the country had it not been for the Federal military which fought a long, bloody, and successful war ‘to keep Nigeria One’, although this was not achieved until the original forces had been internally restructured, numerically expanded, and better equipped. The Nigerian army emerged from the 1967–70 civil war, therefore, hailed by many Nigerians as ‘a saviour of society’?¹⁰ A representative sampling of public opinion as expressed in the so-called letters to the editor columns of selected Nigerian dailies immediately following the war confirms this.

For the military rulers, the new favourable public image was as convenient as it was necessary, since it permitted them to begin a resocialisation (or better still, an indoctrination) of the citizens into accepting some of the basic tenets of Western military philosophy, from Machiavelli through Marx and Engels to Lenin and even (Chinese) Mao, as constant and immutable laws. The tenets included such ones as that ‘war is but a continuation of politics by some other means’; that if you want peace, prepare for war’; that ‘the existence of military organisation assumes conflicting human interests and the use of force to which these give rise’; and, therefore, that ‘military organisation is basic to the existence of every state’.

Obviously, these tenets were required by the military rulers as a status quo ante bellum ideology not just to ingratiate themselves with the Nigerian public, but also to strengthen the military’s own corporate self-identity or interest, and to defend it against critics of increased military expenditures as shown below in the chapter on ‘Nigerian Military and Social Expenditures, 1970–80.’¹¹ It is, therefore, not surprising that members of the military, particularly those holding political office, should have been the most insistent and consistent in the articulation and enunciation of the first theme of contemporary Nigerian civil-military doctrine dealing with the need for strong defence, which embodies such tenets.

A few quotes are needed here to support this point. In the Second National Plan (1970–74), which the military rulers were instrumental in drawing up as a programme for reconstruction and development of Nigeria soon after the Civil War, it was asserted that ‘although the defence and security sector can be regarded as largely unproductive from an economic stand-point, recent experience shows that its effective performance is very crucial to the very existence of the nation]¹² The Third National Plan (1975–80), which came into force five years later, was to assert the same. ‘Although Defence cannot be considered as productive in the economic sense’, the latter stated among other things, ‘it is realised that strong and efficient Armed Forces, which are strong to guarantee national peace and security, are indispensable for the normal economic progress of any country’¹³

Variations of the same theme, and sometimes a parody of one another, can be found re-echoed by Nigerian military spokesmen throughout the period. Thus on 18 August, 1975, Brigadier Martin Adamu, while addressing officers and men of the Ibadan-based 2nd Infantry Division Nigerian Army in his capacity as the new general officer commanding the division, was quoted as saying, among other things, that ‘economic and social growth of a nation depends on a highly disciplined army’.¹⁴ Quoting almost verbatim from the earlier cited pages of the Third National Plan, in May 1977, the then Quarter-Master General of the Nigerian Army, Brigadier Olu Bajowa, said: ‘Defence is unproductive in economic sense but strong and efficient armed forces that will guarantee national peace and security are indispensable for the normal economic progress of the nation’.¹⁵

It should not be deduced from what we have stated thus far, however, that only the men in khaki articulated this theme of indispensability of military organisation to the state, any state, especially the Nigerian. On this theme, even the men in agbada,¹⁶ whom the soldiers had replaced in government, were agreed. As far as the masses were concerned, their harsh environment had conditioned them to the use of force and developed in them a largely pro-military sympathy.¹⁷

It is clear from reading their earlier cited papers, that the idea also appeared incontrovertible to the military analyst Malam Ayuba Kadzai, the former philosophy lecturer Dr Chuba Okadigbo, and the sociology lecturer Dr Chukwudum Uche; although all three went on from here to ask the additional question, ‘What kind of defence force?’ Kadzai, beginning his piece from what he explicitly stated as a largely Clausewitzian viewpoint ‘that war and consequently instruments for making war, Armed Forces, are in the highest sense political’, went on to advocate that ‘the political role or the political function must be given priority over the purely military function. This point must be emphasised again and again’, Kadzai added.¹⁸ From a slightly different angle, Okadigbo would also want the structure of defence to be changed, by calling for what he called ‘The politicisation of the Armed Forces and the militarisation of the people’.¹⁹ Clearly so would Uche, who advocated ‘a politicised army’.²⁰ In other words, especially for the last two scholars, acceptance of the need for defence did not commit one to accepting a standing army as a necessary corollary. Of course, it is true that the idea of citizen soldiers carrying arms in defence of the country alongside a small corps of professionals ran strong in the thinking of most Nigerians during much of this period. We shall have cause to return to this point in our fifth and last section where we examine the connection between defence and democratisation.

Development

Meanwhile, we move to analyse the next major theme of civil-military thought of post-1970 Nigeria, namely development and how this was related to the previous one. Development, especially economic development had long since found considerable acceptance in Nigeria, particularly for most of the educated.²¹ After 1970, with the gargantuan task of post-war reconstruction that had to be tackled, the idea of rapid economic and technological growth, aimed at optimum utilisation of the country’s potentialities both human and material with the view to making her the most prosperous and powerful in Black Africa, came to receive its most enthusiastic support from the military. The question is: was a large...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 The five ‘D’s of contemporary Nigerian civil-military thought
• 2 Military clauses of the new Nigerian constitution
• 3 Nigerian military and social expenditures 1970–80
• 4 On measuring the optimum military size
• 5 Civilian restoration and political stability
• Index