I was saying last week that Senator Adam Oshiomhole did more than pinning down retired generals to the lucrative business of illegal mining of solid minerals in the country. He also spoke to serving military generals who had visited the Senate in search of ways and means to have more money to do their work of defending the territorial integrity of the country.
In a nutshell, Oshiomhole confronted head-on the totality of the military institution. It is not a very wise thing to do in Nigeria. But he did it. I am sure some of his family members and very close friends would have told him so too. That in Nigeria, whether under civil or military rule, no ‘bloody civilian’ talks anyhow to top military brass. Instinctively, a few of them would have advised him to dissolve a while from visibility for the tension to dissipate.
It was the same way I was told to relocate to the village after my appearance on Arise TV last April. The tragic incident of the killing of 17 soldiers including four officers around Okuama, a fishing Urhobo community on the bank of the Forcados River in Delta State was on the front burner of national discourse. The sympathy, understandably, rested with the Nigerian Army.
Even in real combat, such a number would be considered too high to fall in one swoop. Emotions were high. The arising commentaries were therefore more sentimental than they were logical. Every commentator, including even the President, asked for the perpetrators of the heinous crime to be fished out at all costs, surprisingly not by police men but soldiers, to face the law. It was like the C-in-C giving a wild-cat order for the army to move into the scene of crime, which had been pinned down to Okuama to do and undo.
The soldiers were in obvious rage. The desire to avenge the killing of their men and officers in their own way was strong. In the circumstance, there was inadequate processing of the events that culminated in the unfortunate killings to properly place culpability. And so, my point that the 181 Amphibious Battalion in Bomadi breached its own operational procedure to have deployed its entire strategic team for a civil mission without adequate tactical cover and the collaboration of the political leaderships, namely the State Government and the two council areas of Bomadi and Ughelli South where the warring communities of Okoloba and Okuoma are located, came as a bolt from the blues. I emphatically stated that while the killing of servicemen under any circumstance shall forever remain condemnable, the army should be humble and sincere enough to state all the dimensions. Almost immediately, the Chief of Defence Staff, Lt. General Chris Musa emerged on national television with the angle of one General Endurance Amagbein as being the mastermind of the killing. This redirected the kinetic efforts momentarily from Okuoma to Igbomorotu in Southern ljaw local government area in Bayelsa State where about 20 persons were reportedly killed and many houses razed by invading soldiers in search for the new target.
What am I saying? I am saying that the Armed Forces are a creation of law – the Constitution and the Armed Forces Act. This places an obligation on them to operate within the law especially under a democratic dispensation.
They cannot do and undo. In a democracy, even their own special trial, called Court Marshal, is not final. It is subject to judicial review. Decisions reached in such quasi judicial set-up can only remain binding if such decisions are not further tested in a court of competent jurisdiction by affected persons. It is the reason, for instance, that Chief Femi Falana (SAN) has been neck deep in the matter regarding some 70 soldiers who were convicted of mutiny and dismissed from the army.
That is, when soldiers themselves turn victims of their own arbitrariness, they look up to civil society for help. In my days as Editor, I was inundated with requests for media assistance by, especially middle-level officers, who fell on the wrong side of military court marshal. I would detail reporters to play up the issues in the court of public opinion to assist their cases. A moment that has remained evergreen in my memory was the day that late Admiral Augustus Aik-homu sought frantically to speak with me. This was about 1996 or 1997. The telecom revolution called GSM had not happened in Nigeria.
I was a Senior Political Correspondent. I returned from the field to be told that Admiral Aikhomu had been calling and dropped a number with which I could reach him back. I had previously met him in his Apapa, Lagos home to propose an advertorial package to mark his 60th or so birthday anniversary.
But he was not calling to further to seal or reject the advertorial deal. His time in government had passed. Late General Sani Abacha who sat on the saddle was not pretentious as to how he wanted his own show to run. He voted to be a maximum leader and nothing less. On this day, the whole Admiral Augustus Aikhomu was persistently calling a small boy like me, as if we had become mates, because some security boys were playing hide and seek game with his Green Passport at the Mur-tala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos. He could not fly out because he was prevented from doing so.
Until August 26, when that historic ‘step aside’ announcement was made, Admiral Aikhomu was Vice to the only Military President Nigeria has had, General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB).
He was the same man that was calling me to do something in the media to redirect Abacha’s attack dogs off his back. It is all to say that the military may create its barracks, barricades and rules of engagement to enforce some advantages in the short run.
But in the long run, it cannot sustain an exclusivity that will make it stand beyond reproach and a common humanity in the scheme of things.
Today, we are in a democracy where all questions, no matter how tough, are expected to be asked and answered. Accordingly, Senator Oshiomhole chose, the other day, to ask serving military officers, after finishing with their retired counter-parts, tough questions on the floor of the Senate. As I said earlier, the officers had gone to the Senate to ask for more money for the armed forces.
