As Nigerians mark the 50th anniversary of the first military coup in the country, a lawyer, activist and convener of the Coalition of Democrats for Electoral Reforms (CODER), Mr. Ayo Opadokun said President Buhari should clear the woes his former constituency foisted on the country.
According to him, the coup brought Nigeria down to her knees ever since. Excerpts:
How did you receive the news of the coup 50 years ago?
Well, early that morning, there was a strange musical interlude on Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria. We recognized it to be martial music. Within the spate of 20 to 30 minutes, there were intermittent announcements that the government of Sir Tafawa Balewa had been overthrown. The messages explained that the army took the action to bring about sanity into the socio-political and the economic affairs of the country. They went on to tell us that they were out to rid the nation of graft. They said they wanted to stop the “ten percenters” which means that people in government were collecting bribes on any government contracts. They said they wanted to put a stop to the activities of these “ten percenters”. Those were things they said led to the coup. But, well, here we are.
With the benefit of the hindsight, were they able to achieve their objective(s)?
Certainly not and with your question, you are opening a seeming Pandora box that will compel me to say if the army did not overthrow the government of Tafawa Balewa on January 15, 1966, I register my understanding that any reasonable person would agree that the worst civilian government in any nation is better than any military dictatorship no matter how benevolent. How did I come to this conclusion? Immediately after that coup, the Nigerian Army with its highest officers cadre got involved in a vicious assault on the Nigerian nation, our constitution and our socio-economic and political life.
What could have happened to Nigeria if they did not strike?
If the Nigerian Army did not stage the January 15, 1966 coup, I think, I am right to say that the course of constitutionality and maturity of our democracy in Nigeria would have been greatly enhanced. In fact, it is to the discredit of the Nigerian Army that the five Majors who conceived the ideas of overthrowing a civilian regime might mean well, so to say, to rid the country of corruption, but, they did not think the matter thoroughly and therefore it resulted in a chain of negative effects on our body politics.
The coup did not allow the country to achieve the destiny it was destined to achieve. So, from day one, the military intervention had had a negative effect on Nigeria’s body politics. To follow up on that, if you look at the Nigerian parliament, both at the Federal and the Region Level, the composition and the work of legislation that were going on, in our Legislative Houses was the best to be proud of globally and even within the Commonwealth nations. They had tremendous regard for the activities of the Nigerian Parliament at the national and regional levels. This was because our parliamentarians learnt a lot from the British colonial masters when they were here. They mastered the art of representation. Individual honourable members representing various constituencies would go back to their constituencies to interact with their constituents to have fresh mandate, fresh authority, fresh demands from their constituents and take them to the parliament. Don’t forget also that we were running a Parliamentary System where the Ministers and Prime Minister were members of the parliament. The Prime Minister was just first among equals. So, honourable members were in a position regularly to interact with the Ministers and Prime Minister either weekly, fortnightly or monthly as the case may be so that nothing would be happening in any part of their regions or the country that they were not given sufficient notice.
But when the military came, for reasons best known to them, they became so powerful and appropriated all natural and mineral resources of the regions to the centre and kept them under the authority of the Commander in Chief, who was the Military Head of State. And that is what we’re battling till date. To my understanding, Nigeria has been totally turned to a centrally governed nation. So, the idea of Federal Military Government is a misnomer for decadence. That is, there’s nothing federal in running the affairs of the country since then. The military has centralized everything.
Are these their only offences?
No. Let me go further by saying that if the military did not strike and overthrow the civilian government, the chances are that, Nigeria’s socio-economic and political landscape would have been at par with quite a number of civilized nations of the world today.
Education in the beginning , was a thing of beauty and Nigeria was commended and recognized within the commonwealth as one of the leading countries with the best in standard and quality. What Nigeria of today offers as education is deception. We should have declared a state of emergency on the state of education longest time ago. At the time the late General Murtala Muhammed overthrew General Yakubu Gowon, they did the worst thing to our country. Not only did they centralize everything that belonged to the regions and the states, they forcefully did not account for anything for those institutions they took away. The broadcasting service, the first television station in Africa, established by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group government was taken away. Why must an unelected government appropriate that to the central government to control . What’s the rationale for that? They took away the Liberty Stadium that Obafemi Awolowo built as the first stadium in the whole of West Africa. To make matters worse, the universities established by the regions, that were things of beauty and that were competing amongst themselves were taken over by the Nigerian Army to the center and totally destroyed and this totally undermined the growth and development of education till today. Today, some parents send their children to Europe, America and even some West African countries like Ghana! What’s the reason for that? Now, as soon as the military came and the civil war ended, a lot of money accrued to the military men in governance and they kept on misusing the money. Stealing by the military in collaboration with their civilian surrogates became the order of the day. They had too much money in their hands, so, their children could go abroad for education. So, they had no reason to work for the improvement of Nigeria’s education. That was the most annoying thing there.
How well did the civilian government that took over from the military fare?
The reason was that each time they were forced back to the barracks , they always ensured that they foisted their own surrogates, military loyalists and military apologists on civilian governments to take over from them. Lo and behold in four years time, they would find them not worthy of being in office, they will stage another insurrection against them.
Look at the state of our economy. They were there under Yakubu Gowon, when Nigerian oil became so significant to be exported. By 1973, Gowon had already declared that “money was not Nigeria’s problem, but how to spend it.” They did not only mismanage this new found wealth, they did not plan for Nigeria of tomorrow. In any civilized clime of the world, resources garnered from mineral resources of that nature are not used at all to run government. Their political beaurocracy ought to be run with taxes they collected. Not in Nigeria’s situation. As soon as oil became the biggest source of earning to the Nigerian state, they ignored and abandoned what had been keeping Nigeria going so much that we fought the civil war without borrowing a penny. The gifted master of economics, the distinguished legend, Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo was the Federal Commissioner of Finance and Vice Chairman of the Federal Executive Council of Nigeria then. They allowed him to lead them for about two to three years before the military juggernauts started feeling unhappy with ‘this bloody civilian.’
Okay, having said all that, what’s the way out?
I am skeptical and I have doubts as to whatever remedy that can really be thought out now. Well, except that with the advent of President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a former military dictator, now a civilian president, is willing to bell the cat, to take up the onerous challenge that he set for himself like eradicating corruption, because corruption is killing Nigeria. If he can do that successfully, there is a chance that the Nigerian nation can begin to plot its graph of development and programme up on the scale. Let me remind you that, God deliberately worked the arithmetic out, so to say, for Nigeria to have this large expanse of land and human resources that we are supposed to provide leadership for the black world. We are the biggest black nation of the world. When we pick up four Africans, one of them, surely, would be a Nigerian. What have we contributed to the progress and development of human resources in the African nation? The situation is always on the negative.
What President Buhari is doing now, I commend him and pray to God to allow him succeed but with the manner of revelations we are already witnessing, it’s not only that it is too painful, the names that are being mentioned are very unfortunate. It reminds people like us the activists to tell President Buhari to watch over his shoulders as he is fighting corruption in an unparalleled way. The culprits he is exposing are most likely at work plotting how to remove and eliminate him. This is because some of them must have finally found themselves in a very awkward but deep gulf from where they cannot get up. So, my advice to him is that, for the sake of God, the sake of humanity and for the sake of development of Nigeria, he needs to watch his back. He needs to regularly update his knowledge about those security men and women around him. He should remember what happened to Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Junior Gandhi. It has happened all over the world. When you find a genuinely responsive and responsible leader that wants to turn around the fortunes of the country, those who have benefited from the old system will not be watching idly.
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