WHY THE MALU FIGHT Page 1 of 6

WHY THE MALU FIGHT?

By

Mike Ikhariale

Until the famous barbaric military trial of , the former Chief of General Staff or the number two man in the Abacha dictatorship for the unusual offense of attempting to overthrow his own boss in a coup d’etat, the word malu, to most Nigerians simply meant docile cows, particularly those breed commonly found in the northern parts of the country from which the bulk of the protein needs of millions of Nigerians are obtained. Because the animal is considered to be very dull and evidently of little intellect as it willingly walks itself into the abattoir for its own slaughter, the word ‘malu’, all over came to be associated with monumental stupidity. So, almost anywhere you hear someone referred to as malu, it is generally understood that there is a fool in there.

But with the announcement of the Chairmen and members of the military tribunal that was ‘set up’ to try Diya and co. late in 1997, the lexicography of the word malu has completely changed as people began to get used to the reality that the family name of the highly feared Chairman of the Panel is also malu but, in this case, always with a capital M. Since then, the name ‘malu’ was no longer associated only to the dull and brutish animal we all know about, it authoritatively assumed a human dimension, in fact, the name of the new army Bigman. Those who know General Malu intimately before then say he was a very tough and courageous officer. That was all about him that was public. For a while, the people seemed to have forgotten about the man until when he was appointed by President , the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of Nigeria, in May 1999, to the very powerful position of the Chief of Army Staff. And from that moment until a few days ago, the man went about his official business in the most unorthodox way, running his mouth like a pipe broken by a rampaging malu, more like a political busy-body than a professional soldier. Someone reminded me recently that the last time a public figure ran his mouth so relentlessly was during the time of the big Dutchman, Clemens Westerhof, who coached the national soccer team with some appreciable success, though. Predictably, he was relieved of his command appointment as chief of Army staff of the army and also retired from the army.

All of a sudden the nation became engrossed in a proper malu palaver over his removal by the President in due exercise of his constitutional prerogative to hire and fire political office holders, including military top brass. The unprecedented press controversy and very wild speculative analyses which the removal from office has generated, are suggestive of a state of affair well beyond the kind, which is commonly experienced in a country where so many heads had rolled rather casually in the past. Of particular significance is the fact that the ‘malu affair’ is attracting such cacophonic responses from individuals, some of whom until very recently did not acknowledge the equality of rights of other Nigerians who were unlucky to be born outside of a given geographic perimeter. It is not unlikely that the recent decline in the president’s popularity ratings must have contributed to people wanting to find fault with every step he takes, no matter

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how legitimate or proper. I have no doubt in my mind that General Malu must have been basking in the unfolding imbroglio as if it was a measure of his own personal popularity. Such a state of mind would just be illusory because there is nothing special that he has done so well to earn such a reputation being circumstantially foisted on him by some people whose motives are quite unconnected with his best interests. As a lucky beneficiary of the booty of the long military occupation of Nigeria, he cannot be heard to be complaining of having been given the famous "UAC" medal, the so-called "Used and Condemned" award which is the typical Nigerian reward for honesty and dedication to duty in public service.

Who, by the way, is Victor Malu? Who sacked him? Was the sack lawful? Even if lawful, is there anything patently unusual about it? I have carefully examined these posers and at the end of it all, I am unable to comprehend why so much ink has been wasted discussing the Malu sack when other better Nigerians are being unceremoniously thrown out of there jobs on a daily basis for much lesser justifications. What is the big deal about this man’s retirement?

For the avoidance of doubt, it should be recalled that General Malu was appointed the Chief of Army Staff in May 1999 by the Head of State, President Olusegun Obasanjo, in his capacity as the Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria as provided for under the constitution of Nigeria. For all intents and purposes, therefore, he held his appointment at the behest of the President and not by inheritance. For the reader to put the whole brouhaha into rational perspective, it may be necessary for us to examine a little closely the public Curriculum Vitae of the man now at the center of the evidently contrived storm.

He was one of the ECOMOG warlords who held out as Abacha’s viceroy in those West African failed states. As we shall see shortly, that itself was a hanky-panky affair. The next most popular thing people recall about the man is that he was the judge who presided over the military tribunal which over-zealously prosecuted Oladipo Diya and those other lily-livered generals who (would have been better off in civil life organizing owambe parties than putting on military uniforms pretending to be soldiers) were charged with a coup attempt. Ordinarily, the fact that Malu presided over the trial should not count against him in any way because it was purely in the course of his official duties. Unfortunately, the whole trial was ludicrously flawed by the fact that Malu was more than performing his official duties, as he was also fervently pushing the Abacha self-succession agenda unabashedly, so much so, that he was well noted for regularly wearing the Abacha personal political badge on his military uniforms bought with public funds. While one cannot say much about the proprietary or otherwise of the trial and the subsequent convictions of those soldiers who were involved in the monkey business of coup making, General Malu’s sense of justice was, however, tarnished irredeemably for convicting Mr. Niran Malaolu, the Editor of the now defunct Diet newspapers, on the very flimsy ground that the editor once made a phone call (which was illegally tapped, anyway) to a US diplomatic officer wherein the accused was alleged to have spoken about an impending crisis in the army hierarchy.

