The recourse to diversionary maneuvering is a familiar political gimmick. When government is thin on ideas and is politically ambushed or politicians are in disarray, the field is fertile for Machiavelli’s foot soldiers. We can domesticate this classic political script as one of the many possibilities in the reported ongoing investigation into a coup tale that emanated from Abuja recently.
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
According to the sketchy outlines of the script, close to 20 soldiers have been arrested and are being detained and interrogated allegedly in connection with an atempted coup plot. The specifics of their offence or the plot are still lean and hazy. One version says the poor chaps in uniform were overheard grumbling about bleak career prospects and bad service conditions. Another version says the soldiers were complaining about hard times in general as a result of the present economic climate in the country. Yet another version is that some officers were said to be unhappy with the present political leadership in the country which it holds responsible for their unhappiness. With regard to the last grievance, it has been alleged that one of those being investigated is a former state governor.
All the public so far has to rely on is a Defence establishment statement. The statement is unhelpful as it sounds more open ended than the pronouncements of a Delphic oracle: vague, innocuous and replete with avenues of plausible deniability.
In times of political trouble, the political establishment resorts to a number of escape channels. Either politicians begin rehearsing campaigns for an election years in advance or sponsor stories about threats to national security. The latter aims at frightening everybody into seeking protection from politicians. This time, the noise about some coup is coming from a place of increasing emptiness and joblessness. Right now in Nigeria, the government is clueless and relatively jobless. Politicians are bored and in disarray. Wild noises about national survival are all over the place as key politicians fan out into ethnic and regional factions.
A much orchestrated national opposition political platform has literally fizzled out as key elements troop out to join the APC gravy train. How do you keep such a boisterous polity busy between now and the next general election? This is perhaps the reason behind the noise about an alleged coup plan investigations around it. But a coup plot is not a child’s play or a bed time story. It is a serious matter of political life and death in the nation. National security is at issue. Careers and lives are on the line. Our international reputation is equally at stake.
In a close follow-up but inconsequential development, a general notice has reportedly gone out restricting government officials from their usually random visits to the Presidential Villa. No one has told us the relationship between vagrants in and around Aso Rock and increasing insecurity in the precincts of power.
The coup tale and its echoes are familiar. For a country that passed through nearly half a century of jackboot rule, rumours and speculations about regime change through improper means is a familiar feature of political conversation even if it has gone a bit out of vogue in the last 25 years. In general, Nigerians are immune to rumours about coups and plans thereof. Such stories can hardly frighten us. We have seen coups and counter coups, bloody and bloodless takeovers. We have seen civilian power hijacks most times in the name of democratic elections.
Yet there is a worrisome thing in the current political echo system that gives the latest coup speculation some gravity. The Tinubu government is unpopular. The regime has unleashed unfamiliar levels of suffering among the populace. The policies of the administration have yielded some elite statistical progress. The World Bank and Washington bankers think the Tinubu reform could yield some good for the Nigerians economy. But when asked about the timeframe for some relief from the present regime of agony, the bankers and statisticians pack up their files and computers and leave town. The majority of Nigerians hear about the improving figures often cited by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal and keep asking “where is the road to the New Jerusalem?”
Meanwhile, wild tales of mega corruption erupt daily from the hall ways of power. Some senior government officials are shredding the Guinness record book in terms of corruption allegations. Ministers are either buying up vast real estate abroad or living lavishly. Between the lifestyle of our political high priests and the vast desert of penury in which the majority of the people live is a clear gulf. Something is fatally wrong. Rumours of coups and intended power grabs cannot be unfounded in the context of today’s dysfunctional Nigeria. The utterances and carriage of certified Nabobs and high state officials like FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, Works Minister Dave Umahi and Senate President Godswill Akpabio only magnify the appearance of insensitivity and arrogant corruption. Only zombies can inhabit a land like this and not cherish thoughts of ugly leadership change if only to respect the feelings of common poor people.
Democracy and the time it needs to effect political change and economic good have turned out a bit too sluggish. Worse still, the US-style presidential system in Nigeria with its fixed four year tenures has turned out a bit too unresponsive to the anxieties of the majority. People want change now. Presidential democracy says: “wait for the next election” . In the interim, a nation and its people are dying in instalments, drained of the life blood of daily life of food, medicines, security and hope.
In recent times, trends in West Africa and other nearby places have put military coups back on the agenda of political succession. The democratic institutions that ought to discourage these power adventurisms have been fickle and weak. Individual authoritarians and despots thrown up by sporadic democracy have privatized and pocketed the institutions of democratic order. Instead, the institutions have served to deepen anti democratic pressures. They have mostly served to bolster and sustain whoever rides into the presidential palace first.
