Former President Olusegun Obasanjo warned in far away Kenya that the military should not contemplate a coup d’etat on account of the crises hamstringing Nigeria. He is not the only one to warn against military adventurism. All the watchmen are right to warn against the truncation of democracy; but they assume that democracy is really in place in the first instance. Everything at the moment, indeed, indicates that democracy is already in abeyance, and military rule has been enthroned, if not in law, at least in fact. It was the National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki, a retired colonel, that first talked of a six-week extension to the original February 14 poll date. After a lot of meandering instigated and supervised by the military, which said they could not provide security for polling officials and voters, the Jonathan government got the six weeks it schemed for. The president, who has apparently ceded presidential powers to the military, was ecstatic.
In an unprecedented constitutional affront last year, the military also targeted critical newspapers for a week or so, detained their distribution vans on the pretext of national security interest, barred them from selling their papers, and refused to compensate them for huge losses. The same military that found the Boko Haram insurgency a tough nut to crack, and hates been criticised for their ineffectiveness, however, poured tens of thousands of troops into Ekiti and Osun States last year to ‘police’ elections. Meanwhile, they needed only about eight thousand troops to man the Multinational Joint Task Force to fight Boko Haram, with all the derogatory connotations of cowardice levelled against Nigerian troops by Niger Republic officers. Apart from needing help from lowly Chad and Cameroon, the Nigerian military has unadvisedly depended on civilians (Civilian JTF) to procure intelligence for them on Boko Haram, though they have in their ranks troops and officers native to the Northeast.
Importantly too, without recourse to state authorities or the beneficiaries of their benevolence, soldiers have laid siege to the homes of opposition politicians on the pretext of giving them unsolicited security. While the federal government and all manner of small and ad hoc agencies such as the Sure-P are assaulting and upturning the little federalism left in the country, the president carries on indifferently, and indeed, no one seems to care how to halt the madness overtaking the nation.
It is in the midst of these that Col Dasuki (retd) has promised there would be no more poll date shift. How can he tell? Is it not obvious that the Jonathan government, contrary to what their supporters say, simply wanted a break to restrategise against what they perceived as humiliating defeat?