Military and Police Reform

A few days ago, I watched a video on youtube. The video has since become the subject of a propaganda war between the Nigerian Army's Joint Task Force and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta. The JTF says the video is fake. MEND says it is real.

In the video, two injured men are lying on the ground, one dead, the other injured. The injured man appears to be comforting the dead man, patting him as if to say "it is okay, it is okay". The two are surrounded by uniformed soldiers. One of the uniformed soldiers asks the injured man to identify himself. The injured man says his name is "Boma" and is in the middle of saying what village he comes from, when he is shot dead by another soldier.

I have no way of ascertaining the veracity of the video, no resources to commit to investigative research and no "contacts" to pump for insider information. I do not think it was "staged", as the JTF suggests, but I could be wrong. Likewise, I do not know what led up to the incident, in other words whether or not these were two civilians murdered in cold blood, or if these were two "militants" who should have been arrested and put on trial but were instead murdered extra-judicially. The army asserts the incident never happened.

There are two things I know for sure. The first has to do with the editor of the video, and the second has to do with the Nigerian Armed Forces.

On The Editor Of The Video

The editor added text asserting that the JTF offensive in the Niger-Delta was a religious war, waged by soldiers from one religion against people from another. Whomever the editor was, they were clearly seeking a reaction and response from Western European and North American governments. This portion, the text added by the editor, is propaganda. The Niger-Delta is a complex problem, but it is not a religious issue, and never has been. I am tired of political individuals and entities who know only one method for mobilizing support -- to use our ethnic, regional and religious divisions to turn citizens against each other. The editor deliberately alienates half of the Nigerian citizenry in his or her effort to appeal to North America and Western Europe, when in fact it is only the Nigerian citizenry (if it ever decided to act together as one) that can influence the outcomes in the Niger-Delta -- and push for reform of the Army. But how can we ever act together as one, when the basic organizing principle of Nigerian politics from the 1950s till today is divide-and-rule, and when politicking revolves around stoking oft-violent socio-political divisions?

I would have embedded that video on this blog, to help spread the word that our Armed Forces need reform, but I cannot be a party to the spread of inter-religious hate. There is more than enough of that in the world today.

On the Nigerian Armed Forces

The Army faces a serious problem when it tries to claim that this video is fake, and that problem is the Army itself, or more properly the history of the Army. Every Nigerian citizen who has seen that video will believe it is real, because the tragic events portrayed in the video are exactly what the people of Nigeria have witnessed the Army (and Police) doing for decades now. Nigerians do not even need video evidence; word that the Army is engaged in operations anywhere is enough for most citizens of the federal republic to conclude incidents such as that portrayed in the video will almost definitely occur. Indeed, no one disputes the authenticity of the videoof the assault on Uzoma Okere by Nigerian Navy ratings. The "shock" and "surprise" expressed by the authorities was not shared by the citizenry at large; for us, the only thing "new" about the Uzoma Okere case is that someone actually videotaped it!

Don't get me wrong. I do NOT hate the Army or the police. Actually, I had a brief argument with a Ghanaian "intellectual" in the dark days of the 1990s. He was one of those people who said the solution to coups in Africa was to disband all African armies. I had to stop talking to him, because what he was advocating was rather stupid. He sounded like one of those people who think the solution to Nigeria's problems is Nigeria's disbandment! If there is a problem in your family, disband the family, abi? Actually, some people do that. I don't.

Believe it or not, the Nigerian Armed Forces and the Nigerian Police provide valuable service to the country, often in difficult circumstances. When communal violence breaks out, citizens often run to the nearest police or army barracks for safety. Our soldiers and officers have served under difficult conditions (and been killed in action) in places like Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and elsewhere. 700 Nigerian soldiers were killed in one month (January, 1999) on ECOMOG duty according to Professor Ibrahim Gambari (former Minister of External Affairs, and former Permanent Representative to the UN), and the former commander of ECOMOG forces, General Victor Malu revealed that 800 soldiers were secretly brought home and secretly buried in a mass grave for fear of public reaction to the number of casualties. As I type this in June, 2009, the federal government has yet to give an honest, credible, full account of how many soldiers we lost, how many were injured, and how much we spent on ECOMOG.

Our soldiers too-often get the rough end of the stick, treated by our federal republic in the same shabby fashion it treats its civilian citizens, be it the 27 jailed for life for protesting the fact that senior officers were stealing their allowances, or the 25 wounded soldiers dismissed and sentenced to life imprisonment for protesting their shoddy medical treatment.

The majority of our officers, soldiers and policemen are just fellow citizens who are just doing a job in order to earn a salary and support their families. Soldiers and policemen are themselves murdered, by militants, militia, extremists, irredentists, and robbers. Our soldiers are no different from their counterparts elsewhere in the world; the deaths of comrades-in-arms creates resentment in armies all over the world, and no war has ever been fought that did not involve both sides taking out extra-judicial, criminal and murderious revenge on the enemy and on civilians linked in some way to the enemy. Even those European and North American armies that officially profess to be above such things, have been guilty of that much and more in the endless sequence of wars over the decades.

