ARTICLE BY AKINFOLARIN AKINWALE V.[a.k.a BTG]
ADEKUNLE AJASIN UNIVERSITY,ONDO STATE
A 400 LEVEL STUDENT OF EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT/POLITICAL SCIENCE.
08072559328/08137120446
THE RECENT MILITARY COUP IN MALI SHOWS THAT THE MILITARY CANNOT STAY AWAY FROM POLITICS.
1. DISCUSSION ON THE IMMEDIATE AND REMOTE CAUSE OF THE COUP IN MALI
2. WHAT CAN BE DONE TO FORESTALL THE MALIAN EXPERIENCE IN NIGERIA?
In most developing countries, there is a disruption of the civil-military equilibrium usually assumed in liberal democracies. In liberal tradition, the military is insulated from politics and subject to civilian control. In several developing countries, however, the military has not only intervened in the political process and overthrown the constitutional civilian authority, but it also often has established its supremacy over elected politicians. Even in those countries where the military has become almost a permanent feature of politics, military rule is still considered an aberration and symptomatic of a malfunctioning political system. In Nigeria, which typifies the scenario just presented, military rule was usually seen as a "rescue" operation necessary to save the country from civilian ineptitude. Military rule was not expected to last long; once the rescue operation was complete, the military should return to the barracks where they belonged and leave the governing to civilian politicians. The problem, however, was that although military officers accepted this rationale, military rule usually became self-sustaining.
THE IMMEDIATE AND REMOTE CAUSE OF THE COUP IN MALI
The series of events that culminated in the coup began on Wednesday morning, 22 march, 2012 at a military camp in the capital, during a visit by Defence Minister General Sadio Gassama. In his speech to the troops, the minister failed to address the grievances of the rank-and-file soldiers, who are angry over what they say is the government’s mismanagement of a rebellion in the north by Tuareg separatists. The rebellion has claimed the lives of numerous soldiers, and those sent to fight are not given sufficient supplies, including arms or food. Their widows have not received compensation.
Recruits started firing into the air on Wednesday, and they stoned the general’s car as it raced away. By afternoon, soldiers had surrounded the state television station in central Bamako, yanking both the television and radio signals off the air for more than seven hours. By Wednesday evening, troops had started rioting at a military garrison located in the northern town of Gao, about 2 000 miles away.
On Thursday, 22 March, 2012, soldiers who called themselves the Committee for the Re-establishment of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDR), announced that they had seized power of Mali following a coup.In a televised statement, the soldiers cited dissatisfaction with the government's failure to end a rebellion in the north of the country, that had been going on for two months, as the reason behind the coup, but promised to return power after the elections.
Mali was considered to be one of the few functioning democracies in West Africa. It never experienced a military coup since the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1992. Considering that, last Wednesday’s coup comes as a surprise.The group under the lead of so far unknown Capt. Amadou Sonago claims that they have overthrown the democratically elected government of Amadou Toumani TourĂ© (short: ATT) because of its “incompetence” in handling the Tuareg Rebellion in Mali’s North. The Malian army was indeed poorly prepared for its newest task of defending the nation’s unity. The soldiers are badly trained, have outdated weaponry and not enough supply. There were failures in informing soldier’s families about fatalities in combat.
Mali is one of West Africa’s few fairly working democracies. Why was there no national or international political force that pleaded for the strengthening of the Malian forces in the combat against the rebellion? Being one of the least developed countries in the world, the internationally supported downfall of the Gaddafi’s regime in Libya caught Mali on the wrong foot. Many of Gaddafi’s former Tuareg-soldiers became jobless and went back to the Sahel region, of which Mali’s North is a part. They have not been disarmed by anyone. And in January of this year they started a new Tuareg-rebellion in Mali’s North. Its goal is the independence of Mali’s northern regions.
