As Oluyede Comes to Board

Edifying Elucidations BY Okey Ikechukwu

With Senate Clearance yesterday, Lt Gen Oluyede has become the substantive Chief of Army Staff (COAS). He is, by all accounts, a thoroughbred professional soldier with no political flavorings. Confident in a very unobtrusive sort of way, sober, focused, methodical and not given to undue ceremonies and fripperies, the new COAS was once described by a peer of his to my hearing, years back, as someone who does not get involved in anything that is unnecessary. He is completely beholden to his professional calling and ocupies himself with it.

He is now heading an army that is overstretched and taking on what should ordinarily not be its business – such as deradicalization programmes and much more.  The soldiers we see on the road all over the country today have no business being there. The longer they are out there, performing policing duties and without strict professional military drills and supervision, the more “demobilized” they would be; from the standpoint of military discipline, grooming and readiness for combat.

The implication of the foregoing is that the new COAS is walking into an environment that is roundly beset with many asymmetrical security challenges that are partly contrived and partly avoidable. Imagine what the nation would have been like today if we had consistently enjoyed effective and responsible civilian leadership over the decay. The bulk of what our men in uniform are facing today simply won’t be there.

The more we look at some of the security problems facing many states of the federation today, the more we feel constrained to say that they are traceable to the antics of an out-of-touch leadership elite. The notion of leadership elite meant here goes beyond the purely political. It cuts across the political, business, traditional and religious leaders. They all seem to be working together, but apparently without intending it, to create an environment with unprecedented records of grinding poverty and unemployment.

The twin facts of poverty and unemployment have poured unto the national political and sociocultural landscape a massive population of unemployed, underemployed and also “unemployable” people. Many in the latter category are not unemployable by choice, no! They are unemployable either because they hold certificates they cannot defend, are morally so damaged that they cannot be trusted with responsibility or they simply have no skills and must be “retooled’ for them to be useful either to themselves or to the wider society.

Just think of the collapse of the educational system, particularly the dearth of vocational education for those who are not interested in pursuing an academic life and career. One of the questions we may wish to ask here today is this: “Would we be where we are today, in terms of national security challenges, if there had been serious and well thought out National Planning that is guided by strategic National Development Plans?

We have had, and still do have, “Episodic and Regime self-flagellation Plans and Programmes”. With these have come the reprehensible personalization of national resources by those charged with managing the resources on behalf of the people. Ethnic chauvinism and religious bigotry are easily recruited as major drivers of all the wrong things that are fueling insecurity in the country. And it would seem that the right lessons are still not being learnt

We see this every day and everywhere.  We have also had more than enough retreats, and summits, wherein we have wasted much of our time and national resources talking about the causes of insecurity, as if we do not know where it is all coming from. Conveners of the summits, conferences and retreats will always go out of their way to quote various authorities on the subject and then tell us about the effects of insecurity on the economy or the welfare of the people.

Well, we are the people. We know the effects. We cannot safely walk the streets without fear of one misfortune or the other. So, we know. So does the military and sundry security agencies. Yet, the business of talking takes over from the business of problem solving and some people even brag that they have been talking.

That’s why the Sultan of Sokoto said, at one such event about two years ago, that we had had enough of conferences and retreats on national security. Part of what could be inferred from the Sultan’s statement was that the Nigerian public is yet to fully apprise itself of the need for a holistic understanding of national security, as well as the specific roles assigned in principle and in fact to the military, particularly the Nigerian army, and the citizenry.

We can all see that, today, the Nigerian Army is the public scapegoat in all matters of national security, simply because it is the most visible symbol of the state wherever you look. That is why Oluyede needs, and must work with, a comprehensive facts-based overview of all dimensions of the current asymmetrical security challenges facing the Nigerian Army and as an Institution of State.

Banditry and insurgency are not inventions from outer space. Every bandit or insurgent has a local address. Intelligence about such an address can only mostly come from a cooperative civilian population.

That is why holistic perspective on the imperatives of a “whole of society approach to national security” demands of everyone a sense of responsibility towards those professionally charged with protecting the nation and the rest of us. We need informed linkages between political decisions and actions, the reflexes of the various strata of the elite and other less obtrusive stakeholders, in order to really address the security challenges in different parts of the country.

The people must fully appreciate the issues at the core of our national security challenges. This includes a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the key actors, as well as the dysfunctionalities that would inevitably arise whenever there is lack of synergy in the national security activity chain.

Intelligence gathering at community and other levels rests more on the willingness of the communities concerned to cooperate and collaborate, than it does on the military and security professionals deployed to various localities. Some of the challenges with tracing the whereabouts, and hideouts, of bandits and insurgents lies in the fact that this role of intelligence support from various localities is being observed in the breach.

Once this role is observed in the breach, with some communities and community leaders even nurturing, and facilitating, the very security threat the army is trying to deal with, the problems will only fester and get worse. As it stands today, the Nigerian Army is the public face of the war against banditry and insecurity. It has also become the people’s “Whipping Boy” for everything wrong with the safety of lives and property in Nigeria today.

We need to think seriously about some overlooked aspects of the security challenges facing the nation. They include the wrong attitudes of the civil populace towards the military and security agencies, conspiracy with embedded targets in communities, refusal to support security operations with local intelligence, the targeting of military personnel for hostile civilian attention, deliberate misrepresentation of the activities and achievements of the Nigerian Army through fake news, misinformation and disinformation, among others.

The new COAS is coming on board at a time that the nation desperately needs simple and implementable solutions, around the deeper motions of personal, community and environmental security that we have since abandoned. He is also coming on board to sustain the gains made by his predecessor, to ensure that the wrong idea that it is purely the job of the military, and the security agencies, to secure us, is summarily retired.

The civilian populace is not meant to just sit down and do nothing but watch the military “doing their job of securing us”. Communities which do not report the presence of strangers, suspicious characters, or even suspicious activities, to Institutions of State that exist to protect them only further endanger themselves and complicate our national security challenges.  

Undermining the nation’s efforts at improving security comes in the form of Attitudinal, or Orientational Asymmetry. It is a distortion, and disruption, of the right attitude every citizen should adopt in his response to the nation’s security personnel and problems. It is also one of the greatest asymmetrical security challenges facing Nigeria today.

Unless we approach national security issues with a proper sense of history, we might end up mistaking hysteria for substance. The citizen’s duty in the national security ecosystem must be reaffirmed, for everyone to identify with, understand and carry out his role in the national security ecosystem.

The new COAS is familiar with retreats, conferences and summits. He does not need to organize another one now, since these often offer mostly descriptive, and sometimes purely “lamentational”, submissions. Their detailed descriptions of the problems and the generalized recommendations without any clear implementation strategies are all too familiar.

The solutions to our current national security problems do not lie in the declaration of a State of emergency on national security, either. No verbal declaration of a state of emergency can make uncooperative communities to suddenly become cooperative. To urge anyone to declare a state of emergency will not dramatically raise the morale of officers and soldiers who are overstretched. Neither will it remove the fact that the job of our men in uniform is further complicated by the missteps of a civilian ruling elite that has created a massive pool of impoverished, unemployed, underemployed and unemployable youths with the wrong social skills.

The ongoing civil/military relations efforts should be ramped up, because the military needs the independent perspectives that would arise from such engagement. Ditto for the new programs for middle level officers and soldiers. It will all help improve the quality of soldiering, as well as public understanding of the roles, and achievements, of the Nigerian Army in the ongoing efforts to protect and secure the Nigerian State.

For this to happen, we need an overarching perspective that is focused on a “whole of society approach”. This is a critical success factor that we should focus on and press for, as Lt Gen Oluyede comes on board.