Comment - Facing up to the Military II
Why bother to complain, we are not like those people, they are thieves, and homosexuals that is why they are being persecuted...
Those are our neighbours they are taking away, one had thought they were upright people, but if the authorities have seen fit to arrest them, then they must be guilty of something; why else would they be picked upon out of the entire population . . . by the time such families were being picked up themselves nobody else was avail able to put in a word for anybody else being taken away in a Black Maria.
On December 31st, 1983, it looked and sounded very much like a military action against the government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. People decided to draw a fine distinction between what they saw as an assault on or the comeuppance of a limited number of people rather than as an assault on the fundamental rights of everybody.
Shagari and his ministers and all those Governors and Party bosses had it coming to them, they do not deserve a tear. The civil servants as usual were quick to state that they had always given good advice but the arrogance of their political masters prevented them from listening. The military said the Civil Servants should stay in place... now they are being retired and dismissed and as is usual with the military "with immediate effect".
Such wholesale dismissals are valuable, of course, for sheer drama and serve to give an atmosphere of decisiveness and the reaction is often, oh well, those civil servants deserve to be shaken up. But nobody seems to consider that there is a definite and laid-down method for dismissing people from the civil service, not the fundamental injustice in lumping everybody together and dismissing them who among those being dismissed are corrupt and who are inept and who are dead wood those concerned deserve to know as does the Nigerian public.
The National Security Organisation (NSO) and the police enthusiastically rounded up and arrested "fleeing politicians", without stopping to ask or bother about such unimportant things like what crimes they had committed and ransacked people's homes without a thought for search warrants ... their own purges are underway...
The judiciary managed to stave any crisis of self doubt about their position and decided no great damage had been done by the overthrow of the constitution, as their counterparts discovered in Ghana when they also assumed they were safe and it was only the politicians who were the targets; when their turn came it was with unimaginable fury.
A decree has been passed which enables people to be picked up and kept in jail for three-month periods without the person being even told why he has been detained. Not a whimper of protest has come from any identifiable group, neither the Nigerian Bar Association nor the Churches nor the students nor from individuals regarded as possessing the conscience of the nation, presumably because the targets seem to be the dis credited politicians. The day a university don or an erring journalist is picked up under the same decree, it would have been too late to complain, but by their silence and covert abetment today, future critics have forfeited any credible resistance tomorrow.
The group of persons being kept at the maximum security prisons at Kiri-Kiri is currently the butt of jokes, satires, taunts and covert instigation to humiliation. It is fashionable to suggest that they are "alright and are being treated so well, in fact, that the convicts have had cause to protest." But nobody seems to be outraged that a person's liberties have been taken from him and he is being locked up with convicted persons, but history has proved that when politicians have ceased to provide headlines, ordinary persons tend to take their places.
The other political parties apart from the ruling NPN do not seem unduly worried yet except over the few of their members who are being held, and are not inclined to see things in the light of an assault on a system in which they participated actively, freely and enthusiastically. The newspapers, of course, are currently trying to outdo each other in orchestrating the humiliation of people that a few weeks ago, were fair game for criticism, and it will be funny until journalists start seeing and saying that there is something wrong in which case the same decrees which enable the politicians to be locked up without question will be in place to be applied to them.
It is not a fanciful scenario and the experience of Ghana is there to show that the initial enthusiastic supporters who were unwilling to view matters in a broader perspective have in the end been swallowed by the very dragon they helped to nurture.
If the military had any ideas superior to what they had overthrown they would have offered them, but the pattern is the same: seize power and then think of what to do. Nigeria's economic problems which were given as the primary cause for the takeover are being handled not only by the same bureaucrats but along the same lines.
There have been no dramatic announcements or proposals at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund's negotiations and the only suggestion put forward is to OPEC for Nigeria to be allowed to increase its quota of oil production as original and dynamic a proposal as can be expected from a group of people whose training is geared towards stifling any show of original thinking.
For as long as the civilian population allows the military to put the imaginary lines of division among it. they will continue to push the delusion that they possess any skills outside the handling of weaponry or any superior moral authority. The fact of the matter being that the military cannot rule without the co-operation of the civilians and this co-operation is assumed by default because the civilians never present a united front.
The tale of the two squabbling brothers who ended losing their choice piece of meat to the crow is worth thinking about up
