July 25, (THEWILL) – Tony Nyiam, a retired Colonel in the Nigerian Army, speaks on issues as they affect the country in this interview with AYO ESAN. Excerpts:
As a former senior military officer, how do you see the insecurity ravaging Nigeria?
It is very bad. It is the worst in the history of this country. That is how I see it.
How do we get out of it? What would you advise the Federal Government to do to solve the problem?
The problem can be viewed at different levels: The political-economy leadership level, which is called the ground strategic level; the operational level, which is a higher security management level and the practical operational level.
The ground strategic level usually includes many spectators because that is where the root causes of crises are found. Having said that, the first problem is that Nigeria has a political economy order of structure, which engenders causes for national insecurity. For example, you can’t expect the people of Apapa in Lagos to have a port in Lagos and that port is now hijacked by the Federal Government. The people in Apapa, who own the port, are not participating in the ownership of the port. Yet they are treated as if they are a colonised or conquered people. Obviously, they will be resentful.
I am giving an indication as to the causes of resentment, which leads to agitation, protest and more agitations. That is an example. In the same way, you cannot for example, take the resources of the people in the Niger Delta. You cannot take what they have and say that what is underneath their soil does not belong to them. You now forcefully use laws to take it from them. Meanwhile, as you are doing your oil exploration, you are degrading the environment and making the people poorer. These are causes of resentment and grudges that will eventually lead to insurgency.
Basically at the political level or ground structure level, we need to have an appropriate political structure. We need to restructure to true federalism as we had prior to 1963. That is at that level. At the second level, we have a national security architecture, which is not fit for people. For example, the kind of crises we are facing now are not the usual security challenges by armies from foreign countries. What we are facing now and in the foreseeable future are non- state armed entities or actors. In other words, we are facing irregular armies or unconventional armed forces whose mode of operation is by far unorthodox. The military we have now is trying to fight conventional forces in the main. We don’t have the forces to fight the kind of war we are fighting. So, like I have said before, it is like someone who is a boxer punching at you and you are trying to wrestle. So the asymmetry, that is the asymmetrical war, we have now requires a new national security architecture. That is at that level.
At the third level, which is the operational level, the manpower and the force we have is too low and too small for a country of our population and boundary. Let me illustrate this with a country like Egypt. Egypt’s population is between 80 and 100 million and we are over 200 million people. Egypt has half of our Gross Domestic Product, yet her army has more than 27 battalions. We have almost less than one third of that. We do not at the moment have what we call a full-fledged army. A full-fledged army is made up of non-combatant divisions. The term non-combatant division means that you don’t include geographically located divisions like the 81 Division in Lagos because it is merely a garrison division. By garrison, I mean a permanently located division. I am talking of armies that are combat ready, which have a high level of readiness to fight at any time. Egypt has three armies of that kind, we don’t have one yet. What we have is an army that is not more than seven divisions and of those divisions only about four or five are combat ready at any time.
So the problem we need to solve now is to beef up to have a bigger army. We also need to have a mixture of conventional and the unconventional troops. This is because, for example, we need to devolve national security power. The military is purely for the defence of the citizens against external aggression.We do not have armies that have the capacity to deal with home-bound security. When you use the army for all this, it makes the soldiers to be overstretched and fatigued. Of course, with time, the people have them as an army of occupation. So what I am saying is that we need to have a security architecture that has three lines of national security. At the outskirt, that is, in the first concentric cycle, we need a local government-based self-defence troop recruited. And they will become what you may call first responders to any threat and form the bulk of the human intelligence. In other words, if anything happens to Igbo Ora , they would react first. Rather than a threat coming from there, as it is happening now and then, the military drives all the way from Ibadan or somewhere. Havoc would have been caused and moreover, we have the army, which may not desire as responsive to Igbo Ora as the local would be in her defence. So we need to have an army that involves the locals at the first level of response.
