THE KEELING OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF: COS-19 OR COVID-19? PART 1

BY SAM ELEANYA

Autopsy is an ancient part of medical sciences. It is an African gift to the world as it has its roots in ancient Egypt in the World’s oldest university in Alexandria with the Pharaohs as autopsy’s first patrons. Overtime, autopsy, has on merit, secured for itself a standing in the halls of Science as the final arbiter of the cause of death of any mortal on earth. Autopsy’s categories of ruling on cause of death are generally deemed closed and restricted to just five: natural cause, accident, homicide, suicide, or undetermined.

But all that was before COVID-19, with its oriental hubris, arrived from Wuhan of China. Since it made its Pandemic debut, experts and quacks alike, in slight of the inured rights of Autopsy, seem happy to presumptuously sign off any human death as a COVID-19 slaying, once it can, with hastily approved tests, insinuate itself, in just about any degree, as complicit, in the demise of any person.

Yet, in the season of strident injunctions to ‘follow the science’ so as to flatten the curve and thus the twerking death-jig of COVID-19, it is vital that we do not neglect medical autopsy while echoing the virus’ self-peddled claims of ascension to the pre-eminent rung of death  makers. This is particularly so when the viral fiend seeks to boost its overbloated menace with the entombing of the Chief of Staff, COS, to the President of Africa’s most populous and ‘largest economy’: Nigeria.

Abba Kyari, died on 17^th April, 2020, one month away from his first year anniversary as COS-19 to the Muhammadu Buhari presidency having successfully served alive in a similar capacity as COS-15-19. Abba was buried almost immediately without an autopsy and according to hybrid rites: Islamic practices haphazardly meshed with COVID-19 dictated protocols that were half-heartedly implemented by the unhappy mourners who braved more than their fair share of odds to turn out for his hurried funeral.

Abba deserved better. And so his friend to make up for it all have become infatuated, from their lockdown desks, with the sheep-ish penning of cow-ardly eulogies. But one thing rankles. This: that none of the friends, for Abba’s sake, has pledged to join the frontline in the hands-on battles for the takedown of COVID-19. None, so far, shows the ‘liver’ to assert the plausible alternative narrative: that Abba gave up his own ghost having proved too resilient for a long line of orthodox causes of death in Autopsy’s approved lot as to defy with his famed reticence the loquacious orchestrations of COVID-19. Instead, Abba’s friends, in consideration of their own lives, play safe, – even with cheap words – of any narrative that may excite a quarrel between them and COVID-19.

In his long spell as COS-15 and short stint as COS-19, Abba’s friends were apparently happy to be his anonymous heartthrobs whose proof of love was obedience to his so-called charge never to take his back, or to defend him or take the sword to those who have swords out for him and to generally withhold open identification or affection towards him if the public or his enemies were around to take note. They left Abba, in a peculiar even if powerful lonesomeness: so lonely and exposed in the midst of tey-tey and newbie friends – that it was easy for COVID-19 to claim, unchallenged, that it struck Abba fatally from the back while he frontally worked to light up the nation for all of us, from abroad.

Enough! What if, there is a great reason for those of us bereft of Abba-esque friendship virtues, to stand up and demand the vetting of COVID-19 claims over Abba’s death? Perhaps, just out of obedience to the Golden Rule? What if we were afforded by hindsight the lesson: that the entire weight of history is on the side of those who would for the first time take the back or side of a deceased Nigerian Chief of Staff?

For, indeed, Abba Kyari’s death, follows a tragic historical pattern. Of death of key players, the serial truncation of entire administrations due to the manifest presence of an uneven keeled presidency in successive Nigerian governments –civilian and military – that makes the lonely exertions of successive Chiefs of staff little more than a tangling with premature death: physically or professionally.

