PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Malu at ACF: Life Imitating Fiction?

kudugana@yahoo.com

I don’t know if Lieutenant-General Victor Malu, former Chief of Army Staff (COAS), has read Anthills of the Savannah, Chinua Achebe’s fifth novel published in 1987. If he has, I suspect he must be wondering at the similarity between his current predicament and that of Ikem Osodi, one of the three principal characters in the novel. I am, of course, talking about the furore that his speech at the last general assembly of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) held on January 30 in Kaduna, has generated.

In his speech, Malu was characteristically blunt in his denunciation of the Obasanjo regime for what he said were its transgressions against Nigerians and Nigeria since 1999. These, he said, included the regimes’s criminal neglect of the military as a fighting force and its use of the security forces, including the military, to terrorise the political opposition and tyrannize Nigerians. He also mentioned the decision to put the army under American supervision under the guise of enhancing its peace-keeping capabilities.

In that speech Malu was equally unsparing of his hosts, the ACF. For too long, he said, it has spoken out against the transgressions of the Obasanjo administration only when they affected certain sections of the North and not others. The ACF, for example, has not, he said, spoken out loudly against the federal government for putting the Plateau State government under siege, and specifically for freezing its financial accounts. Nor has the organization spoken out loudly enough against what seems to be the politically motivated trial, in the last six years, of Lt-General Danladi Bamaiyi, his predecessor as army chief, and several others, for attempted murder.

Of all the things he said, however, the one some sections of the media chose to focus on was his remarks about how he resisted the temptation, as army chief, to overthrow the Obasanjo administration. These sections of the media quoted him as saying he regretted not doing so.

Predictably the federal authorities and many a public pundit have come down hard on Malu like a ton of bricks. Indeed the Nigerian Tribune of February 3 reported that the ruling party has become “jittery over Malu’s outburst on coup”, and has scheduled a meeting to do something about its worry. “The party”, said Tribune quoting an official, “has to meet with a view to taking a prompt decision on this matter because if anything happens, the party will be held responsible, but we  won’t wait for that time.” Already, there are heavy hints that Malu may be hauled before the courts for treason.

At least two questions arise from this sensational interpretation of Malu’s remarks about coups. First, did he say so? Second, should the authorities use the remarks as an excuse to silence him as one of its leading critics?

Chief Sunday Awoniyi, the Chairman of ACF’s executive committee, has since issued a statement rejecting the media’s interpretation of Malu’s remarks. “It is,” he said, “wrong and even mischievous to cast headlines suggesting that Lt-General Victor Malu said he regretted not having overthrown Obasanjo. He did not say so.”

I was at the venue of the event and, like Chief Awoniyi, I did not get the impression that he regretted not overthrowing Obasanjo. On the contrary, I was of the distinct impression that he was glad he did not do so. I do not remember his exact words but he definitely said, with great humour, that he was glad he was sacked as army chief before he might have contemplated a coup against the authorities because of the big mess they had made of the country’s politics and economy.

To me, the most sensible, if not the only, way to interpret this remark is to regard it as a sign of Malu’s loyalty to constituted authority. A sack is a calamity and you see a calamity as a good thing in retrospect only when you believe it had saved you from yourself or from something worse. And Malu categorically said his sack stopped him from contemplating something foolish.

When Malu spoke at the ACF assembly, he might as well have been playing the role of Ikem in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. Anthills is a story about how power corrupts ideals and damages long-standing relationships.

To rephrase the blurb of the novel, two years after a military coup swept a brilliant young Sandhurst-trained army officer, Sam, into power, in a fictional Republic of Kangan, the failure of a referendum to make him President-for-Life left him embittered especially against his two childhood friends, Chris, the Minister of Information, and Ikem, the brilliant poet who took over from Chris as editor of the National Gazette, the country’s national newspaper. Sam personally blamed Chris and Ikem for not doing enough to ensure that the referendum succeeded. The three of them had grown up together as kids and had gone to the same schools, with Ikem as the intellectual, Sam as the socialite and Chris as something in between.

In a telling dialogue with his girlfriend, Beatrice, Chris said he was worried that the President had become paranoid. One day he decided to confront the president over the deterioration in their friendship following the failure of the President-for-Life referendum.

“I reminded him,” Chris said to Beatrice, “that he never really wanted to be Life President. That made him truly hopping mad. I didn’t, he said, and you know I didn’t, but the moment it was decided upon you had a clear responsibility, you and Ikem, to see it succeed. I never before heard so much bitter emotion in his voice.”

Ikem and not Sam, however, was the one that eventually committed the greater faux pass in the eyes of the President’s security outfits. Following a series of editorials and stories in the Gazette that were critical of the government, Ikem was first suspended as editor, then sacked.

It was while he was on suspension that he accepted an invitation to give a lecture in the country’s university. That lecture turned out as the most decisive turning point in the relationship of the trio.

As lectures go, Ikem’s was characteristically controversial, but what made it fateful was his answer to a question, after the lecture, about a persistent rumour that the Central Bank of Kangan was completing plans to put the president’s image on the nation’s currency.

“Yes”, Ikem had answered with a bit of dark humour. “I heard of it like everybody else. Whether there is such a plan or not, I don’t know. All I can say is I hope the rumour is unfounded. My position is quite straightforward especially now that I don’t have to worry about being editor of the Gazette. My view is that any serving President foolish enough to lay his head on a coin should know he is inciting people to take it off; the head I mean.”

The following day the Gazette carried the story with the boldest and most sensational headline. “EX-EDITOR ADVOCATES REGICIDE!”, the newspaper exclaimed.

This clearly mischievous interpretation of Ikem’s remarks provided the security forces with an excuse they had been looking for to deal with Ikem; they declared him a wanted person, a declaration which forced him to run for his dear life and his friend Chris to join him in the race in disgust at the corrupting influence of power on Sam. While they were on the run, the very security forces that Sam had increasingly relied upon to stay in power, overthrew him and quickly executed him.

Achebe wrote his novel over 18 years ago when coups were still in vogue. However certain similarities it has with today’s Nigeria makes it a compelling reading and re-reading for the lessons those similarities hold for all of us, politicians, soldiers, journalists, and ordinary Nigerians, alike.

One can only hope that all of us, but more especially those in power, will learn from those lessons and allow our new democracy to grow so that Nigeria will begin to realize its great potential as the largest nation in Africa and the black race.