Mali has experienced recurring Tuareg-rebellions since the sixties. However, the intensity of this new rebellion was unprecedented. Along with that appeared a new generation of well-armed Tuareg-fighters, which came back from Libya. Together with some factions of older Tuareg-rebellions, they formed the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). The Malian government and its army were taken by surprise. They were ill-prepared because the peace treaty they have signed after the last Tuareg-rebellion in 2008 with the old generation of Tuareg-rebells and the generous “development aid” of the Malian government for the Tuareg to keep them at ease gave the government a misleading feeling of security. Additionally, the foreign, most notably French, diplomatic and military aid for Mali was rather weak or even counterproductive: The French engaged in direct talks with the MNLA, because they hoped to gain their help in France’s battle against the terror-organization Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb
(AQMI), which kidnapped and murdered French and other Western tourists and expats in the region. This boosted the MNLA’s self-confidence and led to diplomatic tension between France and its former colony.
But these are not the only causes of the coup. One important cause lies in the nature of ATT’s governing style and Mali’s political culture itself. ATT, who was without any partisan affiliation, preferred to govern with a consensual-styled all-party cabinet. Since his re-election in 2007 he included every important party – with one exception – in one way or another in his government: Out of 160 parliamentarians, only 4 of a small socialist party were in the opposition before the coup. In such an ethnically heterogeneous country like Mali the inclusion of every important power-base has many advantages. The fact that Mali experienced relative stability or no ethnic conflicts in contrast to its neighbors Ivory Coast, Niger or other West African countries in the last 20 years proves this point.
However, Mali’s financially and organizationally weak political parties are not only in ATT’s all-party government due to political sanity, but also for their very political survival: In most African democracies and semi-democracies, access to state resources is crucial to win important client’s favor with gifts and other privileges, in order to make sure that they give support in elections. Consequently, no Malian political party was willing to occasionally play the indispensable part of the opposition, meaning that no important party pointed out to the deficiencies and failures of the ATT government in its handling of the newest Tuareg-rebellion. The parties did not want to risk their participation in the government and the consequential loss of access to state resources.
Switzerland is the world’s most famous example of a functioning consensus democracy. However, in contrast to Mali and most other democracies in the world, Switzerland’s democracy features extensive direct-democratic rights for Swiss citizens.
This ensures that the citizens itself occasionally play the missing part of the opposition to a consensus government. As no party wanted to harm its share in the Malian government, they criticized ATT only off the record for his lack of foresight on the fallout of the conflict in Libya, his hesitant diplomatic and military reaction, as well as his almost non-existent information policy regarding the rebellion in the North.
On the contrary, all political parties awaited ATT’s orderly replacement in April’s presidential elections. The unexpressed consensus was to first await the new president and only after that to strive for a solution of the conflict in the North. Until then, the parties concentrated on their preparations for the elections. Yet even while doing that, they did not consider to raise the issue of the Tuareg-rebellion as a topic for their individual election campaigns; again for the sake of the all-party consensus. As a result, one part of the Malian army decided to take matters, or respectively, the part of the opposition in their own hands. In a drastic and non-democratic manner they pointed out the deficiencies and grievances of their army.
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO FORESTALL THE MALIAN EXPERIENCE IN NIGERIA
To design a prevention and treatment program for a disease, one has to understand its causes, natural history, system of transmission and manifestations. Likewise, preventing a successful coup d'etat requires a complex and detailed understanding of interrelated political, military, security and intelligence issues that go into planning and staging one. In Nigeria, this is a very serious matter that should command the attention of all Nigerians. Some countries have dealt with the problem by appearing to keep the military as far away from politics as possible. Others (particularly communist nations) have used adjunctive tools, such as the deployment of political commissars in military units, to foster ruling party membership. In others (like Egypt) the military has simply been "civilianized". The system we need to set up to deal with coups needs to be able to respond at three levels: before a coup happens, as it is happening, and after one has happened.
The Chairman of Unity forum, Alhaji Musa Maigida Abdu has absolved the military of any blame in its interventions in the country’s politics, saying there is no reason to blame the military for the country’s underdevelopment because politicians, by their wasteful behaviour, invited the military to intervene when they did. The lessons of the past 51years of the country’s independence, politicians are advised to tread the part of democracy with necessary caution to prevent any future military intervention.
The army will not dabble into politics if politicians do not invite them. Of all military interventions, the behaviour of politicians has been the cause. Let those who govern, govern well so that nobody will be encouraged to intervene. Mark you that when those in power don’t meet public demands, the tendency is for the public to think of alternatives.