A close scrutiny of Nigeria’s history in the deployment of presidential powers showcases these categories of Chiefs-of-Staff: (1) I no fit kill myself for oga; (2) Nobody go die: na work me and oga come do; (3) Over my dead body;  and (4) I go take am as I see am. While Nigeria’s successive Chiefs of Staff rarely come to the job waving the membership tag of those categories, a rigorous review of each of their tenures reveals,( regardless of the complicated pull of other factors impaling them sometimes in directions they may not have intended to travel) that how each of them eventually ended had a lot to do with – not so much with the competencies, preparedness and character they possessed , but their subjective view of what their job as Chief of Staff in that moment in history was. And the intriguing story of Nigeria’s First Republic and the pioneer Chief of Staff it threw up – Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe – has a lot to do with it

Nigeria’s apprenticeship as a modern sovereign nation was conducted under Britain and its parliamentary system. As colonial overlord, the Nigerian political space had limited learning exposure specific to the office of the Chief of Staff in the deployment of national executive powers vested n the Head of State, perhaps because the Head of State was the Queen in far away London who ruled through a proxy styled as the Governor-General.

According to Eric Teniola, a former longstanding Director at the Presidency of Nigeria’s federal government, upon independence, whatever measure of executive powers that were recognized and engaged for deployment by the political leadership were effected through the office of “the Secretary to the Government of the Federation as well as the Principal Secretary to the Head of State”, with the latter occupying a central space, even if of a narrower scope, that is now connected with the office of the Chief of Staff.

The first person to hold the Office of Principal Secretary in post-independence Nigeria was Sir Peter Hyla Gowne Stallard (1915-1995), a British national under the employment of her Majesty the Queen who was appointed to the office by Nigeria’s first and only indigenous Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa (1912-1966) after Stallard’s service as the administrative Secretary of the London Constitution Conference for Nigeria. Stallard would stay on as Principal Secretary until he was redeployed by his country as Lieutenant Governor of Honduras in 1961. His successor was Mr. Stanley Olabode Wey, a Nigerian from Lagos who would hold the office from 1^st September, 1961 till 16^th January, 1966.

The operational headache started with Olabode Wey but had very little to do with anything he did not do. His predecessor, Stallard was fortunate in the sense that he operated in a transition period. For, even though Nigeria was legally an independent sovereign, very little changed in the actual deployment of executive powers under the emergent 1960 Constitution when compared to the colonial period. The Queen of Britain remained Nigeria’s Head of State wielding sovereign clout over the nation’s foreign affairs. The apex judicial powers of Nigeria remained vested in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council established by the same Queen instead of a Nigerian court. Above all, the Parliamentary System that was practiced under the 1960 Constitution echoed in the main, forms and traditions of the Parliament at Westminster. 

Those governance dynamics, in the everyday deployment level, would change jarringly in 1963 as Nigeria adopted a new constitutional instrument in place of the 1960 Constitution. Among others, the new instrument ‘recovered’ Nigeria’s final appellate powers from the Privy Council vesting same in the Supreme Court. Even more drastic were the changes as to the deployment of Nigeria’s executive powers: changes which seems to have been missed by a large segment of the country then and continues to be misapprehended even today. For instead of a Westminster-type Parliament where executive powers is vested in the Prime Minister, the 1963 Constitution explicitly conferred Nigeria’s federal executive powers on the President and made the Cabinet appointed by him, with the advice of the Prime Minister, wholly subject to the President. According to the unambiguous text of section 84(1) of the 1963 Constitution, “The Executive authority of the Federation shall be vested in the President and, subject to the provisions of this Constitution, may be exercised by him directly or through officers subordinate to him. Specifically, section 85 provides that “the executive authority of the Federation shall extend to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution and to all matters with respect to which Parliament has for the time being powers to make laws.“

Under sections 87 and 88, the President was again given the power and procedure for the appointment of the Prime Minister (from the House of Representatives), other Ministers and the Attorney-General (from among members of the Cabinet).

Thus contrary to what continues to be peddled as the dominant narrative in legal and history texts that Nnamdi Azikiwe had no more than ceremonial roles under the First Republic, the truth properly is that he had ceremonial roles between 1960 and 1963 as Governor-General (a resident proxy of the Queen in her capacity as Head of State) but that Azikiwe became constitutionally transfigured, without an election, and vested with full executive powers at the start of the First Republic pursuant to the 1963 Constitution, up and until the military struck in 1966. Perhaps, the inability of political operators of his era to appreciate the implications of the 1963 Constitution was the real problem.

