By Owei Lakemfa
A series of video recordings of men and officers of the Nigeria Army brutalising hapless Nigerians have in the past few weeks been making the rounds. The most disturbing, which a conscious institution should have by now made public either its interim or full report, is that of a Major General in uniform supervising the brutality on a young couple that can be no older than his youngest children.
Soldiers have become like improvised explosive devices, IEDs in our streets with citizens unconsciously stepping on them.
Unlike in Nigeria, soldiers in many countries are respected, not feared; they inspire confidence and give an assuring presence and not a sense of panic.
Unfortunately, this is an institutional problem with the armed forces constantly issuing threats against the civil populace as it did over the EndBadGovernance protests or, being incriminated in extreme brutality during the ENDSARS youth protests.
This may have to do with the colonial origins of the Nigerian military as an alienated institution established to beat the colonised civil populace into line.
In my 1996 assessment of the Nigerian military, I wrote that it was behaving like a dry fish that cannot be bent.
Tragically, a quarter of a century after it was forced back to the barracks and, governance restored to the civil populace, the military continues to exhibit the same symptoms.
On March 15, 2024, armed men with at least two in military uniform, abducted Mrs Oluwatosin Olatunji, the wife of FirstNews Editor, Segun Olatunji and his one year old child. They forced her to take them to her home where they abducted the journalist.
After the Presidency, National Security Adviser, Military Defence, Army, police and security agencies denied holding him, it seemed the Editor had simply vanished into thin air.
Specifically, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, and the Chief of Defence Intelligence, Major General Emmanuel Undiandeye, denied holding the Editor. Fortunately, the Nigerian Chapter of the International Press Institute, IPI, had irrefutable evidence that the two generals, despite their denials, were holding the journalist. It made this public, including the exact location in Abuja Olatunji was being held. Cornered, the generals released the journalist twelve days into his unlawful abduction.
Nobody is immune from brutalisation by the gentlemen and officers of the Nigerian military. The issue of esprit de corps does not seem to exist in their dictionary as some of their victims are policemen.
Just as hens pick on cockroaches, so do they sometimes, also eat other hens of the same species. Similarly the Nigerian Military is known to feed on itself. This is why under military rule, batches of soldiers and officers were periodically executed for real or imagined coup plots.
Clearly for its development, the Nigeria military needs introspection, and the best way to begin, is by being honest to itself, admitting its faults and submitting itself to re-orientation.
There was the point I tried making on November 5, 2024, as the Chairperson of the book launch: “Judicial Terrorism: A Macabre Trial and Death Sentences on Major General Zamani Lekwot and five others on the Zangon Kataf Crisis.”
However, General Lucky Irabor, CFR, Chief of Defence Staff, 2021-2023, countered me, trying to exonerate the armed forces by arguing that the institution is different from its men and officers who overthrew governments, occupied political offices and committed the atrocities I talked about.
he book, written by Richard Akinnola, one of the best Judicial Editors in our history, had been crawling since 2017 when it was published until this month when it was made available to the public. The primary reason was because Lekwot wanted tempers to cool in Zango Kataf so that the book, although based on facts, does not ignite another ethno-religious crisis in the area.
It is the sorry tale of generals led by Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, going after one of their own, throwing him in the prison rather than the tradition of placing generals under house arrest, and after failing in the first attempt to convict him and five others, ordered a new trial which sentenced the victims to death.
I had in my address titled: ‘Military Terrorism In judicial Robes,’ argued that what we witnessed under military rule especially from 1984 to 1999, was not so much of judicial terrorism. Rather, it was the military ambush of the judicial system. I posited that what the military regimes did was to terrorise the populace by issuing iniquitous decrees and establishing tribunals to enforce them. I pointed out that a primary factor in this military sense of justice, was that the results were pre-conceived. The various tribunals were in most cases, merely to provide judicial cover for decisions already taken outside the court room.
This was precisely what happened in the Zango Kataf case. So when Lekwot was brought back for his second trial before the pliant Justice Benedict Okadigbo, the former Military Governor of Rivers State and ex-Commandant of the Nigeria Defence College told the judge: “…this is your parade. I take orders from you…Obeying orders has been my professional duties for years…do what you were sent here to do, I leave the discretion to you.”
Citing the case of the 2019 illegal removal of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, I concluded that while the Zango Kataf Case was thirty two years ago and, we are a quarter of a century into Civil Rule, our judicial system still has military parasites in its blood system.
Akinnola, now with twenty books under his belt, reflected that the conduct of Justice Okadigbo during the trial: “would go down as one of the lowest moments in our judicial history, an abhorrent and bizarre conduct (so)current conducts of many judges, where they seem so pliable to politicians should be a source of concern.” He added that: “Justice is rooted in public confidence but when this confidence is eroded by either acts of commission or omission, anarchy sets in.”
The reviewer of the 114-page book with seven chapters, Mr Femi Falana, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, had met Lekwot in Kuje Prison. He posited that the book: “came at the right time when there is public perception of our judiciary being asphyxiated by political influences, a worrisome phenomenon that needs be urgently addressed.”
Many retired generals turned out at the book launch; perhaps an indication that they did not support the extra-judicial attempt by the Babangida gang to eliminate one of their own.
I came away with the impression that the attempt by General Irabor to play the ostrich, was not popular.
The Nigeria military which has had some of the best officers in our contemporary world, must introspect, be reborn and take a new trajectory into the future.
