By Tony Erha

For about two weeks, the rumour mill had been agog, concerning an alleged failed coup d’état to unseat Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Nigeria president and a coterie of politicians and leaders, by a section of the Nigerian army. One’s heart wouldn’t skip the unsteady thuds of its beats, realising its extent and severity for Nigeria’s growing democracy culture and by extension its reversal effects on the hapless populace. Shocking revelations emanate from the news report, which allegedly bore the names and cadres of the alleged aberrant plotters.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian state had been tongue-tied and slyly in its reactions to the intense newsbreaks and updates on the rumours, which most of the news outlets seemingly confirmed as true. In the windstorm of the rumoured coup, presidential spokesmen and those of the military, dispelled it, but regarded the sack and replacement of the Chief of Army Staff, General Christopher Musa and his contemporaries of the Navy and Airforce as normal shakeups, which was later proved to be disloyalty on part of the key officers and many more of the lower ranks. The Presidency and the Military Information units were faulted, whereas the disloyalty allegation was another expression for a coup, with a punitive betrayal.

But, military takeovers in a democracy, as we are often reminded, are retrogressive and anti-people. It’s more so when a military coup hijacks a government that was put in place by the same commoners, who the coup plotters would say them wanted to save from misrule by the incumbent powers; where anti-coup d’états are upset that the gun entrusted on soldiers to safeguard the populace, is the same that silences, kills and maims the people to submit to their power-hijack.

When soldiers, who swore on oath to remain in their barracks and trenches; pledging to defend the people and their sovereignty at all time, and to be buried with their rifle along their sides, now turn their arms against defenceless people, it becomes very frightening and a subject of great concern. That is where those sacked and those allegedly arrested should face the rebellious act of a coup or disloyalty.

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Yomie Johnson, the gun-toting late Liberian warlord, who killed Samuel Doe, in ambush of the Nimba county neigbourhood of Liberia, a capital and presidential seat of the power of the West Africa country, readily comes to the mind. With his ‘tail to his heart’ Sergeant Doe, the man who killed, maimed and misruled his country, was shot to death, by Johnson, culminated in a Nemesis or retributive justice, similar to the maxim of ‘he who kills by the sword dies by the sword”. In his Ikoyi, Lagos asylum, Johnson, the guitarist and womaniser, had written a moralistic book, “The Gun That Liberates Shouldn’t Rule”. Yomie Johnson, the mysterious die-hard soldier, who stopped the killing fields of Samuel Doe, wouldn’t be bugged that General Sani Abacha, his host and the late Nigerian dictator, who similarly gained presidential power through the barrel of the gun, would have nothing to do with a book title that sneered innuendo at his fistic rule of the country, after a bloodless coup, killings and maiming that marred his reign.

Nemesis may have forgiven Yomie Johnson his sins, for his was outright dedication to the commoners of Liberia, who he saved from the Samuel Doe’s cruelty. He later passed on after some failed contests for the same presidential seat, not by gun-putsch, but through popular election. But Nigeria’s gurgle-wearing general and the most prolific military coup-maker, was scandalised to have been killed in the ‘Garden of Eden’, by eating an apple courtesy of ‘Eve’, the roving mistress. And there is only a little dissimilarity between the late maximum leader and his ‘twin-in-arm-and-looting’, the Minna-based general and gap-toothed king of military coup d’etats, who God has apparently given the benefit of longevity, in order to witness the deadly consequences of his despotic reign of a country and its people that have continually given him a life-support.

It couldn’t be that it is for the love for the hapless populace that the plotters move to overthrown, than for the greater desire to feather their own nests and bleed the people’s treasury. Particularly, page 39 of the year 2000’s edition of H. B. Momoh’s book, “The Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970: History and Reminiscences”, decoded the first Nigeria’s military coup, that prompted the civil war as follows;

“Either by design or default, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu-Ojukwu held on to 5 Infantry Battalion and refused to cooperate with the coupists, particularly in their bid to obtain money from Kano Central Bank under the pretext of settling troops salaries by intercepting the aircraft sent to Kano by Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu”.

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The Nigerian army, that was in 1993 dubbed in unflattering appellation of “an army of anything goes”, by a one-time revered Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Salihu Ibrahim, can’t vouch that it heeded the salient wake-up call, until now that a once-indomitable force, has become a near-mincemeat to makeshift Boko Haram and its complement bandit groups. Again, an intrepid former and late National Security Adviser (NSA), Owoye Azazi, in 2002, even though was serving under a People’s Democracy Party (PDP), was courageous in his memorable public comments that the escalation of insecurity in the country, particularly the rampaging activities of the dreaded Boko Haram, was traceable to some undemocratic practices by the political parties during elections, especially carried out by the ruling PDP.

A Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency and its ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which kicked the PDP from power, with the promise that it was going to stamp out the ‘Boko boys’ and others, was the same that opened the country’s boarders to extreme rebels and herders, and their de-radicalization and enlistment into the army. Now, what we seem to have on hand is an army of occupation, in furthering in-house and external colonialism.

Excepting for the alleged involvement of Timipre Sylva, a former Minister of State for Petroleum and ex-governor of Bayelsa, who is said to be a kingpin of the coup that might have been goaded from outside the country’s southern zone, nearly all the 16 names, so far allegedly arrested as the failed mutineers, are from the northern part of the country. If the media accounts are authentic, it therefore means that for a first time, a Nigerian coup was engineered from a section of the country, unlike the coups of 1966, Muritala Mohammed’s, Gideon Okah’s, and that of the erudite Mamma Vatsa, which unified literary giants like Christopher Okigbo, the late Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, whose joined notable Nigerians, pleading for leniency, but was tricked by IBB’s hastened execution of him.