The confrontation between the duly elected Governor of Lagos State, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu and an errant soldier, who breached the traffic regulations of Lagos State, has generated a lot of reactions in the public space. But first, the story.
The governor was going to a function at the Lagos State University (LASU), when he saw some okada riders driving on the wrong side of the road. On sighting the governor’s convoy, some of them abandoned their motorcycles and ran away to avoid arrest. But one of them kept moving. The governor ordered that he should be arrested. When he was arrested, he said “I am a soldier sir”, in the vain hope that his profession will bail him out of trouble.
This statement angered Governor Sanwo-Olu who then said “That is even the more reason why I will lock you up. Put him there. You are telling me you are a soldier, useless boy.” The armed men in the governor’s convoy whisked him into one of their vehicles.
The governor then said to the two passengers who were conveyed by the soldier on his motorbike “you people are the ones causing this. Maybe I should arrest the two of you and put you in the guardroom. You are on okada and they are taking one way. Is it good? When you fall and you die, they will say the government killed you. What a shame”!!
All of this happened on the Lagos-Badagry expressway.
When the story hit the public space, there were all kinds of reactions. One soldier slammed Sanwo-Olu for arresting the soldier. He was seen in a viral video where he was defending the errant soldier and instead insulting the governor for describing the soldier as “useless” in front of “bastard civilians.” He also said that the governor had no right to arrest a soldier, especially in front of his barracks. He claimed that soldiers are not under the control of any state governor but under their senior officers. He said: “Did I just hear your governor calling a soldier, a lance corporal, useless. This man broke his arm, they fired at the man. There is iron in his hand.”
After what looked like eternity, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt General Taoreed Lagbaja, has now told us that the abusive soldier, who probably thought that he was doing his profession and professionals a favour by scolding the governor has been arrested. The rank of the rude soldier has not been disclosed but it is obvious that he was speaking ignorantly in the display of his superiority complex.
On all counts, he was wrong in his futile defence of the soldier involved in the route violation. The soldier who drove on the wrong side of the road did four things wrong: He drove his motorcycle in a forbidden area. He drove it on the wrong side of the road. He carried two passengers instead of one. He wore no crash helmet.
So, the soldier who was running his mouth in his defence was defending the indefensible. He thinks that the soldier should not have been arrested in front of his barracks but the barracks is part of Lagos State, which is ruled only by the Governor of Lagos State and not by his senior officers. The Land Use Act which is a federal law enacted in the seventies puts all the land in each state, including land where military barracks are located, under the custody of the governor.
Route violations are regular features of irresponsible driving in Lagos by not only okada and keke drivers but also by car drivers. This has caused series of accidents and arguments among commuters. But one expects that armed forces and other security personnel who are trained to be very disciplined would not be among the violators but on a daily basis they seem to think that the guns they carry give them the licence to violate traffic regulations with impunity.
That these things happen regularly does not make it right. That these violations are committed by people who carry guns does not also make it right. Our security personnel are actually expected to lead the way when it comes to discipline because soldiering is a disciplined profession everywhere in the world.
Here in Nigeria, some of the soldiers treat the civil populations like their slaves. Apart from calling people insultingly ‘bloody civilians,’ they impose all kinds of indecent punishment on civilians for little or no violations. They flog people mercilessly; they tell people to roll inside gutters; they ask people to do frog jump for hours for wearing “camouflage” an attire that is sold randomly in markets around the world. They say that that is army uniform.
Elsewhere in the world, people wear it without being harassed. In Nigeria, in the 80s people were harassed for driving cars painted in green, which they claimed was army colour. I have no idea if that aberration still goes on today. I guess that was part of the military’s attempt to assert their supremacy in the lives of we bloody civilians.
The disparagement of the Lagos State Governor by the soldier who was defending his colleague, is a show of disdain for constituted authority and an exhibition of needless arrogance. I do not know if senior military officers secretly support him but it must be made abundantly clear that if soldiers ruled the roost during the era of military authoritarianism, that era is long gone, gone for 24 years now. For 24 years now, Nigeria has been operating a constitutional democracy which recognises an elected President as the leader of the country. It also recognises, more importantly, the President as the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.
During military administration, the constitution is often suspended and the regime rules by its own Decrees some of which are backdated. During such regimes, as we had experienced in the past, soldiers behaved like peacocks and did whatever they wanted to do, humiliated civilians who questioned their decisions, threw them into detention, shut down newspapers and magazines.
The soldier who was abusing the Governor of Lagos State, must be made to understand that, that era is gone. He must therefore adjust his thinking cap and accept that an elected civilian is now in charge of running the government at the centre and the states and that there is only one law for soldiers and civilians, whether bloody or bloodless.
I hope that this display of ignorance by the soldier as to who is in charge is not the prevailing view in the Armed Forces. Our soldiers make a lot of sacrifices for the nation. That was mentioned by the soldier who was ranting about the wound that the arrested soldier was carrying, a wound he sustained in the line of duty.
Yes, soldiers make a lot of sacrifices for our nation. Other professionals also make sacrifices too: doctors, nurses, journalists, engineers, policemen, traffic warders etc. That is how nations are built. Nations are built with the sweat of all its citizens, not just with the sweat of only one professional group, even if that professional group carries a gun, which is capable of making a statement of finality with its equipment.
Our soldiers must understand, I think some of them do, that in a democracy there must be a subordination of the military to political control. That is a sine qua non in a democracy. The military is a special government agency that is supposed to implement, not formulate, policies that require certain types of physical force.
A lack of control over the military by our elected, constitutional government will result in having ‘a state within a state,’ an obvious anomaly in a democracy.
Elected representatives reflect the will of the people and the people are the sovereign in a democracy or in fact in any situation at all. Richard Kohn, eminent Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina says that “the point of civilian control is to make security subordinate to the larger purposes of a nation, rather than the other way around. The purpose of the military is to defend society, not to define it.”
Most of the advanced democracies in the world have been able to establish this philosophy firmly in their governance structure, and all the segments of their society have accepted it as an article of faith. In our part of the world that has gone through many years of military rule we have to work conscientiously with all facets of our society to plant the philosophy firmly in our soil.
In America, it is a settled matter. For instance, the nuclear weapons of the United States are controlled by the civilian United States Department of Energy, not by the Department of Defence.
We do not intend to have a state within a state. Our security forces must subordinate themselves to the civil authority of our elected, constitutional governments. That is the way it is, that is the way it ought to be in a democracy.
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