By Adagbo Onoja
The mention of a military coup anywhere, anytime can be unsettling. It is more so in Nigeria where the military intervention in politics has been a prolonged experience. Understandably, the authorities in Nigeria sniffed a different turn once protesters confronted some military officers with an invitation to intervene.
Surely, the scene cannot be ignored because the linguistic practice can produce a material outcome. Still, what if the authorities ignored it? It would have been better that way because the president and the Chief of Defence Staff ended up amplifying the request by interpreting it as treason.
Presidential communication can easily become presidential miscommunication
What could have passed as volatile pronouncements by angry urchins, some of whom may not even know what to do with a Dane gone, got presidential stamp through its unintended amplification. There was absolutely nothing to fear in those statements except if the authorities has more details about the makers.
Words are dangerous because they set the boundaries for action. They produce subject positions. But they do that only on one condition: when they have been politically pushed to a collective frame of reference in the audience which, in this case, is the entire military establishment and the Nigerian polity. It is hard to see anyone with an intention to stage a coup deriving his inspiration from some protesters lacking discretion to the point of openly asking uniformed personnel to stage a coup. And all these happening in broad day light. Haba!
If every such words could produce outcomes, then paupers would be transforming into billionaires every now and then and revolutionaries will have more success stories than the very limited stories they have had to tell since the Great October Socialist revolution in the USSR.
In a fluid situation such as the past one week, it is interpretations and re-interpretations that assign meanings more than what a particular speaker actually said. In that case, the less some people talk, the better, particularly if they are the people on top. It bears repeating that any presidential outing requires elaborate simulations because a presidential pronouncement could make the difference between life and death for those who have no hands or legs in a matter nor the voice to be heard.
Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, all presidential candidates in 2023
The very entertaining scene of protesters asking uniformed personnel to stage a coup is the reason the government was advised to undercut the protest through a dialogic process. But the friend – enemy prism and abject lack of mastery of biopolitical processes in this government in particular prevented them from doing so. Instead, they went far in using the threat of protest to try to rope in and overwhelm some individuals considered to be a pain on their neck. Except those such as Peter Obi who was dignifying that misdirected governmentese (Atiku Abubakar didn’t even give them any reckoning), it was a flop.
And then followed the disaster for the president. Disaster because the totality of his investments in politics came to naught when the protest movement awarded him the master signifier for bad governance through the hashtag #Endbadgovernance. It is not a badge of honour but a failure mark. The consensus the hashtag enjoys as to serve as directive principle for the nationwide protest implies that the master signifier awarded the president matters.
That is why it is said that the time one is in power is not the right time to go for a test of strength because someone with nothing to lose can throw in a metaphor and do so much damage. All these practices of threatening fire and brimstone or trying to borrow logics of power from Machiavelli cannot help a 21st century president even in a non-industrial polity such as Nigeria. A president has better and cheaper chances of a successful tenure if he has a better grasp of hegemony because hegemony and democracy are together in so far hegemony is always about consensus. That is the lessen of this epoch.
In case anyone pretends not to know what this point is about, lets try to illustrate, without posing the Chief of Army Staff against his superiors. According to the reports, a soldier went against the ‘rules of engagement’ in Zaria and killed a young chap who was not even protesting. Still according to reports, the soldier has been arrested and the Chief of Army Staff has reached out to the family. That is hegemony because, in doing all these, he has substantially melted the anger and frustration in the family by sending the message that something wrong had been done and the culprit is not protected for his action by the institution he belongs to. It makes the COAS more powerful than he would ordinarily have been because he has acquired more legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the country than otherwise. Very, very simple things that matter.
