Early Sunday morning, I went looking for trouble. In APC’s internal political family affairs.

Like Portable, the controversial musician would shout, “wahala, wahala, wahala”. But I was beyond caring. The feud between these two APC staunch supporters on the Facebook page of one of them was too interesting and amusing for me to ignore and not poke my nose into, not minding what could be the backlash.

These two gentlemen, one of them a former Senior Special Assistant, (I think), on agriculture, in the office of the former Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osibanjo, and the other, a veteran journalist who has worked for various national news publications, including The Nation newspaper, and who was all over the place, promoting and defending the candidacy and personality of President Tinubu during the election campaigns leading to the last general elections, were virtually at each other’s throats, tearing down the policies of their two principals, former APC President, Mùhámádù Buhari, and present APC President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

I was amused to no end. So, I jumped into the fray, hoping to calm these two APC family members’ frayed nerves.

Me: “D.B. and O.O.” (their initials), “See me here, sitting back and eating my popcorn, enjoying this your movie: ‘Buhari APC Supporters Club vs Tinubu APC Supporters Club – Two Sides of The Same Coin.’ This is quite hilarious – APC government in power versus APC opposition in power, a.k.a ‘Change’ versus ‘Renewed Hope'”

I continued, “Are we still going to get the APC ‘Change’ you guys promised us in 2015, and can we bank on the APC ‘Renewed Hope’ you assured us of three months ago? Or, should we simply continue praying for ‘Another’?”

O.O., obviously amused by the uninvited intrusion into their family matters, replied, “Ayo Lijadu, you can clearly see sir, that the differences may be because of differences in the names of the two APC Presidents and the different ways they choose to do things”.

What? Really?!!

I fired back . “O.O., whether APC northern President o, or APC southern President o, omi èkọ́, èkọ́ ní, (àkàmú water, remains àkàmú). We have experienced APC calamitous governance under Buhari for eight agonizing years. Tinubu’s barely three months’ old reign in the saddle has been no less agonizing, and, as they say, ‘morning shows the day’.

“If you have the ears of Mr. President, or the ears of those who have the ears of the ones who have his ears, we plead that you tell your principal, (Nigeria’s C-in-C), not to drag us into a senseless war that may be the inglorious crowning point of his three months old calamitous government, under which a hapless people are already groaning.

“This kind of war he wants to champion ( ECOWAS versus Niger Republic), is unlike the one he allegedly single-handedly led, (like you his doting admirers always bragged), as a NADECO war General, and routed out that rascal Sanni Abacha from power, thereby making him the ‘undisputed national hero of Nigeria’s modern day democracy’, lol. Just like you guys also love to tout him as the ‘Chief Architect and Founder of modern day Lagos’. 😅 🤣 😅

“Tinubu versus Abacha will not be the same thing as Tinubu versus Niger Republic o. Please shout it very hard into his ears o, per adventure he has also inherited his predecessor’s ear problems”

I am not in the habit of interfering in other people’s family affairs but our President’s seemingly hungry disposition to embark on a war of misadventure, (along with his fellow clueless brother ECOWAS Heads of State), against our fellow brothers in Niger Republic, can no longer be considered a solely APC family affair.

This obviously very dumb ass decision to plunge the West African sub-region into another theatre of war, instigated and egged on by the Western powers who are standing by to sell us their firearms, (for us to kill ourselves), while they plunder our mineral resources, should be seen exactly for what it is: an absolutely dumb ass decision.

Every right-thinking and level-headed Nigerian adult should speak up, and loudly too, against the quest of our shallow-thinking leaders to murder their citizens in a war that is a consequence of the internal issues of another country that do not threaten our own national interests in any way.

After putting in place obnoxious economic policies that are steadily strangulating their citizens, impoverishing the populace, and driving people to their untimely death through extreme hunger and suicides, is it their plan to quicken the elimination process by plunging us into a senseless war?

This is no longer a solely APC’s family affair but one that concerns us all. Let everyone, therefore, raise their voices and continue to shout to the highest heavens so that even the one who has ear problems can hear:

WE DON’T WANT WAR!!!

Ayo Lijadu is a veteran actor, former Presidential aspirant, and later Senatorial candidate of Kowa Party for Lagos East senatorial district in the 2019 General Elections. He features regularly in the daily TV soap, Tinsel, and writes from Lagos.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Democracy is a very evocative notion. In the name of restoring or defending it, presidents have wielded bayonets, levied war, and executed coups. On 10 August, 2023 a summit of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) rose from its convening in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital, with an explicit order for “the deployment of the ECOWAS Standby Force to restore constitutional order in the Republic of Niger.”

The following day, the headline was “West African nations order troops to restore democracy in Niger after military coup.” But, if the idea of “ordering troops” to “restore democracy” sounds like an oxymoron, it’s because it actually is.

In the aftermath of the chaos left after armed interventions led by the United States of America in Iraq in 2003 and by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Libya in 2011, however, the idea of bayonets for democracy has lost currency. A military invasion, in any case, requires more than the orders of presidents. Military planners have to design a concept of operations (CONOPS) and, these days, military lawyers too have to weigh in. The former is not-negotiable but lack of the latter has never stopped politicians from going ahead.

Thwarted by France and Russia in its desire for a UN security Council authorization of use of force against Iraq in March 2003, the USA decided to proceed nevertheless with its own coalition of the willing. Having talked up its causus belli as Saddam Hussein’s ultimately non-existent weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush had to find another reason for his regime change project in Iraq.

