Time to retire the generals



By Ochereome Nnanna
THERE is a saying among the Igbo: Agbachaa oso a gua mile. After a race, you must check the distance you made. After the presidential race we must decipher the hidden and obvious meanings of the vote. What did the Nigerian electorate say with their voting patterns?

What do they want? Saying “the vote should count” simply means that the wishes of the electorate must be respected.
I summarise my reading of the vote thus: Nigerians want to put the discredited past behind them.

They voted to remove those who have held this nation down in the past 40 to 50 years from the centre stage. They want the factors, persons and philosophies that reduced a country with so many promises at independence to a cretin to be exorcised. They want Nigeria’s greatness to begin.

This vote was a resounding defeat of the old order. How do I mean? The historical older order consisted of two segments: the post-colonial stage and the post-military era.

The post-colonial stage was characterised by the imposition of internal colonialism by the departing British colonial masters, who corrupted the system before they left it.

They created fake majorities and introduced rigging to make their contraption stick. They created an ethnic and sectionally dominated army to protect the contraption from the equalising and equitising influences of democracy.

True to their agenda in the First Republic, the sectional power bloc that took over from them used the army and the police to contain the various hot spots that rebelled against ethnic conquest, such as Tivland and Yorubaland as well documented by Professor of Political Science, Remi Anifowose.

This led to a messy military intervention in January 1966 and a counter-coup six months later, during which the ethnic demons of this nation were unleashed. An attempt by the Igbo people to create an independent republic where they would be safe from post-colonial Nigeria was thwarted in a civil war in which the entire nation, aided by Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union and other allies united against Biafra.

The war ended in 1970 with Nigeria winning “the war of unity”, as late songster, Sonny Okosuns, put it. The boys that fought and won on the battle front “to keep Nigeria one” rapidly became senior military officers who took over the commanding heights of governance. Even though the war was a collective effort of all Nigerians on the federal side, what later emerged was a military political establishment that suggested that the war was fought and won by the former Northern Region, especially its majority cultural people.

Gradually, other allies were sidelined, as were the marginalised ex-secessionists. The only person who seemed to “grow” with the rest of the senior military officers from the North was General Olusegun Obasanjo. This was possible only because he seemed willing to stooge for the North.

Obasanjo was so adept at playing “the fool” that he ended up the only two-time president of this country with the record number of years in power (eleven), thus besting General Yakubu Gowon (nine years) and General Ibrahim Babangida (eight years). During his second coming to the presidency, Obasanjo eventually became the remote instrument through which the Nigerian people finally sent the military era packing.

Just as in the case of the colonial era, the military period had its years of reverberations long after the military quit politics. Most of the surviving top generals produced in 33 years of military dominance (1966 – 1999) continued to dictate the character of our democracy until the transitional politics of 2010/2011.

Some of them and their civilian clones, such as General Babangida, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), Lt General Aliyu Gusau (rtd), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Dr Bukola Saraki and others, leaning on the expired sectional dominance, tried to seize power from a sitting President Goodluck Jonathan.

They built their political strategy on the notion that once the North decides the rest of the country follow. Many of them did not even bother to campaign in the South East and South-South or even the non-Muslim North Central. They lost their bid for snatching power every inch of the way. It was not an ethnic coalition that ensured their failure. It was a coalition of all Nigerians, including progressive Northerners that achieved the defeat of the Generals.

Jonathan has thus emerged as the first genuinely democratically elected president Nigeria has ever produced. Abiola would have achieved that feat if his election was not annulled in 1993. Jonathan is the first Nigerian president elected not because he was propped up by the colonialists or the North or its regional-minded retired Generals.

The immediate import of this is that his primary allegiance is to the Nigerian people. GEJ does not owe the Generals anything. Nigerians have retired them from our political arena, and Jonathan must keep them where they now belong.

It does not matter whether we are talking about Babangida, Obasanjo, Danjuma, Atiku or Adamu Ciroma. These and their co-travellers no longer count.

It is the ordinary Nigerians, who cannot afford to send their children to private or foreign schools, who cannot afford their own private security, who need good infrastructure to pursue their livelihood and who cannot afford to travel abroad for treatment that GEJ must address his full attentions to. It is the youth who have become confused and misguided after 50 years of military rampage; who are poorly educated (if at all); who have low capacity for productivity, that GEJ owes the next four years.

GEJ should remove the unearned privileges of these Generals and the parasitic, idle elite, and transfer them to the people. Any of them who makes trouble should face the law, not the President. The nation’s security agencies must now do their work without fear or favour.

Their time is gone for good. It is now time to fix Nigeria.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/05/time-to-retire-the-generals/