Nigeria had made progress in the last 51 years. Though the progress has been slow but the country has not been static. It is true that before independence, Nigerians lived together as brothers and sisters, especially under the colonial administration. But the advent of politics began the polarization of regions and tribes. Politicians used them to gain power by playing on the intelligence of the less privileged ones.
First of all, it is an achievement that we have been able to stay together for a period of 51 years. And come to think of it, no matter our shortcomings in infrastructural developments in comparison to the time of independen, our achievements in education are okay. We had only a university at the time of independence, today; we have over100 universities. The airports were only three, but today we have more than 10 international airports and viable airports for domestic uses. Our hospital facilities have increased. the road networks have tripled. It is true that we could do better but Nigeria is not static in growth.
Speaking on the spate of bomings and insecurity in the country, “Every Nigerian must be worried. Bombing is an unfamiliar development in Nigeria. It is regrettable that this is happening. I appeal that those responsible should see reasons and come to terms with the authority and settle their differences.
Speaking further, One reason for our lack of development is the neglect of the experience of the elders. But the elders themselves must show that they are not in competition with the younger ones. Quite frankly I do not see any reason why those in their seventies will want to be in the fore-front in the social and political activities in the land. These elders should serve as behind the scene advisers; they should not be advisers of election riggers, and in this way, the military can be prevented.
some other basic requirements to forestall the Malian experience in Nigeria
The most fundamental prerequisite is to expand domestic political participation and give people a sense of control over their destiny. It is crucial to educate large segments of the population in such a manner as to become invested in the legitimacy of the system and process and thus see it as inseparable from the very basis of their sense of well-being. This will be assisted to a great extent by enforcing the rule of law and basic principles of fairness in a predictable and consistent manner. Such a belief system helps to set the stage for a spontaneous act of sustained civil disobedience in the event of a coup and render would-be coup-plotters at a psychological disadvantage. Since the rank and file of the military would essentially be a product of society, illegal orders would be harder to enforce.
We need to accept the fact that the village is the unit of political action in most precolonial African societies and remains so to this day. Most "urban" Nigerian elite think in "village" terms and remain so organized in social terms. The "formal" three-tier Federal-State-Local Government structure, therefore, needs to be expanded to include a municipal or Village level, in which precolonial systems of administration should be respected and enshrined into the Constitution, including a mechanism for those systems to be changed if it is the wish of the said villages or villagers. This is only one of several ways to bridge the gulf between primordial society and the modern state system in a manner that allows us to regulate the behavior of public officials and make our primordial heritage "part of the system".
Even then, it is important that there be excellent communication among the major segments of the Nigerian polity, to prevent emerging coup leaders from manipulating ethnic and religious differences to their advantage as they seek to consolidate. The experience of "June 12" 1993 is a classic example. The 'mandate' of late Moshood Abiola, who apparently gained a majority of votes across the entire country, ended up becoming the 'private property' of the foreign-based liberal element of one ethnic group, while everyone else watched from the sidelines. Another example dates back to 1978 during the "Ali must go" students crisis. The government cleverly manipulated communication difficulties between northern and southern based institutions of higher learning. Along with national TV and radio network news black-outs, regional editions of newspapers often failed to report events going on in other parts of the country. The student leaders of the uprising were forced to roam about the country using rickety and sometimes dangerous public transportation, just to be able to let each other know what was going on.
Secondly, (with safeguards to assure communication) the sources of political power and legitimacy in the country need to be decentralized. This follows naturally from the first premise above, but is important also from the technical standpoint of coup-plotting. [I shall say more on the matter of military reorganization below, but what I am focusing on at this point is political matters.]
Thirdly, without surrendering too much internal leverage, the state security infrastructure needs to be somehow integrated into the international system, so that taking it over internally becomes practically impossible without a major international angle. As an example, in retrospect, if Balewa 's unpopular attempt to sign an Anglo-Nigerian Defence pact had succeeded, it may have prevented the January 1966 coup.
REFERENCES:
1. ON THE QUESTION OF
PREVENTING COUPS IN NIGERIA by
Nowamagbe A. Omoigui, MD, MPH, FACC