The undeniable fact is that there was a sea-change in executive governance that put the President, not the Prime Minister, wholly in control, a constitutional contrivance perhaps actively orchestrated by the US trained Azikiwe who clearly was unhappy with his largely ceremonial functions under the 1960 Constitution. Perhaps, to make doubly sure he landed his dream job after its Constitutional engineering, Azikiwe somehow secured the extraordinary step of having himself specifically named as occupier of the emergent office by Constitutional fiat to wit, section 157(1) of the 1963 Constitution: “Nnamdi Azikiwe shall be deemed [to be] elected President of the Republic on the date of the commencement of this Constitution.” 

Consequently, between the emergent President and the incumbent Prime Minister, there appeared a massive sphere of executive powers, substantive and ceremonial, requiring proper re-articulation for their effective deployment between their two disparate offices. A graduate student-teacher instructor and a PhD candidate in the United States when he returned to Nigeria, it is not impossible that Azikiwe heard something significantly different in his new title of ‘President’ from what the conservative Tafawa, an educator trained in Nigeria and Britain heard from his longstanding position as Prime Minister (1960-1963) which perhaps tended towards the continuing regarding of Azikiwe’s role under the 1963 Constitution as little more than ceremonial. Having some trusted functionary between them committed to ensuring that both men at that sensitive point in time were constructively but firmly enabled to robustly appreciate and then deploy the enormous powers reclaimed and availed them by the new Constitution through their disparate offices, as purposively as possible, while maintaining fidelity to the legal contours and collaborations envisaged in a constitutional republic was vital.     

At that moment in history, what Nigeria needed was a Chief of Staff, by whatever title called, able to appreciate the historicity of the moment when Nigeria began its transition to a full presidential system as a unique Republic governed by a Constitution, a President, a Prime Minister, a Parliament (made up of a Senate and House of Representatives) and a Judiciary. A capable hand embedded somewhere close to the President and yet interphasing directly with the Prime Minister would have found the demands of the moment herculean, but would still have made a sizable difference.

But, historical records say nothing remotely close to that on a formal level happened. All that came to the knowledge of this writer was the perpetuation of the same old Office of the Principal Secretary still wielded by the same person appointed by the Prime Minister in 1961: Mr. Wey!  And, he was not tasked to run in any way different or upgraded in respect of the big changes introduced by the 1963 Constitution. As Wey would testify years later, that reality rendered his job ‘too tasking’, often ‘frustrating’ and untenable under the emergent order.

That lack of fluency in the everyday exercise of the nation’s executive powers would progressively engender a toxic governance space that led inexorably to the unraveling of the First republic, just three years after its inauguration, through a military led coup d’etat. The President lost his job and his dream powers – and never got any of them back again. The prime Minister lost everything, including his life, tragically. And Principal Secretary Wey, perhaps in relief, rode into the sun in retirement. Alone but alive. 

The Military adventurists, on the surface, acted as if they learnt some lessons from the collapsed civilian misadventure. The office of the Principal Secretary was retained with vastly reduced operational sphere approximating to its original intent before 1963. Instead of a contested realm, executive powers was under the military wholly vested in the Head of State. In place of Parliament, a Supreme Military Council was devised led by the Head of State with membership spanning heads of arms of the Nigerian Armed Forces, designated military cabinet members and State Governors. And to ensure, at least on paper, operational fluency which had proved the undoing of the First Republic, a Supreme Military Headquarters was established as a clearing house with a Chief of Staff’ as its formal gatekeeper.

While many today prefer the simplistic narrative that an occupant of the office of COS under successive military government was wholly different from those of its civilian counterpart on the ground that a military COS was automatically deemed de facto ‘2^nd in command’ after the Head of State at the very least, a careful perusal of historical facts in actual military administrations suggest that not to be the case for these main reasons. First, only one former Chief of Staff of the Supreme Headquarters or its equivalents (Olusegun Obasanjo) ever ascended to the office of Head of State out of the seven military administrations that ruled over Nigeria. Second, the hierarchical governance structure of military administrations respected seniority of ranks with the implication that a COS would need to outrank every other members of the SMC at any time there was a succession vacuum to be so deemed, and that was rarely ever the case.