Granted that there was indeed a coup in the making, does such an educated guess by an investigative journalist months before the instant case amounts to coup planning? It was well known that Malaolu edited a paper that persistently came out with scathing editorials against the self-succession plan of the late Abacha. At that particular time, the present writer was the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the newspaper. With Niran as editor, the newspaper stepped on several toes and right from then, he, like many others, was marked down as an anti-Abacha dissident, for dastardly destruction. Rather than used Sgt. Rogers and his gang of killers to do the job, as was the practice of the Abacha junta, Malu tribunal came in handy. So, it was just too easy for them to come for Malaolu when the coup opportunity arose. In the light of the enormity of the exculpating evidence exonerating Mr. Malaolu, it was preposterous that a tribunal with a dose of humanity could still go ahead and find the gentleman guilty as charged. For example, none of the soldier-coupists knew him in any way, neither could a minimal thread of conspiracy be woven between them and the editor by any stretch of the imagination. I am therefore unable to see the integrity of Victor Malu who so enthusiastically pursued his master’s agenda with mindless ruthlessness that he was prepared to shed the blood of an innocent journalist who was only

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carrying out his job just to prove that he was a regime loyalist in an environment in which coup plotting and rumors of coups was the order of the day. In decent societies, such travesty of justice would have been enough to disqualify Victor Malu, for life, from the high office of chief of army staff, more so, in a democratic dispensation mindful of the rule of law. Because we are still within the era of ‘anything goes’; he was given the high office of Chief of Army, his odious records notwithstanding.

I have read, amongst others, Mohammed Haruna’s spirited defense and self-serving interpretation of the ignoble roles that Malu had played in that coup episode his essay, The Sacking of Malu as published on the Web. Given the fact that Mr. Haruna was a likely insider of that bloodthirsty system, one cannot totally deny the veracity of the claims he made therein. But it is quite clear that his objective in the piece is not to shed the much needed light on ‘why’ Malu was asked to go home, as he tried to convey the idea that Malu worked very hard to save the lives of the same people he ‘militarily’ condemned to death, thereby projecting him as a man of integrity. The best that one could say in that respect, as far as the case of Malaolu is concerned, is that Malu was only shedding the proverbial crocodile tears as the dubious judgment had already been given before the belated attempt to commute the crazy sentences. As matter of fact, that was a well choreographed part of the operational strategies of Abacha as he was very adept in it: harshly sentence people unfairly through the numerous kangaroo trials first and, then, arrange for elaborate open and humiliating supplication on their behalf and pardon them later---simply playing God!

Another prominent item in Malu’s c.v. is that he was the man who, as a serving military officer, came out politically in the open to be criticizing the recent training of Nigerian soldiers by US troopers. As a general, even by the Nigerian cheap military standards, Malu knew that he did not need to do that. It was an act of gross insubordination on his part to have gone to the press gallery to be criticizing a decision already taken by his boss, the C-in-C. The truth of the matter is that he belongs to that generation of army officers in Nigeria, which does not believe that any civilian authorities could exercise any power over them. They have become little warlords in their own egoistic thought garrison. They have come to the belief, formulated over the years, that they are practically above the law of the land, and it is very clear that Malu was quite uncomfortable to be seen to be taking orders from ‘bloody civilians’. His mistake here, and perhaps, his undoing, however, is that his commander-in chief, although a civilian president was once a general himself and at a time when he (Malu) was not yet up to the captaincy cadre.

To make matters worse, Malu embarked on an obvious misinformation spree by telling the world that there is a defense pact between Nigeria and the US. Embedded in that allusion is that he is patriotically opposed to it. Nothing could be farther from the truth because at the very first opportunity, the same Malu was himself at the Pentagon, the nerve center of the US military establishment, divulging all he knew about ECOMOG without evaluating the security implications of his talks in such a highly wired place. He further arrogantly told the nation that the Nigerian soldiers have nothing to learn from their American counterparts. Specifically on peacekeeping, Malu would want any one that cared to listen that his troops are better than the Americans in all departments of military science by holding aloft the testimonials they gathered from Sierra Leone and as evidence for the claim. But he failed to tell the nation the huge human and material costs that were expended to achieve those obviously limited military objectives. Is Malu really to be taken seriously on those claims? On what grounds did he compare his army with that of the US? Perhaps in coup making and general insubordination. Is that not like saying that because the Naira is also a national currency it now has more value than the US dollar just because the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria says so?

