Former Military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, IBB (retd), has justified military incursions into governance in Nigeria.
IBB, who explained why the country had five coups between 1966 and 1985, added that military governments had more development projects than civilian governments.
In extracts from Part Three, Chapter Five, pages 104 to 115 of his controversial Autobiography: ‘A Journey in Service’, launched last Thursday, he highlighted the motivations behind military interventions, the historical context of coups in Nigeria and Africa, the structural reforms initiated by military leaders, and the on-going challenge of ensuring responsible governance.
He wrote:
When I started working on this autobiography a few years ago, I knew that, as someone who had participated in military coups, I would, at some point, need to reiterate my position on the problematic issue of military interventions in politics.
Anyone, who reads descriptions of me, particularly in foreign publications, as a ‘serial coup plotter’, or as ‘the moving spirit behind most military plots in Nigeria’, would think that my 35-year military career was devoted entirely to coup plotting!
One foreign journalist, Karl Maier, whom I readily obliged with an interview, ‘returned’ the favour in his book: ‘This House Has Fallen’, by claiming that ‘coups seem to run in my blood’!
He was not the only one with that mindset. In its reporting of the coup that brought me to office as head of the government, one international news magazine headlined its story: ‘The Triumph of the Trouble-maker’! I will not bother responding to the discriminatory implications that I did no more than plot coups as a soldier.
This volume bears testimony to the modest contributions of a soldier who stood up to play the role assigned to him by destiny at a notably peculiar moment in his country’s history. And as I will show in subsequent chapters of this book, it’s a role (my mistakes and shortcomings, notwithstanding) that I look back upon with pride.
Resurging coups in Africa
When I started writing this book, I had also hoped that I could say that coup d’etats in Africa are now a thing of the past. But, thirty years after I left office, sadly, seven African countries, from across the Sahel to Sudan, are under military rule.
First, let me restate my position on the matter. Military coup d’etats, that is, overthrowing an incumbent government, whether as redemptive or corrective measures, are an aberration and should never be encouraged. Indeed, coups in the context of a democracy such as ours are not just unacceptable; they are illegal.
Appropriate sections of the Nigerian constitution insist that ‘Nigeria shall not be governed, nor shall any persons or group of persons take control of the Government of Nigeria or any part thereof, except in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution’. So, the question should be this: if these are the provisions of our constitution, how did we end up with five military coups since 1960, the last of them being the 1993 Abacha coup?
Why we had coups in Nigeria
To put these in perspective, we would have to go back to our history as a nation and the challenges that have defined and shaped our collective existence.
But first, the larger picture. Military takeovers are not peculiar to Africa or isolated to Nigeria. The history of post-colonial Africa shows that where civilian leadership and the political class have failed to live up to their billings and progressively build upon the legacy of the colonialists, the military attempted to step in. In some cases, these interventions have been nothing short of revolutionary…
The point to note here, of course, was that the sordid failure of a particular ruling class created the need for an inevitable change. A pattern where the political class virtually abdicates its responsibility to the governed typically created the conditions that led to several military interventions in post-colonial Africa. Also, certain coups, given the peculiar political and socio-economic circumstances, are genuinely revolutionary, especially where the masses support the coup and where the coup-makers, beyond their own rhetoric, embody the people’s hopes and aspirations.
But the risks were always there because, to go back to Colonel Ibrahim Taiwo, whom I referred to earlier, a ‘good’ coup is only a successful coup, and a failed coup is a mutiny and high treason! Again, before I am misunderstood, let me reiterate my position: I do not suggest that military interventions, which can be undue interferences in the politics of a country, are replacements for incumbent governments. Nor do I imply that the military is the guarantor of good behaviour; far from it. All that I suggest is that coups don’t just happen.
They are sometimes inspired by extraneous conditions that demand interventions. Generally, the abject failure of civilian governments is the cause of coups. Therefore, a fairer assessment of why the armed forces seized power was not to be found in their success or failure to deliver once they took over but in the various factors and events preceding the intervention. Our example at home in Nigeria bears me out.
Without necessarily justifying the actions of the young majors of the 1966 coup, it’s possible to argue that the conditions that the young majors were compelled to face, even without sometimes asking for it, drove their actions. And to understand how and why a group of young, idealistic and a political UK-trained army majors violently overthrew an elected civilian government of Sir Balewa, it would be proper to examine the circumstances that led to the 1966 coup briefly.
