Dilemmas of Civilian Control in a Post-Military State: Interpreting recent developments in the Nigerian Armed Forces

by

J. ’Kayode Fayemi

  Introduction

Aware of the work that we do at the Centre for Democracy & Development on Civil-Security Sector relations in Nigeria, we have been inundated with requests to provide an analysis on the recent exit of General Victor Malu as well as the Navy and Air Force Chiefs, Victor Ombu and Ibrahim Mahmud Alfa and the implications for stable civil-military relations. What was responsible for this “unexpected” development? Did the service chiefs leave or were they pushed? Were the “resignations accepted” because this was a mutually beneficial face saving way out of crisis?  Was it the outcome of a failed coup attempt?  Was it just a routine decision blown out of all proportion by the media? Or a pre-emptive strike against Babangida’s rumoured plan to come back to office in which Malu and his colleagues were seen as pawns in Babangida’s political chessboard? Was it the government’s belated response to Malu’s claim at the Oputa Commission that he was loyal to all his political bosses and proud to have served under General Abacha? Or could it just have been a case of repeated acts of insubordination to the political authority that required an immediate and decisive response.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, these reasons have been given in isolation and in combination as having the explanatory strength for the exit of the service chiefs. While some of the reasons can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and objective analysis, the views linking this exit to a failed or an attempted coup and the one deriving an explanatory power from Babangida’s ubiquity in every design really have no basis in fact.  Not only do these conjectures ignore the balance of forces in the military, which is significantly tilted in favour of “constitutionalists” (and I count the three service chiefs amongst the constitutionalists), they also ignore the almost total control of the intelligence services by people personally loyal to the President.  Underestimated also is the opposition among ordinary Nigerians and the international community to a military overthrow of government in spite of the growing disillusionment with the performance of this government. Babangida may be involved in many harebrained ideas, but people should also credit him with some intelligence and self-interest not to engage his time in any puerile stoking of the fires of dissension in the military even if he has the capacity to do so, as his detractors and admirers seem to believe. Although General Malu is a very popular officer like General Musharaff of Pakistan, Nigeria of 2001 is no Pakistan of 1999. Perhaps, President Shagari could not have done this but it hardly merits a mention that the only reason why President Obasanjo could remove three service chiefs in one fell swoop and replace them was precisely because he is in charge and the military is not what it used to be. The objective of this article therefore is to go beyond the media frenzy, trace the genesis of the problem, establish what happened in as dispassionate a manner as possible, examine the implications and make projections into the future.

Background to Service chiefs’ exit

In interpreting threats to any ruling authority and explaining the variables responsible for any particular decision, it is important to caution ourselves as less emotionally involved outsiders that we do not possess the same information as those in closer proximity to decision making and therefore bound to assess things differently. Since threats are neither a product of mechanical causality or technical accuracy identifiable by all, threat perception in unstable polities hinges more on an inference rather than tangible evidence.  This is especially so in a country like Nigeria where national security and regime survival are intertwined, a factor which makes analysis a very selective process as a result of which the peculiar mindset of the perceiver, in terms of his receptivity to threatening acts or information becomes a key determinant in the decision making process. The consequence is that a certain level of over-reaction or under-estimation develops on the part of the ruling elite, as threat perception becomes driven by often opaque, fragmentary and even contradictory pieces of information.   Yet, even though the personality of a perceiver, like President Obasanjo, is key, it should also be possible to delineate tangible situational factors – factors that have exacerbated problems of military disengagement from politics, clear internal political pressures and the untoward influence of certain international actors.  Viewed from these perspectives, our contention is that it is possible to examine the relationship between the armed forces and the civilian, political authorities in the last twenty-four months and reach some definite conclusions about the nature and dynamics of the relationship and what led to the exit of the military chiefs.

From the evidence available, it seems obvious that the Service chiefs did not resign their positions in spite of claims to the contrary by the Secretary to the Government. Barely two months ago, one of the affected Generals stated in response to a question about his possible retirement that he still had at least two years to go having only served 33 of his mandatory 35 years as a public servant with no blemish on his service record (Tempo, March 8, 2001).  This was not a statement borne out of any intention to call it quits, although it would appear as though it was deliberately made to preempt any official explanation of his almost inevitable ‘resignation’ as untrue given his open criticisms of government’s treatment of the armed forces. Nigerian newspapers have also reported that until the day they were relieved of their service positions, the two other service chiefs were still arranging appointments entirely oblivious of any plans to leave office. (The Guardian, April 25, 2001).