Talking about those peacekeeping missions, there is no doubt that a better trained and well equipped army would have done the same job with fewer loss of lives and at a much smaller financial wastes. We all know that those expeditions were by themselves gigantic industries for some commanders, what with the alleged booming trade in gold and diamond. Can anyone justify the outrageous five billion US dollars or (700 billion Naira, more than half of Nigeria’s GNP!)) that

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was wasted in those recklessly diversionary campaigns? What appreciable gratitude did Nigeria get in return from those nations for whose salvation we wasted our soldiers, equipment and enormous national resources? Of course, because we went in wrongly motivated, behaved wrongly while there, we are instead now receiving insults and rebukes from them. To put it mildly, we thoughtlessly burnt our treasury in those missions just to enrich a few commanders and war contractors and it is just too bad that no accounting has been demanded till date and may never be.

There is a lot our soldiers can learn from their US counterparts without necessarily entering into a defense pact, for there are several levels of military co-operation that are less than defense pacts. In military jurisprudence, the concept of a defense pact is a different ball game altogether. Right now, Nigeria has similar relationships with many other countries across the world and no one familiar with diplomatic practices would refer to them as ‘defense pacts’. Neither President Obasanjo nor President Bush is competent, acting alone, to enter into defense pact on behalf of their countries. The US Congress and its Nigerian counterparts must act on it for it to be anything lawful but I am not sure that our legislators have done such a thing yet as they are still very busy with their more pressing problems of Ghana-must-go bags gathering. No rational purpose is served, in my candid opinion, by mischievously raising the national thermometer by screaming about the existence of an illusory defense pact, properly so-called. For years, since the Babangida era, the military handed our economy over to the Bretton Woods institutions, of which the IMF is most noticeable, and in the name of restructuring, gave out the lucrative parts of the downstream sectors to their Lebanese and oriental fronts in the name of deregulation while their cronies applauded them for mortgaging our tomorrow for their today. Excepting the much maligned human rights groups, ASUU and some students led by NANS who complained they wen on unchallenged. Now, tomorrow is finally with us and everyone is in anguish.

Particularly about the US army, there is no denying the fact that our soldiers stand to gain a great deal by interacting with them because one is unarguably a primitive army and the other is a hi- tech army. Just the same way our intellectuals and professionals need to interact regularly with their counterparts from across the globe in order to keep abreast of developments, our soldiers also need to learn from others about what makes a modern army thick. One example, is how an army can excel professionally by submitting to civil authorities, something that our soldiers have completely forgotten? It is tactically archaic for any one to be speaking of national security as a justification for resisting the US-Nigeria military cooperation. We lost that several years ago under the military when our economy was ruined. Needless to say that poverty and dignity hardly meet. Right now Nigeria has been bled dry by greedy leaders and has no muscles left to flex seriously. Operationally speaking, the is not better than the Nigerian airways, moribund and debilitated and, in the case of the army, by political contamination. Did anyone visit a Nigerian army barracks during the military administration? In one word, they were junkyards! A truly determined OPC unit could put the military to shame if the army were to remain in the operational state the military administration left it—totally neglected. In the circumstances, I think it is a wrong reading of the true strategic status of our military for anyone to be heard complaining about the proposed re-orientation and overhauling of our decadent army. Here is one good example of the saying that pride goes before fall or more aptly, national pride before a national fall! But we all know that genuine national commitment is a very rare commodity right now in our national discourse, no matter the pretension. So, who is fooling whom?

There are strong indications that some of those who are scared of the presence of the US troops in Nigeria are those who continue to harbor the possibility of another military comeback to the politics of the country. Their present worry is that, with the presence of the Americans, such a prospect is becoming unlikely. So they are doing everything possible to hasten the departure of the US troops which they consider as veritable obstacles to their nefarious schemes. On the other hand, it is a shame that the federal government is actually hoping that the new training the soldiers are receiving would help it in the maintenance of peace in the Niger Delta region where all the ingredients of peace have been undermined by the same government. The only legitimate reason for us to reject the training arrangement is that it is being feared that troops so trained

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could be deployed against our fellow Nigerians in the Niger Delta just to protect oil supplies to the US and also to make the Nigerian political elite richer at the expense of the oil producing communities.

Lastly, General Malu’s records also contain the fact that in total disregard of the feelings and sensibilities of millions of Nigerians whose tax money paid for his uniforms, he went to the public gallery to say that he still continues to revere and worship the late butcher, General , his former boss. He even went further to describe major El Mustapha as a hero of sorts whom Nigerians must be grateful to for his patriotism. To Malu, therefore, the State was synonymous with Abacha and anyone who served Abacha well, no matter the resulting harm to the nation, was actually serving the Republic. What a big shame, that a man who wears the military epaulet of a general was making such elementary mistakes about professional duties and patriotism.