But whatever good the Police and Armed Forces do, and whatever they suffer because of it, is drowned out by the ocean of negative effects accruing from the lack of institutional, systemic and operational reform. Whether this particular video is real or not, the Army and Police are sorely in need of dramatic reform and transformation.

The tactics, methods and rules of engagement of our uniformed services are the same as they were during the colonial days. The British imperialists created the nascent army and police to "pacify" the country; first to impose their rule and later to preserve it. A key principle in this process was "Collective Punishment". If a few youths from a particular village dared fight the colonial order, the colonial authorities imposed punishment on the entire village from which the youths emerged. Collective punishment was not invented by the colonial-era British government; it is as old as humanity. But the British are important in the Nigerian context because they created the proto-army (and proto-police) that would eventually (on Independence) be placed under the command of Nigerians as the Nigerian Armed Forces. And from the very beginning, this colonial army of Nigeria (predecessor of today's Armed Forces) was created to impose and sustain colonial government by force, against the will of the people, and by enforcing collective (and other) punishments on the people until the people's will was broken and colonial rule was secure. Indeed, collective punishment began before the colonial era proper -- I have read an account of three towns (including Asaba) attacked and destroyed by British ships in the pre-colonial period as punishment for not finding and handing over men (allegedly from the area) who had attacked British commercial interests.

The principle of collective punishment should have been banished from Army doctrine after Independence, but it was not. From the 1960s onward, the practice of striking at entire communities, as punshiment for the crimes of particular individuals from those communities, continued. And in the last ten years, there have been incidents in Odi, Choba, in Zaki-Biam , Afahakpo-Enwang, Okene, Abala, and elsewhere -- incidents where police or soldiers took revenge on entire communities after their colleague(s) was(were) killed (or in one case robbed) by unidentified "youths" allegedly from the respective towns.

Alongside this trend of collective punishment is another trend -- excessive force.

Like I said, I do NOT hate the Armed Forces, and as someone who wants to see the Nigerian military transformed into the protective force we the citizens have always wanted (and deserved), I have to say that the training and equipment of our defence forces are both ... inadequate. The inadequacy of training and equipment compel our officers and soldiers to adopt the safest method of attack under the circumstances, which is to obliterate everything in their path, buildings and people alike, with neither precision, nor discrimination nor discretion. The idea is one way or the other, when the dust settles, the enemy will be somewhere under the rubble -- along with anything and anyone else in a given radius around where the army surmises the enemy to be. As far as the doctrine is concerned (and in a context where collective punishment is still practiced), if you were "innocent" you shouldn't have been anywhere in the vicinity of the enemy in the first place, so if you die, you are just another "sympathizer" to them.

I could be wrong, but I believe if you sit down and talk to the officers and men of the Armed Forces, and they were honest (for once), they would admit to their lack of any ability to mount more precise offensive or defensive operations. Nigerian soldiers have died in Darfur (and before then in the Mano River region), because of it. Those soldiers in Darfur came under attack, and we had no way to provide them with air support, no way to supply them through logistics (they basically fought bravely, until they ran out of ammunition), in fact if one were to seriously study our military deployments, one would be angry at a series of governments that continues to deploy the military with abandon, careless of the fact that it is putting them at risk without giving them the things they need to mitigate risk.

But again, this leads to towns in Nigeria getting more destroyed than is strictly necessary in situations that should be mere police operations (armed response task forces, called SWAT in one country), or at worst military intelligence operations backed up by special forces. The police have no systemic or institutional capacity to handle the police operations, and we keep having to call in the army to deal with "communal violence" and the like, which means the violence of rioting youths gets countered by the excessive violence of the army. And the lack of real intelligence gathering, sensible policy-making at the political level, and conflicts of interest between leaders who serve Nigeria by day and destroy Nigeria at night, mean we are constantly faced with anything from Maitatsine to MEND within our borders, meaning the Armed Forces have to defend Nigeria from Nigerians rather than focus on defending Nigeria from outside forces. Add to this the fact that the army and police continue to defend governments Nigerians do not want against Nigeria's people, and you get a conundrum that we have yet to resolve.

You might think I am digressing from the initial point about an extra-judicial murder in the Niger-Delta, but I am not. If you want to stop things like this happening, you have to go to the source. We have to change the input, if we want to change the output. If we were to find the soldiers responsible for this crime, and prosecute them, it would not stop this happening again, and again, and again. And most of the time there is no video, no evidence other than eye witnesses who will be scared and intimidated, and the victim who will be painted as the aggressor by senior officers who always defend their men, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of what the men have done.

The Armed Forces and Police are in need of SERIOUS reform and transformation. We won't get to that point without political reform and transformation, because our political class as currently constituted has a vested interest in keeping law enforcement as weak as possible -- and in ensuring that the army protects them (the political class) rather than protects the people against the political class.