This style of announcing departures from government as voluntary resignations is not at variance with President Obasanjo’s pattern of disposing of senior public officials whose services are no longer required. One of the Ministers disposed of in the last cabinet reshuffle was informed of his fate at the regular breakfast prayer session on the day he was sacked. In the previous reshuffle, one Minister heard news of his ‘resignation’ convalescing in a hospital after surgery. Although several departing Ministers who insisted that they did not resign their posts have challenged the President about the veracity of such claims in the past, he has ignored this and continued to be less than forthright about the situation of senior public officials leaving his government.  Of course, it is arguable that since these were appointed, rather than elected officials, the President is not obliged to fully account for their removal beyond what he chooses to say no matter how economical he is with the truth. Yet for a president whose watchword is transparency and honesty, the manner of official removal also goes to show the extent of the government’s commitment and fidelity to its own transparency and accountability credo.  A situation where Ministers and Service Chiefs’ receive little or no notice of their removal and the public is left to speculate about the reasons for the sack neither promotes efficiency of government nor trust and confidence in it by the people.

On the media’s description of the President’s step as an “unexpected surprise”, keen watchers of the deteriorating relationship between the military leadership (especially the army) and the political leadership over the last twenty months would not have seen this as surprising nor shocking in the least. What was surprising is that it took this long to happen (at least in the case of the Army chief) who seemed to have been the main target of the President’s action.  The fact that the other service chiefs were caught in the cross fire between a domineering president and a strong-willed army chief came as a surprise as well, but this is not to suggest that they haven’t had their difficulties with the executive branch of government.[1]  It would appear though that sacking them alongside the army chief was just a way of cushioning the effect of removing a popular army chief without unsettling a restive military.  The fact that the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Ibrahim Ogohi is still in post underscores the personality dimension of this frosty relationship.  

To reduce this to a clash of personalities, however, is to miss the dilemma faced by both the president and his army chief. At stake has been the fundamental issue of governance in the security sector and how civilian and military leaders handle policy differences between them. As well, it is about the extent to which professional autonomy is recognised by civilian control of the military. Equally central to the debate is the limits of objective civilian control that is not democratic.  One can identify at least four concrete areas, separate and sometimes intertwined in which policy differences between the Presidency and the military have manifested themselves in civilian control of the military sector, namely – (a) Role and Mission of the military based on a shared understanding of the threat environment; (b) Government’s commitment to military professionalism; (c) Professional autonomy over military matters; and (d) Role of international players in the military & security sectors.

The key issues at stake

a)         Role and Mission of the Military – A Military mission gives an indication of the threat a nation must deal with and its location in relation to that threat.  Is it internal, external or both? A ‘missionless’ military obviously poses a great danger in relation to its primary role as a defender of the nation’s territorial integrity and it is really the responsibility of the civilian, political leadership to define the role of the military after due consultation with all stakeholders in society, including the military. Granted this is not always a determination based on an ‘objective’ assessment of the threat environment, but given the stated commitment of the new administration to a professional military, the military had hoped that the exercise in search of military mission in the immediate aftermath of a discredited era would be subjected to a measure of professional assessment.  Instead, it appeared that the political leadership came prepared with its own pre-conceived notions about what to do with a military that carries a lot of negative baggage and it felt the solution was to reduce its size arbitrarily without any objective assessment of the threat environment and the capability of the institution. 

Although it later balked at this original intention to reduce the size of the military and the president even publicly disagreed with his Defence Minister that such a decision was taken, there is still a strong perception within the military that various actions taken were driven by a desire to tame the institution.  In spite of these initial misgivings, the military leadership went embraced the new administration’s declared commitment to professionalism enthusiastically. This was partly due to the quality of the military leadership and the recognition on their part that reforms were not only desirable, but also essential following years of decay.  But they soon felt disappointed by the continued lack of clarity over the mission of the military.  Whilst many, including the army chief, believe that the military mission should be restricted to an external, combat role such as peace-keeping as a means of strengthening civil-military relations and re-orienting it towards a more professional outlook, security chiefs like the National Security Adviser, insist that internal security operations is a constitutional duty “in terms of suppressing insurrection and acting in aid of civil authorities to restore order when called upon to do so by the President”(Section 217 c of the 1999 Constitution). 

For many of the officers keen on redeeming the battered image of their profession, a focus on the external with a clearly defined role and mission in peacekeeping is critical to removing the military from politically tainted projects internally.  The involvement of the military in Odi, Bayelsa State in November 1999 brought this into clear relief and these officers argued that if the military must get involved in internal security operations, proper criteria would need to be drawn up for evaluating their involvement in such non-combat operations. Not a few of these officers saw the plan therefore to start a new division dedicated to oil-protection at a time that the same government was keen on size reduction at best a confusing move deeply suspicious move to get the military embroiled in political issues.