Oshiomhole didn’t get even simple answers in return. In fact, his fellow Senators including Senate President God-swill Akpabio pretended not to have heard him.
They made it seem as if Oshiomhole was talking nonsense. First, what he thought was a beautiful motion; his call for increased legislative oversight of the three branches of the armed forces – Army, Navy and Air Force – was defeated without even a debate. The motion was not actually seconded.
It was dead on arrival.
But, instead of backing down, Oshiomhole switched into the comrade mode. He stood fast like the right-hand marker in a parade formation and ready to battle the soldiers with his tongue. He charged the military to do like other institutions of government and subject itself to public scrutiny. Hear his plea: ..”our Armed Forces must be made account-able. It borders on blackmail to say we don’t give more money. Since I arrived here at the Senate, we have done for the nation two ap-propriations; 2024 and 2023. For the Armed Forces, we have done several supplementary appropriations. And the revelation on the floor of the Senate is that they are buying the wrong equipment.”
Oshiomhole also tried to put in context, the procurement of a certain yacht that was in the news not too long ago.
“It is on record that the Armed Forces are often times or sometimes procuring equipment that they really don’t need. The issue of the yacht is a shining example of complete gross misplacement (of priority). I think they spent about $6billion. Convert that to naira.” Oshiomhole recounted his engagement with former President Moham-madu Buhari on this same matter of yacht procurement.
“I remember President Buhari said he never asked them to buy a yacht. Which President will go in a yacht on holiday?” The whole issue actually was that the military didn’t want to be unnecessarily encumbered and it was asking the Senate to place it on First Line Charge so that it could do at anytime whatever it needed to do with money without having to answer too many questions from the Accountant-general of the Federation or some other meddlesome officers of the Federal Ministry of Finance. And here is how Oshiomhole saw it: “I think when you say we should move the military to first line charge, you must face the origin of the security crisis we are facing today. The only thing I will favour for first line charge is education.”
He explained: “…people who are educated or skilled are unlikely to be poor that terrorist organisations can easily recruit them. If we put all the money to defend the country and there is nothing left for education, healthcare and investment in the manufacturing sector, and those things that will ensure that our GDP grows at a reasonable pace, and at a rate higher than ourpopulation growth, our poverty will remain endemic. The super highway to criminality is hunger and starvation. So the armed forces have to understand that Nigeria doesn’t have unlimited resources.”
Let me quickly add that in this endeavour, I have tried to separate the message from the messenger. I am asking you to take the message and leave the messenger, who, you may say has not cultivated any moral high ground to stand upon to pass his message. But here is the thing. In this country, nobody has been able to tell the military that its mouth smells. Everybody tries to put up with the smell.
Since I knew how to follow the presentations of annual national budgets to either Supreme Military Councils (and by whatever description) or National Assemblies, I cannot remember too many instances when allocations to defence fell below other sectorial budgets including the critical sectors of education and health. Under the military, it was a fait accompli and it had looked as if Nigeria was under constant threat of external invasion and we therefore needed to spend good money to enhance the combat readiness of the military to containany eventuality.
The painful aspect is that when Boko Haram eventually-happened about two decades ago, the decades of big de-fence budgets to cultivate combat capacity and capabilities failed to count. Let’s take it from 2015. One estimate puts the total defence budgets for the period at about $25 bil-lion. This is not chicken feed. It is more than enough to create another Dangote Refinery or turn around the Nigerian Defence Industries Corporation (NDIC) now Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON) into a production centre for arms export. The corporation was established in 1964 as the nucleus of a projected military industrial complex.
It was meant to start with the production of ammunitions, riffles and other defence consumables and then grow into a complex for the production of military hard wares, including tanks and jet fighters. Six decades down the line, the basic hopes have remained elusive. The projected lofty dreams are completely off the discussion table. The answer to this lies in the fairly persistent budgeting pattern in the military where the ratio of recurrent expenditure to capital expenditure has been on an average of 80 per cent to 20 percent. In 2020 and 2021, the defence capital expenditures were a mere 12 percent and 13.2 percent of a total budget outlay of N900 billion and N900.4 billion respectively.
This is why the military needs more money. It is also why Senator/Comrade Oshiomhole is saying the military cannot get more money. That further disbursement should be done on the basis of a proper and accountable retirement of previous disbursements. I don’t know what else to say. I will only add the military has no other enemy than itself. It must therefore work to save itself from itself.
That done, the rest of society including Oshiomhole shall queue behind it in sup-port. The honour of every military lies in its civility. I mean that content of medieval chivalry that pushes an officer to defend public good against self interest. Honour does not lie in the propensity to rely on the power of a smoking gun to breach the rules.
