It was not a coup but a planned bloodbath, by Rotimi Fasan
The sometimes-careless manner it reports without bothering to admit its errors probably did it for me. But when Sahara Reporters broke the news of a foiled coup, I didn’t pay it serious attention. The fact that no other mainstream medium followed its lead was a red flag. Premium Times, as I recall it, later followed up on the report. But then Abuja denied it and since there was nothing beyond what was reported to support the claim, further speculations about the coup was as far as I was concerned of no use. I couldn’t see what the government stood to gain by denying it was the target of an attempted coup.
Coups are among Nigeria’s original sin, not the answer to our problems. The military is not equipped for the complex order that managing Nigeria has become. Not in the face of the kind of reforms Nigerians mostly agree the country needs to walk out of the economic and political quagmire she had been led into in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I thought any confirmation of a coup would ultimately work in the favour of the government, as it was bound to rally all true lovers of democracy (as opposed to the disgruntled losers playing the zero-sum politics of a dog in the manger) to its side.
Since nothing proved their claim, I thought those insisting there was a coup were entrapped in wishful thinking that left them essentially crying more than the bereaved. For them, a coup was something they secretly desired. They wanted their bias confirmed in order to convince themselves they had been right that the government was unpopular. It was, talking of 2027, the only way for them out of a defeat that looks inevitable going by their unpreparedness so far. So, for me, if the government said there was no coup, then there was none in the absence of countervailing evidence. But now the government has turned full circle to admit there was, indeed, a coup attempt.
In a recent interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, General Christopher Musa, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the current Minister of Defense, says the government had to conclude investigation, backed with evidence, before an announcement could be made about some of their officers who were involved in the treasonable act of plotting to unseat an elected government. This makes good sense. For a government that has made quite a few avoidable slips and has for that been called names and pelted with various allegations, any error would have been viewed as attempts at silencing the opposition.
That in turn would be an easy way out for an opposition that is not doing nearly enough to show that it is ready for the next general election to explain away its failures. This, no matter what the government might or might not be doing to steer up the waters, as the opposition alleges, to ensure their opponents’ camps remain fractured. Now we all know what was afoot and evidence is being provided even as investigation continues apace, one is left to wonder about the level of political illiteracy and tone-deafness that could have led a group of military personnel that were overwhelmingly from one part of the country to contemplate a violent seizure of power at these times. It’s shocking to think of the sheer scale of the chaos it was planned to be. Not much thought appears to have gone into planning it; nor do the planners appear equipped for governance.
The coup, from what the investigation has so far revealed, was poorly conceived and its planned execution would have been nothing short of a decapitation of the country’s leadership, civilian and military. Motivated by nothing beyond personal grievances that would surely have been sanitized into some form of messianic effort at political engineering, had it succeeded, none of the planners was strategically placed to see the coup to success. It would have been a botched but very bloody attempt akin to what happened on January 15, 1966. Considering the rank of most of the conspirators (Nigeria has long gone beyond the times when middle-rank officers headed military formations), they would have done far worse than the five majors of this country’s first coup. This was a motley crowd of truly military adventurers. As General Musa observed in his interview, they lacked access and more than that, they lacked capacity in every sense of that word.
They seem like a drunken lot grievously deluded by a sense of importance derived from being in the military, even though a few of them are civilians and one or two were in the police. They remind one of Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, the face of the botched coup that led to the assassination, 50 years ago this month, precisely February 13, 1976, of General Ramat Murtala Mohammed, the third military ruler of Nigeria. Looking at the list of alleged coup plotters and their leaders, they were no more prepared than a drunken Dimka was on the fateful morning he brought ‘good tidings’ and went on to impose a ‘dawn to dusk’ curfew on the country.
The investigation should be as thorough as it can be and not so much as to establish the culpability of those involved as it is to ensure that no innocent person is framed. This is a life and death issue and all care must be taken to protect the civil liberties of those accused. The times must be very tough for their families and loved ones. That the plot was triggered by private concerns, namely, the failure of the plot leaders to pass qualifying exams to higher ranks, highlights the personal origins of some grave matters of state. It was jealousy that the likes of Ibrahim Babangida were members of the Supreme Military Council that triggered Dimka, his mate by rank, and possibly Major General Illiya Bisalla, another key member of the 1976 plotters who, it was alleged, was miffed that General Theophilus Danjuma, his junior, had risen above him. This was the trigger for their action.
And how can we talk about this botched coup without mentioning the politicians who literally called for military intervention in the wake of the 2023 elections? We know the leaders of those who knelt at the Defence Headquarters, the reckless politician who claims to know the limits of his right of free expression but has on two momentous occasions made statements suggestive of his preference for military intervention. What role did people like this play in instigating soldiers like those now under arrest/investigation? After all, the botched coup had been timed to forestall the peaceful transfer of power on May 29, 2027. Who sponsored this coup?
The post It was not a coup but a planned bloodbath, by Rotimi Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.
