Do not disband military checkpoints!

If President Buhari goes through with his announced plan to disband military checkpoints from the highways, he will soon find that he made a serious mistake. The military are better trained and better equipped than the police; they are needed to assist and, in some cases, replace the police not only in the north-east where a battle rages with Boko Haram but in fact in every part of the country.

Until Boko Haram became an issue, the armed forces have rotted in the barracks, basically idle and un-engaged. Even now, and even if on rotational basis, only a small fraction of our armed forces are actively engaged in fighting Boko Haram. What are the rest doing in the barracks?

In the past eight years, in essay after essay on these pages I have been an advocate of the idea that the armed forces should be deployed nation-wide to patrol the highways and streets, day and night. They should be supported with aerial surveillance from helicopters, and of course with a superb network of intelligence gathering by police and civilian community operatives. That way, within six months the hide-outs and holding-pens of the armed robbers and kidnappers will be discovered and destroyed, and the criminals rounded up and imprisoned, hanged or, hopefully, set on the path of psychological and social rehabilitation.

The patrolling will of course continue permanently. Check out every developed and well ordered society in the world: the only reason peace and order reigns in their domain, and their people can walk the streets, drive the highways and sleep safe and undisturbed every night is because their nations have committed their uniformed forces (police-cum-military) to “eternal vigilance.”

In a nation where millions of able-bodied young men and women are unemployed, it requires no great intelligence to realize that Nigerian governments should train up masses of armed peace-keepers and deploy them on the roads and streets and even the forests to protect the peaceful and unarmed populace from the armed robbers and kidnappers that have infested most if not all of the country.

If there is a better solution to those problems, someone should please speak up. Or if there is a better use for the armed forces in whom we have invested so much of our resources in training, equipping and maintaining but who rot in the barracks from inactivity, someone should so advise President Buhari.

Whether we like it or not, the armed forces are the main guarantors not only of our physical safety and security but also of our democracy. If the electoral commission engages in secret manipulation of the voting process or the results, the soldiers on duty may well be unaware and unable to prevent it. But at least they will prevent open cheating as well as violent protests of the announced results.

But the role of the armed forces as guarantors of our democracy goes well beyond physical patrols. Since the early 1980s when Zik put forth the idea of “diarchy” I have also been a keen advocate of joint civilian-military governance. True, our three decades of military rule left much to be desired: military rule turned out to be as bad, sometimes worse than the civilian misrule they came to save us from.

But my own hope is in the ultimate emergence of a “People’s Army”— an army loyal to the people and not to their privileged exploiters; an army so totally identified with the aspirations and needs of the people that in any dispute between the people and their rulers the army will intervene on the side of the people.

Re-training the national army and converting it to a People’s Army should be the job of the retired generals who have now seen the light.

Today’s global reality, unfortunately, is that when there is a popular uprising or revolt, 99% of armies will be on the “wrong side”—the side of the misgoverning and thieving Elite. National armies, such as Syria’s, and neo-colonial armies such as Nigeria’s, are trained to kill to preserve the status quo and protect their paymasters (the misgoverning Elite). This, to them, is social justice. 

For the People, true social justice will remain a dream until a right-minded Elite comes to power or the national or neo-colonial army have been re-oriented and re-trained to become the People’s Army, an army loyal to the People and not to their privileged exploiters.

It is quite useless debating whether the military should or should not be in politics. Truth is, the military are and cannot but be in politics. And of all the players in the political card game, the military hold the trump card.

But . . . all this is matter for a future discourse . . . .

Onwuchekwa Jemie