The mood of the international community is different today. A new world order is up for contest between the liberal democratic West led by the US and Europe and an “Axis of Authoritarianism” led by China, Russia and North Korea.
On the contrary, the pains of Africa have deepened and do not particularly interest the rest. Hardly anyone cares about the hunger, spiraling poverty and serial failure of the state in Africa. It no longer matters to the rest of the world who is living large in some African state house or the plight of some ragged economy in sub-saharan Africa. New economic realities and trends now defy extractive sweaty enterprises in favour of fintech, tech, AI and crypto currency robbery. Blood diamonds, swamp oil and gas and coal mines in deep African rain forests hardly interest too many people in the developed world. Bush African dictators and illiterate politicians hardly understand these intricacies. They are content with deepening the exploitation of their peoples by denying them education, food, medicine and basic enlightenment in order to continue to exploit them. African political adventurers and would be coup makers only want to re-cycle or re-steal already looted money. Old Africa has exhausted all development theories. There are no new theories in the horizon. The new breed of African coup makers are not interested in either The Communist Manifesto or Adam Smith. These handbooks have gone out of fashion except in museums.
Those blowing the trumpet of coup attempts are perhaps attracted by the atmosphere of intractable insecurity in Nigeria in the last over fifteen years. Insecurity has become part of the architecture of the Nigerian state. No national budget has been made in the past 15 years without a huge vote for internal security. Insecurity is one feature of our present reality that has made alternative power change ttractive. Politicians have used it to to no avail. Mr. Buhari touted his military background to promise an end to insecueity. People bought the myth only for him to spend eight years fanning the embers of unprecedented insecurity. Today is a worse day in the land. The scraggy road that connects Abuja to parts of Kogi State is controlled by bandits, kidnappers and abductors. Similarly, in parts of Zamfara, Borno, Yobe, Katsina and niger states, bandits and terrorists have shed their disguise and masks. They now hold “peace” meetings openly with elected officials complete with a full display of assault weapons, rocket launchers, grenade launchers and drones while official security forces keep watch over the sessions.
New ‘insecurity’ factors have arrived the scene. Non-state armed actors, a vast youth army, Gen Z wild kids, a vast rampaging army of jihadists from the Sahel- all these latent forces are exerting pressure on a very weak state structure loosely held together by a creaky divisive political thinking.
A vast military establishment presided over by officers spoilt by privilege and corruption can only protect its own interests and those of its immediate masters. It makes huge annual budgets. It buys fancy weaponry to combat pockets of trouble makers in the country. But it has been humbled by all manner of untrained and rag tag non- state bandits. Maybe we should hand out the annual defense budget in cash to the bandits and thereafter beg them to go elsewhere with their trouble so that our military can return to professionalism and stop playing with defense money.
The nation has become synonymous with our failing state and its vast estates of privileged power and vested interest networks. The major instrument of survival in our current landscape is violence. Guns, bombs, improvised explosive devices and lethal drones are available on the shelves in bad places nearby. The agents of violence and darkness operate freely in a black market supplied by theatres of recent conflict in North Africa and serving security racketeers who sell and buy smuggled weapons as side hustle.
The Defense people have since thrown in their own politics into the alleged ongoing coup investigation. They have reaffirmed what every idiot on the roadside knows and should say: Reaffirm your loyalty to democracy and the democratic order. The adolescent logic is that even the best unelected regime is worse than a decadent democracy.
But who cares what silly statements are being issued by over decorated fficers in some fancy office in Abuja? Real soldiers that combat insecurity have no time to polish and burnish their medals earned for doing nothing. People are hungry and frustrated. Whoever translates governance into food and the good life is the best leader. That is the sad summation of popular thinking in today’s Nigeria.
But the sloganeering on the beauty of democracy is good for military officers in their fancy Abuja offices. It is also a good weapon in the hands of the Tinubu political regime. Let’s give democracy a chance and avoid dangerous power escapades and undemocratic regime changes. Nigeria must project the promise of democracy in Africa and the black world. Tinubu and his friends and party are now synonymous with democracy in Nigeria. It is easy to say that the opposition is a disruptive force which may be part of the support for the coup narrative.
There is already an unconfirmed dangerous insinuation that one of the coup suspects may be a former civilian governor. No one knows but if that allegation happens to be upheld, the political opposition may have a hard time defending itself from an allegation with little foundation. An opposition that gets enmeshed in a coup narrative is already out of play in the political game.
A thorough investigation of the coup tale is required. But every effort should be made to avoid mixing the narrative of disquiet in the military with the prevailing general discontent all over the nation. National security must be kept very far away from petty inter party political disputations.
