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Nigeria: Rioting Soldiers
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Daily Trust (Abuja)
EDITORIAL
18 July 2008
Posted to the web 18 July 2008
We were alarmed by reports of a violent protest in Akure by hundreds of soldiers who blocked roads, chanted war songs, and held their commanding officer hostage to demand the reimbursement of allegedly illegal deductions from their UN peacekeeping allowances. An Army spokesman blamed the failure to pay the overdue allowances and that the army authorities will constitute an internal board of enquiry to discover the nature of the "mix-up." We beg to observe however that similar "mix-ups" have long affected the payment of legitimate allowances to the police, not to speak of the entitlements of countless sportsmen and other groups of "ordinary" Nigerians who have either been denied their remuneration for services rendered or failed to receive them as and when due.
Nigerian leaders, it seems, are truly a careless lot. Enthralled by the illusion of invincibility, they are utterly oblivious of the potential impact of their endless harangues about democracy and people's rights on our political consciousness and vainly hope that inertia and tame submission to fate will forever incline the Nigerian people to comply with unjust decrees. Hence they entrust the country's development to laissez faire, street-beggar economics and muddle through in a system of atavistic hierarchies and self-regulating "free enterprise" which has hardly produced the results we collectively desire. It hardly surprises that Nigeria, for all its acknowledged potential, remains a place where the best appears to be impossible although the worst never seems to happen.
Be that as it may, we are increasingly perturbed that the frequent reports of unconscionable and grossly irresponsible treatment of "the people," soldiers and the police in particular, could constitute a national security threat. They certainly undermine the legitimacy of duly constituted authority in the eyes of the majority of compatriots, for the Nigerian people currently endure a lot of privation. There is the agony of pensioners whose terminal allowances are mismanaged or stolen, many of whom die in misery while a few misappropriate their benefits. Soldiers and police are condemned to living in dilapidated barracks and spending their meagre salaries to purchase their own uniforms. Let our leaders beware however that power is fundamentally ambivalent in that it exists in both latent and manifest forms and could be both stabilising and destabilising - a causal factor in bringing about or preventing social changes.
The majority of Nigerians may today be so traumatised by the abuse of constituted authority that they perceive power as inherently evil in itself, corrupting by nature, and therefore to be eschewed, denied and renounced. As a result of their ideological manipulation by the powerful and their own reactionary misperception of reality, they may even perceive the pursuit, possession, and application of power on their own behalf as unworthy of virtuous persons and feel compelled to find the emblematic signs of their Godliness and salvation in their powerlessness and poverty. But dominated groups and individuals have throughout history been known to eventually mobilise themselves to question the injustices of the dominant social order.
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Let our leaders be mindful that, thanks to their democratic awakening, an ever increasing number of Nigerians, including members of the security services, are beginning to resent the collective apathy of the masses as convenient for the rationalisation and maintenance of the powers of the haves over the have-nots. Let them therefore address the underlying corruption which has over the years produced the moral rot and mental servitude that pervade the contemporary Nigerian mass psychology. Legitimate authority, after all, rests on the subjects' belief in the integrity rather than the formal position of those in a recognised hierarchy.
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