Some people have mistaken Malu’s unguarded utterances as evidence of his forthrightness and personal honesty. But any objective analyst would readily see an unrepentant mind as well as a complete failure of logic in those his routine goofs. General Abacha might have been his hero but he ought to have kept it to himself because worshipping the deceased Abacha openly was clearly sending a needless reminder to the populace about the ignoble role that he actively played in those dark years. If he was lucky enough to have survived in the military while many of his fellow Abacha foot soldiers went down with the dictator, he ought to have continued to thank his stars, but those the gods would destroy they first make mad. And in many ways, the general went over board, judging by the way he went about with his unguarded utterances that were calculated to, or capable of, undermining the civilian authorities.

Here is a general, a member of the then PRC, who could not summon the requisite courage to make his opinion known to the late dictator Abacha even when such opinion concerned the lives of fellow officers and an innocent journalist, now daring the democratically elected civilian Commander-in-Chief at every turn. Is he implying that one has to be a serving soldier to be fully respected as a leader in Nigeria or was that a part of the organized disrespect for the new leadership which they have chided for not paying enough deference to them as was the case during the dictatorship? To any discerning person, it should be clear that the general’s cup was already full a long time ago. It is on record that Malu did accept the authority of the civilian ministers in charge of the Army as he routinely attempted to by-passed them for almost everything official. But things don’t work that way in any civilized environment. Malu was still encased in the old mindset of military rule with no regard to the concept of accountability, as he demanded to be allowed to draw up the army budget and run it all by himself.

When he was denied this clearly ultra vires request, the ‘Lion’, as he is popularly known in military circles, went to town roaring about what he 'called under-funding' of the army by the new civilian democracy. What he wanted to achieve by this deliberate incitement of the army against the government, no one else knows. In all these deviations, he did not expect that he could be queried, much more, sanctioned, by the civil authority. From what have been written on this affair, so far, it obvious that most Nigerian also did not actually understand that General Malu was still subject to the law of the land. Nigerians should be careful not to make the military an untouchable institution within the society unless we intend to kill the inchoate democracy and return to the old anarchic ways. The President should be free to hire and fire his commanders in the interest of the military, our fledging democracy and constitutionalism. We must get out of the mentality of thinking that the only good government for Nigeria is that run by men in uniforms. If anything, the wholesale debilitation of the nation by several years of military rule ought to help us to reach an intelligent conclusion on this.

Malu could not honestly be speaking for the rank and file of the armed forces as it is common knowledge that the military regimes of which he was a key participant neglected the general welfare of the soldiers in preference to cultivating the 'favored boys' mentality and god-fatherism in the service, with no attention paid to equipment supply and maintenance as well as the general

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health of the barracks which the officer cadre had deserted en mass. Things got so bad in the army that many soldiers turned to sundry criminal activities like armed robbery, mercenarily renting their services to any one who could pay them for the day and mayhem while their politicized officers got richer and filthier. Perhaps the one real good thing about the Obasanjo presidency is that he is the one man who could look at our over-pampered army officers in the face right now and call them to order. It is most unlikely that any other politicians, already scared and psychologically broken with the idea of the invincibility of uniformed men, would have had the guts to call the bluffs of these arrogant soldiers.

Shehu Shagari with all the power of the caliphate behind him succumbed to this mentality and paid dearly for it. So, in spite of the general failings of Obasanjo, this peculiar strength of his is enough to safeguard his presidency. Nigeria needs a George Washington, a soldier and a politician who can stabilize the polity vis-à-vis the threats from these unruly soldiers, for some time. That is why the Malus still around should be identified and flushed out of the military as soon as possible.

On the whole, one of the first lessons our soldiers must learn from their US counterparts is the over-riding need for them to endeavor to submit to civil authorities. That is the only way we can hope to put our military men where they properly belong--the barracks. Indiscriminately idolizing them will not help the nation or the military establishment itself. And making unnecessary malu noise over the sack of army generals is only exhibiting the lingering military mentality in us, and the earlier we stop it, the better for the polity. Daily, we witness the illegal and patently unfair dismissal of public officers, including high quality professors and other professionals in Nigeria without reading as much political meanings into them. Why is Malu’s is sack so different? After all, he was removed along with several other service chiefs, no less import than himself. Why are there no protestations on behalf of the others? Casually reading political motives into such a purely administrative process and, in this particular case, a well reasoned step, is unnecessarily complicating the business of governance in the country. Malu is just a public servant and he should be allowed to enjoy his retirement which, no doubt, would be in stupendous affluence. After all, soldier go, soldier come. Abi?

Cambridge, MA02138

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