You then have the second line of national security made up of what I would call a mixture of conventional and unconventional paramilitary forces. The example, one could use is that of the National Guards in the United States of America. The U.S National Guards are civilians who are also part-time soldiers. They are owned and managed by the different nations that form the United States. That is why they are called National Guards. They are like the homeland security of a state. You do not have a National Guard in Oyo State, for example, that will be made up of people from Igboland. It is the last and ultimate line of defence.
So the problem we have is that we get it wrong. We are still having the colonial mentality of the Army. So we need to correct that, so that the people can be involved in their own security. We are only paying lip service to the slogan, ‘ Security is everybody’s business.’ At the moment, we have a national security architecture that is self-serving to those who want to control power.
The issue of constitution amendment by the national assembly is currently generating controversy. Some people are saying that the National Assembly cannot give the country a better constitution through the amendments and they are clamouring for a people – oriented constitution. What is your position on this?
Actually, this has been an old story. There are two aspects of democracy. There is what we call direct voting democracy and indirect voting democracy. In other words, citizens can vote House of Representatives, delegate power to it to make laws . But when it comes to the issue of existential questions, the citizens vote directly through a referendum to determine what they want. So what do I mean? For example, you cannot have constitution that is not approved by the people themselves. It is only when you have referendum that the constitution can be started with “We the people.” What we have now is falsehood. So when you have a government that starts with falsehood and is also sustained by pretence, what do you get? It’s what we are getting now.
You talk about restructuring the country, but the government of the day is clearly not positively disposed to restructuring. Where do we go from here?
That is the problem. It is because we forget that there are three levels. There is the level of the people who are sovereign. There is the second level of nation states and there is a third level of government.
The government is the pool of nation states. It is a servant of the nation states. Both the government and the nation states are the public servants of the people. So where you have the reverse, as in this case whereby a government refuses to listen to the people, it is an abnormality. The government cannot be telling the people what to do. It is abnormal. It is only in a military dictatorship that a government will refuse what people are saying. And here we are, we have a case where most of the state governors are asking for restructuring. By that I mean the governors of the South-West, the South-East, the South-South and the North- Central. So why would a government that is democratic refuse to listen to its people, if it is not a dictatorship?
The Electoral Act Amendment Bill by the National Assembly also generated tension, as members could not agree on electronic transmission of election results by INEC. How do you see the development?
Well, there is a saying, ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ What do I mean? I am saying that it is because we have a constitution that favours certain people more than the others. The constitution we have now gives the North-West of Nigeria, for example, more voting power than two regions put together in the South. Now, the constitution was made in such a way that it gives more slots in the National Assembly to two regions, the North-East and the North-West. Therefore, they have what you may call the veto power. As a result, when anything is put up for debate, they will dictate the tune. That is what I mean by garbage in, garbage out. The structure we have now is such that does not promote equity and fairness. It means that anything the North-West and North-East want becomes the norm. They structured and backed it up with a fraudulent census. What you now find is that the South and the North-Central have been caged in by the structure. That is why every time you hear President Muhammadu Buhari saying go to the National Assembly. It is like telling someone to go and enter a cage and be locked up. The people are insulting our intelligence. Those of us in the South and the Middle Belt who are educated are being insulted. For example, 2023 has already been structurally rigged. There is nothing you do in the election that will not be determined by the fraudulent census. That is one.
Even when they should give room to a situation in which people can ventilate and decide what we want, like we had in the past, they don’t want that. People are now caged. You hold a stranglehold on a people and you don’t give them room. For example, if the South-West is allowed to be, it would be as developed as Malaysia in six or seven years. But when you put the South-West, the South-East and the South-South in a system that gives a child from the South-East, who scores over two hundred marks in a public examination but cannot go into a university, while someone who scores less than 100 marks gets admitted, this does not allow for growth. So the system we have now is the major cause of insecurity in this country.
About the Author
AYO ESAN, has been actively reporting and analyzing political events for different newspapers for over 18 years. He has also successfully covered national and state elections in Nigeria since the inception of this democracy in 1999.
