The Military in Nigerian Politics

In most post-colonial countries, the struggle for independence and nation-state building had been the main dynamics in which national armed forces emerged and rose to political pre-eminence. Achieving independence in 1960, Nigeria’s post-colonial history was relatively short and the role of the military in achieving independence was quite marginal. However, the military leadership’s ambitions increasingly developed from the mid-1960s onwards (Othman, 1989 ).

The Nigerian military had never gone as far as legitimizing its political role through an elaborated missionary ideology anchored in the local political symbolism. Apart from assumptions derived from vintage modernization theory of the 1960s, which regarded the military as an organization spearheading the drive for modernization (Janowitz, 1965 ), there was no other ideational core legitimizing the Nigerian military’s involvement in politics. The history of the Nigerian military as part of the British West African contingent (Adejumobi, 2002 , pp. 150, 159) and the clear inclusion of the principle of civilian supremacy in the post-colonial state of the 1960s had not encouraged the construction of a particular political role for the military.

The armed forces intervened in domestic politics for the first time in January 1966 when the military takeover under Gen. Aguiyi Ironsi, an Igbo from Nigeria’s southeast, abruptly ended Nigeria’s post-independence Westminster

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type parliamentary system. The coup provoked a counter-coup by northern officers in July 1966. The secession of the Igbo ethnic group, which on May 29 1967 proclaimed the independent Republic of Biafra in the eastern region of the country, threw Nigeria into a Civil War (1967–1970). Although the military had a decisive role in the restoration of national unity in the Biafra War (Clapham, Herbst, & Mills, 2006 , p. 66), it acted as a tool of the federal government and not out of a particular ideology or a self-proclaimed guardian role. However, the Civil War was

a watershed in Nigerian civil-military relations. It transformed the former colonial armed forces into a de facto national army, an element of unity in the face of ethnic fragmentation. But even more decisive for the military’s leadership aspirations was the fact that it markedly strengthened the role of the armed forces, gave them an identity as savior of the nation and established their firm political grip over the country. Since then, Nigeria’s post-colonial history has been a history of military incursions into politics, often driven by heavy infighting within the political class over the distribution of the country’s abundant oil resources among the major ethnic groups, namely the Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani and Igbo (Jega, 2007 , p. 209).

This early period of military rule under Lt. Gen. Yakubu Gowon ended in 1975 with the coup of Gen. Murtala Mohammed. After Mohammed’s murder in an aborted coup in 1976, Vice President Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo became his succes- sor and, finalizing the democratization program initiated by Mohammed, handed over power to a democratically elected civilian government under President Shehu Shagari in 1979. This has been the only, albeit short-lived, restoration of constitu- tional democracy since the first military coups in 1966 and the power handover to Olusegun Obasanjo on 29 May 1999 (Ojo, 2006 , p. 255). In 1983 another military incursion into politics led by Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and Gen. Tunde Idiagbon ended the return to democracy abruptly. At the time, the coup plotters benefited from public and civil society support as people were dissatisfied with the misman- agement of the Shagari administration. Only 2 years later, an intra-military power struggle brought to power the Chief of Army Staff, Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Babangida. In 1987 Babangida’s military administration launched a transition program to democracy expected to return political authority to civilians by 1993, an empty promise as it should turn out. Gen. Babangida did not accept the results of the 1993 elections and simply annulled them. Instead, he established an Interim National Government (ING) under Chief Ernest Shonekan, a shallow imitation of a civilian government which was overthrown only a few months later by Gen. Sani Abacha and Gen. Oladipo Diya (Badmus, 2005 , pp. 57–60; Elaigwu, 1997 , pp. 85, 86; Falola, 2000 , p. 193; Nwolise, 2002 , p. 325). Once more, segments of the political class and even pro-democracy forces openly welcomed the intervention by conser- vative military officers in 1993 (Ihonvbere & Shaw, 1998 , p. 190).

The higher number of coups targeting military rather than civilian governments proves that the Nigerian military was far from bringing either political stability or economic wealth to the country. Instead it evolved into a factionalized organization suffering of similar tensions and ethnic cleavages as Nigerian society as a whole. Nigeria had seven military heads of state between 1966 and 1985 and 117 military officers and civilians have been executed due to their involvement in coups

60 M.-G. Manea and J. R€uland (Ojo, 2006 , p. 262). Moreover, Nigeria’s military rulers presided over a dramatic

economic decline in the 1980s and 1990s. According to World Bank estimates, 70% of the Nigerian population lived below the poverty line of one dollar per day at the

turn of the century (Suberu, 2001 , p. 207, 211). 1 This brought Nigerian military regimes to a point where economic distress made them dependent upon the support of the Western world.

The short and limited autonomy of the Nigerian political system from military intrusion substantially reduced the space for political institutions and the political class to develop free from the military repression. With each phase of military rule, parliament, political parties, opposition, and civil society went through a process of atrophy or outright abolition. As a matter of fact, they were largely absent in 1998 when the regime changed, leaving civilians with limited bargaining power in the negotiation of the democratic transition and even less with regard to military reforms. In particular, the civil society, which in many Third Wave transitions was a driving factor for reforms, only played a minor role in Nigeria prior to and during regime change. Although in Nigeria civil society organizations and labor unions emerged in the 1980s, they faced massive repression under the rule of Gen. Abacha (1993–1998). Security forces responded brutally to all kind of political dissent, imprisoning or even murdering many oppositionists. By creating an atmosphere of intimidation and severe repression, political activity in the country came to a virtual standstill (Ahosni-Yakubu, 2001 , p. 92; International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2000 , p. 186). 2

The self-proclaimed role of the Nigerian military as the savior of the fragile nation state and its self-attributed institutional modernity and professionalism fuelled the military’s claim to political power and a feeling of superiority over civilians. Many military officers despise the non-uniformed population as “bloody

civilians” 3 and “dirty politicians” corrupting the military ethos (Adekanye, 1999 , p. 88). By contrast, the Nigerian armed forces defined themselves as a professional organization. Yet they conceded that in the course of political interventions the loss of their military ethos had become ostensible not only outside, but also increasingly inside the military institution. This view has been repeatedly aired in our interviews

by retired military officers, especially those from the older generation. 4 In fact, the emergence of a “political” type of officer had strongly divided the Nigerian military, creating an atmosphere of discontent among the operational units towards the “political soldiers” (Adejumobi, 2000 , p. 33). The decision to withdraw from politics after June 1998 was, on the one hand, in harmony with the perceived military ethos and professionalism but, on the other, a tactical move safeguarding

1 For slightly different, but in the general tendency, similar figures, see Adejumobi ( 2002 , p. 170) and Nwanko ( 2003 , p. 48).

2 Tell, 3 May 1999, pp. 18–22. 3 Tell, 21 April 2008. 4 Authors’ interviews with retired military officers at a Roundtable in Jos, 5 March, 2009.

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the military’s image and interests through a self-controlled process of transition that left unquestioned the military’s corporate identity as the dominant institution in the country. 5

The Military in Nigerian Politics