Addressing his country and the world at the beginning of the invasion on 19 March, 2003, President Bush claimed that his mission was to “disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger” so as “to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.” In other words, he was a warrior for democracy (in Iraq).

President Bush was not the first US leader to order or tolerate military action against another territory nor was he a pioneer in the business of doing that in the name of democracy. 110 years before the invasion of Iraq, during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, armed activity by US military assets toppled Queen Liluokalani of Hawaii in 1893, ultimately leading to its annexation.

When in December 1909, President Howard Taft’s administration masterminded the overthrow of Nicaragua’s José Manuel Zelaya, it was because, as stated by then Secretary of State, Philander Knox, “under the regime of President Zelaya, republican institutions have ceased in Nicaragua except in name.” The excuse was the defence of democracy.

20 years before President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, President Ronald Reagan had also invaded Grenada, a small island on the eastern Caribbean, in the name of democracy. In March 1979, the Marxist, New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard had overthrown Grenada’s first prime minister, Eric Gairy, in a populist coup that initially promised “all democratic freedoms, including freedom of elections, religion, and political opinion.” Instead, on taking power, Prime Minister Bishop retrenched the constitution and parliament, preferring instead to rule by populist decrees.

In October 1983, a long-running rivalry between Maurice Bishop and his deputy, Bernard Coard, over ideological purity of the New Jewel Movement ended with the army commander, General Hudson Austin, throwing his weight behind Coard. Bishop was placed under house arrest and, following an effort by his supporters to free him, a confrontation ensued in which he and his leading supporters were massacred on 16 October 1983, leaving the Movement in the control of Marxist purists whom the United States could not tolerate.

Citing a dubious “invitation” by some states of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, the USA launched an invasion of the Island on 25 October 1983. The goal, as captured in the back-dated letter of invitation by Sir Paul Scoon, whom they installed as Prime Minister after the invasion, was “to facilitate a rapid return to peace and tranquility and a return to democratic rule.”

In response, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution which “deeply deplored the armed intervention in Grenada”, describing it as “a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that state.” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York boiled down the case against the invasion of Grenada in a one sentence declamation: “I don’t know that you restore democracy at the point of a bayonet.”

This did not prevent President Bush’s father, the first President HW Bush, from overthrowing former US client, Manuel Noriega, in Panama, in 1989. Noriega had emerged as the effective leader of Panama and its army chief after the killing in a suspicious helicopter crash of General Omar Torrijos at the end of July 1981, followed by the systematic, often macabre elimination of his most significant opponents. By 1989, Noriega had become so dominant that he single-handedly procured the nullification of the victory in the presidential election of Guillermo Endara, an act described by the USA then as “cowardly”. On 20 December 1989, the USA launched military action to topple Noriega. Two weeks later, on 3 January, 1990, Noriega landed in Metropolitan Correction Centre, Miami. He was a criminal indictee.

A lot has evolved since then. In May 1990, ECOWAS adopted a proposal by Nigeria to establish and deploy a military intervention in Liberia, known as the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). In the eyes of many, the intervention was a thinly disguised effort to save the regime of Samuel Doe in Liberia. Doe, a Master Sergeant, had seized power in Africa’s oldest republic, Liberia, in April 1980, after killing then incumbent, President William Tolbert, before transforming himself into a civilianized soldier in pre-determined elections in 1986. His brutal and erratic rulership ultimately precipitated a murderous civil war in Liberia, which quickly threatened its neighbours with contagion.

For justification, the deployment of ECOMOG in Liberia was grounded in an invitation from Mr. Doe’s government supposedly issued under the terms of the Protocol Relating to Mutual Assistance in Defence, an agreement adopted by ECOWAS member States in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1981. The UN would later buy into the model of ECOMOG and of regional action in support of peace and security.

In January 2017, ECOWAS with support from the African Union and reinforced by the United Nations Security Council deployed to enforce the outcome of the election in The Gambia in which defeated incumbent, Yahya Jammeh, having initially conceded defeat, changed his mind and refused to vacate office. The victorious new president, Adama Barrow, reinforced the legal authority of the deployment with an invitation of his own.

In Niger, notably, ECOWAS and the AU are at odds.

The use of force in defence of the idea of a sovereign republic or of democracy is so high-minded that, quite often, presidents lack the patience to finesse its legality. In November 1903, military sleight of hand by President Theodore Roosevelt achieved the secession of Panama from Colombia. In Cabinet subsequently, President Roosevelt asked his Attorney-General, the appropriately-named Philander Knox, to provide the legalese in support of the operation, to which Mr. Knox is reported to have infamously responded: “Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

The leaders of ECOWAS could desperately do with their own Philander Knox as they contemplate their options in Niger Republic. If they can find one, they may not have to worry about soiling their bayonets for democracy with any taint of legality. But they will still need a workable CONOPS. That may be the practical problem that compels ECOWAS ultimately to give diplomacy a chance in Niger.

There is precedent for this. One week after Col. Pierre Buyoya’s (second) coup against the elected government of President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya on 25 July 1996, seven neighbouring countries initiated a complete blockade of land-locked Burundi at the beginning of August. By common consent, the sanctions “ultimately played a major role in pressuring the Buyoya government into the Arusha negotiations due to their severe cost,” which forced Buyoya in 2003 to cede power to a new president, Domitien Ndayizeye.

A lawyer & a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]