Although the government has since returned to earlier suggestions to have a defence review that would guide steps taken in the security sector, by setting up a committee headed by Major General Enahoro to revise the country’s defence policy with a view to clarifying military role and mission, the ownership of the process of defence review remains questionable and the issue of military mission remains unclear.

(b)            Commitment to Military professionalism: The lack of clarity about the role and mission of the military has affected the direction of the re-professionalisation agenda. Critical to the re-professionalisation of the armed forces as far as the military was concerned is the ability of the State to provide efficient and well functioning institutions and infrastructures and an enabling environment for their constitutional tasks to be accomplished. General Victor Malu aptly captured the feeling of his colleagues in The Tempo interview:

“Having come out of very many years of neglect because of our mismanagement, we expected that the civilian government was going to address issues…Unfortunately, from June 1999 to date, we haven’t got anything meaningful to assist us in the process of professionalisation.  Our training institutions have not improved, the training aids with which we conduct the training to re-professionalise have not been provided; the situation in the barracks has not changed; as a matter of fact, it has deteriorated…we did not get anything done last year by way of capital projects and we thought these were the things we were supposed to do if we are going to improve on our well being to keep busy in the act of re-professionalising…”

While General Malu’s views above reflect the feeling of despondency both within the military hierarchy and the rank and file, it is hardly fair to blame the civilian government for the years of neglect in the military; even less so to expect the President and his team to change this anomaly in two years.  What the political leadership can be blamed for is the lack of shared understanding about the problem and the lack of ownership of the re-professionalisation process even by the elected representatives of the people.  The feeling is rife within the military as it is in civil society that the life of the average Nigerian has not improved in the last two years of civilian governance.  Unlike in civil society however, where these things are expressed daily in the public domain, they have simmered underneath the surface in the military, partly due to the nature of the institution but mainly due to the military’s credibility deficit with the Nigerian people who blame all soldiers for the mess the country is in.  Hence, his military constituents saw an Army Chief who raised these difficulties publicly as a breath of fresh air, a step which inevitably put him at loggerheads with his political masters.

Yet, this is not a dilemma faced only by the new civilian government in Nigeria. Indeed, the transition to democracy in the last decade has presented African countries in particular with two critical challenges on the important issue of creating a professional army: on the one hand, that of establishing an effective and accountable military, capable of protecting the security of the state and its citizens, and on the other, that of establishing effective civilian oversight of the armed forces and security agencies.  The problem for such governments therefore is often how to find the necessary balance between allowing the military to fully discharge its duties by providing it with the necessary resources and also ensuring that civilian rather than democratic control of military activities is maintained.  Given the faustian bargains that had been struck with the military in the quest for a civilian dispensation in Nigeria, the room for democratic and consensus driven oversight of military activities had also been foreclosed. Hence, the ideas of Aso rock had largely become the ruling ideas with no alternative mechanism for ensuring balance. Even when the legislators in the Defence and Security Committees of the National Assembly argued for a major improvement programme for military barracks and military equipment, there has been limited means of enforcing their concern for these issues if the executive branch does not share it.  This disdain for accountability by the executive branch was helped by the widespread notion in the country that the president’s background in the military had equipped him with sufficient expertise to deal with security issues in a manner that can hardly be challenged.   The danger was that it also encouraged unnecessary dabbling into issues of strictly professional nature by over-zealous presidential aides.

c)            Ensuring professional autonomy over military matters and relationship with the Defence Ministry:  Perhaps one of the most critical fallouts of the above tension with regards to re-professionalisation has been that of ensuring professional autonomy over military matters.  The military leadership is of the view, and rightly so that the political leadership must respect professional autonomy in spite of the temptation to want to display an all-knowing ubiquity in their responsibility for broad policy decisions over military matters. In their view, while it is appropriate for their political masters to set the framework for issues such as size, shape, organisation, force structure, weapons procurement and conditions of service on the one hand, it is inappropriate for the presidency or the Ministry of Defence to also want to take  operational control over these strategic issues. To the military leaders, even if the final decision is with the political leadership, success can only come in a climate of sustained dialogue and interaction between the civilian, political leadership and the military leadership.  Unfortunately, for much of the last two years, the well-respected political leadership in the Ministry, General Danjuma, has not paid sustained attention to these issues due to failing health and his erstwhile affable deputy, Dupe Adelaja, is not seen to be in charge even though she works very hard.  Instead, there is a strong but hardly substantiated claim that the Ministry is run by the Minister’s Special Assistant who is not accountable to any political authority except his boss.  The fact that the Minister’s Special Assistant has no military background is seen to be a major problem for someone with allegedly limited knowledge of military issues.

