A Catastrophic Miscalculation -By Kene Obiezu

Nigeria’s troubled tryst with nationhood has seen it all in more than sixty years of false dawns, cruel stops and starts, broken dreams, and shattered hopes. Indeed, it is to the eternal credit of the country and a testament to its resilience that it is still standing, somehow managing to hold things together.

Nigeria’s shaky foundations were laid with the amalgamation of 1914. If independence was supposed to consolidate those faulty foundations, the quick fire coups that followed in 1966 before snowballing into the cataclysmic Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 put paid to those hopes. The country has struggled to recover ever since, with the deep wounds inflicted during the civil war showing a significant capacity to fester.

Today, Nigeria faces significant challenges to achieving national unity and cohesion. Ethnic and religious divisions instigated by historical differences and disagreements remain sharp.

In 2023, against significant odds,Bola Ahmed Tinubu who campaigned on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) won the race to become Nigeria’s president. The election was fraught with challenges and heavily contested, but at the end of the day, he was sworn in for a first term of four years.
If the challenges that greeted his emergence were considered significant, events since have put those challenges in their shadows.

President Tinubu has since presided over a country of deepening inequality, steep poverty, and rising discontent. Many Nigerians, not content with giving the government an earful through whatever channels they choose, have not let any opportunity to take to the streets slip by. While many Nigerians have been content to bide their time and wait for the next cycle of elections to register their discontent by changing the government, some Nigerian military officers appear to have grown particularly agitated and impatient.
Some time last year, reports emerged that about thirteen military officers were taken into detention following a failed coup attempt against the government. While the Defence Headquarters confirmed the news, it was reluctant to release their names pending the conclusion of preliminary investigations.

With the recent conclusion of investigations, the Defence Headquarters has since released the names confirming that there is a case made out against the military officers.

Until the recent surge of coups in a handful of West African countries that border Nigeria, it was unthinkable that a military coup could be contemplated in Nigeria. This was largely because Nigeria had gone down that path before and discovered that as inviting as that path was in the despair of heedlessly chaotic civilian rule, nothing ever lay there but the death of democracy and the disorienting darkness it dips a country into.

Nigeria’s leadership crisis is decades old. It is not even about the current administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. In fact, of all those who have led Nigeria recently, the former Lagos State Governor is showing the greatest promise.

Many have led Nigeria and have failed, including many who came in military camouflage, suspended the constitution, dictated decrees, and ruled with iron fists only to leave the soul of Nigeria broken, its spirit crushed, and its coffers empty.

As for those for whom discontent and disappointment with the current administration have congealed into nostalgia for the days of military rule, let the fact that nothing good that can go the distance ever comes out of military rule serve as a warning to them.

Democracy is too delicate for calloused and often corrupt military fingers. For all its flaws, especially in a country that so often lacks direction and decisiveness, democracy remains the best bet and the surest promise.

There can be no sympathy for military officers who took their eyes off Nigeria’s steep security challenges to plan a doomed coup. They must be made to dance to the drumbeats of the law, and their apologists must be left in no doubt that Africa’s biggest democracy has no desire whatsoever to return to the treacherously dark days of military rule.

Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com