While the mistaken notion that civilians have no business in military operational matters is rife in the military, and the civilian bureaucracy in the Ministry of Defence is seen to be largely deficient, it is also true that the military generally respects civilians who they are convinced take sufficient steps to understand the institution even if you are not a flag-waver for their cause. As General Malu claims in his Tempo interview, “Just because you’re in the Ministry of Defence doesn’t mean you know exactly how the military operates”. The irony of course is that the connection is not often made by the same officers that this is the effect of the deliberate policy of populating the Ministry with soldiers when the military was in power.  Even, middle ranking positions, which should have been held by civilians, were turned into staff offices for undeployable but politically connected officers who refused to go to the field.  Indeed, throughout the period the military was in power, not only were civilians working in the MoD employed independently by the various services, (hardly the feature in other ministries where they were centrally recruited) at least 90% of the civilian staff belonged to the junior grade. Even the less than 10% in professional grade played no crucial role in defence policy deliberations, thus creating a vacuum in the knowledge base of civilians about the military.

Having acknowledged the fact that military involvement in politics has undermined military professionalism, it also ought to be stated that respecting the professional autonomy of the military in a civilian dispensation should not mean abdication of responsibility on the part of the civilian, political leadership.  This is one of the paradoxes of the arguments for objective civilian control.  While objective civilian control allows the military to concentrate on military matters and minimise its involvement in political issues, the logic of it also delimits civilian control over military matters.  Hence, when layers of civilian bureaucracy are imposed on the military, it seems clear that this is bound to generate tensions no matter how well intentioned the idea might be.  Although it is too early to judge whether the new structure of service ministers superimposed over the coordinated structure of national defence is working, it is not difficult to see that it would exacerbate unresolved tensions within the Ministry of Defence.  Not only will it further undermine the platform of the Chief of Defence Staff meant to coordinate the activities of the services – already diminished by General Malu’s seeming disrespect for the occupant, it also actively promotes inter-service rivalries as each Minister pushes the case of his or her service rather than enhance a common understanding of the role and mission of the armed forces.

(d) The place of foreign advisers in the military re-professionalisation programme: Although all of the issues raised above are central to the disagreement between the military and the executive branch of government, they pale into insignificance when the involvement of foreign advisers in the re-professionalisaion programme enters the debate.  And yet this disagreement is not so much about involvement of foreign advisers per se. The Nigerian military is not new to bi-lateral military cooperation agreements.  After all, it is the product of a colonial army, the British set up the Army and the Navy, the Germans set up the air force and the premier training institution, Nigerian Defence Academy was established with the assistance of the Indians. The problem this time is about the nature and extent of that involvement of external agents. 

Although there were various options open to the administration on coming to power, the administration in its wisdom decided to engage the services of a foreign private concern of retired military officers known to have close connections to the government of the United States in the re-professionalisation programme. The organization, Military Professionals Resources Incorporated (MPRI), describes itself as a "professional Services Company that provides private sector leader development and training and military-related contracting and consulting in the US and international defense markets". It has been involved in military training, weapons procurement and advisory services in Croatia, Saudi Arabia and Angola before winning the US government supported contract to be involved in Nigeria. In 1999, MPRI undertook on behalf of the US Department of Defense and USAID Office of Transition Initiatives an 8 - person, 120 day assessment mission aimed at developing "an action plan to integrate a reformed military establishment into a new civilian context”. In the course of the assessment mission in the country, it also ran a series of workshops on civil military relations for senior military officers, civilians and various armed formations across the country. Since completing the initial assessment, it has signed a new contract "The Transition-Civil Military Program for Nigeria" which focuses on three key areas - a) Military reform; b) Creation and development of new civilian institutions for civil-military affairs; and, (c) Support for demilitarisation of society. 

No doubt, all of the above constitute areas in which support can be rendered to the Nigerian military, as long as local ownership is not jeopardised and this involvement is under the purview of the legislature and the professional military, not just the president and the Minister of Defence. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.  MPRI has become a permanent fixture in the Ministry of Defence with an office and full complement of staff. Apart from the undisguised opposition of the military professionals to MPRI’s unrestricted access,  MPRI’s belief that models of civil military relations from a different social-cultural context can be transferred into another context wholesale is seen to be more problematic. Since this is also a pattern that Nigerians have become familiar with in other fields of government – the seeming dependency on foreigners for assistance even where local expertise will do -  General Malu’s public criticism of the need to “protect our nation” struck the right chord with even people such as Gani Fawehinmi and others not known for their endorsement of anything coming from the military. General Malu went to great lengths in his interview with Tempo to explain his opposition to the involvement of MPRI and the Ford Bragg team:

We are a sovereign nation and we should protect our national interest.  I don’t think it’s the duty of any foreign country to tell us what our defence policy or what our strategic policy or those things that can only be determined by Nigerians should be…

…Part of the misunderstanding we had with the Americans coming to train us was that they wanted to train us in the rudimentary art of soldiering.  We objected to that because we are an army of well-trained soldiers and seasoned officers that lack logistics…

Unfortunately, General Malu lost this media war.  The fact that his position on foreign involvement can hardly be faulted was damaged by his seeming endorsement of the atrocities committed under General Abacha at the public hearings of the Oputa Commission and for this, the media pilloried him to no end. Although the president is not unaware of the argument about the potentially negative role of a private American organisation that is not even accountable to its own government nor Congress directing the re-professionalisation of the Nigerian military, it was important to him that his position prevailed over the military leadership’s stance in favour of abrogating the MPRI contract if civilian control is to endure.  Whilst he did not concede to a wholesale review of the contract, he was not opposed to ‘diluting’ the American involvement by inviting bi-lateral actors by key players such as the British Military Advisory Training Team (BMATT) or the South Africans with which a Defence protocol was recently signed.

What enraged President Obasanjo would appear to be the manner of General Malu’s use of the media flank, which was construed as an open insurbordination clearly meant to challenge his authority. Although he realised that many of the issues raised are serious even if he has refused to admit this in public, his position became akin to President Truman’s when General Douglas Macarthur, as Commander of the US & UN forces in Korea publicly criticised the limited nature of the war efforts, continued with the war into China and jeopardised the delicate negotiations in Korea.   Realising how popular Macarthur was with his troops and the republican dominated Congress, Truman still went ahead and relieved Macarthur of his Command position.   In the same vein, President Obasanjo was absolutely correct to have relieved General Malu of his job. If he hadn’t done so, he would have risked a military institution ridden with insurbordination and disloyalty to him as an embodiment of the State.  Indeed, my own view is that General  Malu had calculated the risk involved in what he was doing and felt sufficiently determined to sacrifice his military career on the altar of insisting on a professional principle.  It would have been unprofessional of him to raise these concerns publicly if he wasn’t ready to leave the job.  Indeed, those who know him insist that he resorted to speaking to the media because his private pleas in the past year have largely gone unheeded. 

By bringing these issues to the public domain, it is also my view that General Malu deserves commendation rather than abuse even as he deserves to lose his position.  General Malu has clearly helped civil society in general by ensuring that military issues do not remain in the dark recesses of the executive branch of government by raising the stakes in the media.  By this, he has raised a fundamental issue of accountability of the political leadership to the citizens even as the political leadership demands the accountability and subordination of the military. This is the silver lining that has come out of this event and society must not allow this opportunity to be lost.

It is of course tempting to treat the symptom of external involvement as the cause of the crisis of military professionalism but removing MPRI from the scene and replacing them with ‘acceptable outsiders’ to the military will not resolve the critical issues raised by General Malu nor will it address the dilemma of a post-military government in search of a fool proof anti-coup strategy.  The challenge that still has to be dealt with is how to ensure not only civilian oversight, but also democratic control of our military and security establishments whilst at the same time equipping them to competently discharge their duties in defence of the nation? 

Which way forward for military reform?

The crucial point to make is that civilian control should not be seen as a set of technical and administrative arrangements that automatically flow from every post military transition.  It must be seen as part of complex political processes, which must address the root causes of militarism in society, beyond the formal removal of the military from political power.  While formal mechanisms of control are not in themselves wrong, the reality underpinning the crisis of governance in Nigeria is the fact that subordination of the armed forces to civil control can only be achieved when civil control is seen as part of a democratic struggle that goes beyond obeying presidential orders, but one that ensues accountability to the rest of society.

The conclusion this leads to therefore is that what we need is not just civilian, but also democratic control of the security sector (including the military) and this can only be fully addressed through a range of measures – ensuring comprehensive constitutional dimensions of democratic oversight of security sector activities; redefining the role and mission of the military, developing a civilian, security sector expertise; ensuring professional autonomy over military matters and recognising the holistic nature of human security in terms of ensuring freedom from fear and want and not just absence of war and societal violence.  By encouraging further public debate on our security sector in an issue oriented manner - as the government embarks on its constitution review road show around the country – we would be giving voice to the voiceless and taking the views of ordinary Nigerians on security and military reform into account.  Let us seize the moment!

Kayode Fayemi writes from Lagos