Third, even where a COS had a pre-eminent rank over other members of the SMC, it didn’t necessarily conduce to significant leverage politically, especially during times of succession, as the office of COS was largely an administrative position that seemed deliberately designed to render successive wielders bereft of capacity to mobilize sizable military firepower without the seal of the Commander-in-Chief in their own right. Indeed, the real clout at such periods belonged to commanders of strategic military formations. Fifth, no Nigerian military administration ever contemplated handing over powers to another military regime as each sought legitimacy at home and abroad by pitching plans to return the country to civilian rule as quickly as possible. Fifth, all things being equal, the effectiveness and clout of a COS in military regimes mirror their civilian counterparts closely by being dependent, largely, on the ideals and eccentricities of governance embraced by the principal they serve. That is, if the Head of State preferred a coordinated policy making and implementing mode of governance running through the official clearing house of the Chief of Staff, the latter’s stock rose but where the Head of State preferred a staggered mode or the use of different power-hubs reporting directly to him for the performance of his office, the clout of the chief of Staff levelled off accordingly. Finally, it is telling that out of the four Chiefs of Staff appointed since the return to democracy in 1999 (beside the constitutionally guaranteed office of the Vice President), 50% of them, covering 10 of its twenty years span, so far, have been retired generals.   

Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, the pioneer COS of independent Nigeria is, in that sense, a colourful case in point. Long pressed into service as Military Attaché to the Nigerian High Commission in the United Kingdom, he was recalled home upon the emergence of the Aguiyi Ironsi regime to serve as Chief of Staff of the Supreme Military Council, SMC, in hope that his diplomatic experience, senior rank, Yoruba ethnicity and non-participation, directly, in the bloody events that ousted the 1^st Republic would make him a neutral but effective canvasser for the Head of Staff towards the pacification of northern elements that remained set on mutiny against the emergent regime.  Abdul Kareem Disu (1912-2000) from Isale Eko, Lagos was also appointed Principal Secretary to continue with the narrower functions approximating to its colonial heydays. On paper, things looked great but the administration, for many reasons, would keel over in death long before its first anniversary.

Some historians contend that Aguiyi Ironsi, apart from the bloody foundation his administration arose from, further helped to accelerate his own demise, personally and as an administration through the progressive alienation of his supposed gate-keeper by often detailing, directly, trusted aides or loyalists to undertake key functions which properly should have been deployed and or coordinated under the office of his COS. That, it is contended created many blindspots for the COS and Head of State thus, making it easier for the administration and its Head of State to be fatally upstaged in a second bloody coup that would throw up a junion officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon as the new Head of State.

There is another way to make the same argument with the buck still stopping at Aguiyi Ironsi’s desk still. That is, Babafemi Ogundipe was a bad fit for the office of COS for the Ironsi presidency from the get-go and thus a poor choice that did not answer to the most important issue of the moment: how can the beleaguered administration achieve an even-keel? For while Ironsi’s government needed a hardnosed COS able to play the peace-maker by insinuating himself into the simmering angst and discontent among the rank and file of northern soldiers as to defuse as much of it as possible while at the same effecting reconciliatory reach-outs to leaders of the region, they got a Babafemi who proved to be little more than a diplomatic peace lover who did his best to avoid and even hide from open controversies and confrontations.

Instructively, when the mutiny finally bubbled over and the Commander–in-Chief went missing in the ensuing coup, in Ibadan, Babafemi is on record to have done two main but ineffectual things. One, he waited in Lagos for the Head of State who had become incommunicado after traveling to Ibadan to re-appear or call him and when that did not happen, Babafemi mobilized an escort of soldiers to go and wait for the same Head of State at the airport just in case he reappears! Tragically, the poor soldiers were waylaid and massacred by the mutineers on their way to the airport. Two: Babafemi on hearing of the massacre went back to the remaining troop in State House to mobilize yet another number to make the same trip to the airport through ‘another’ route (as if that mattered) to ‘wait’ for a head of State who had already been assassinated, Not once did he volunteer to go with them or try to mobilize senior officers with serious strategic military assets to aid in the search and rescue of the Head of State . Fortunately, a ‘Private’ found the voice to publicly astound Ogundipe with “We won’t go”, a response interpreted by Brigadier Babafemi as evidence that the whole troop had joined the mutiny.  And so he found the ‘calm’ to ask the junior soldiers to await further ‘instructions’ after his ‘consultations’, neither of which would happen as his next move was the self-preservationist step to quickly go inside, disguise himself, scale the fence of the Presidential villa and run into hiding in the guest room of a friend in Surulere, Lagos.

Babfemi would remain in hiding in the guest room of his friend for about three days while the mutineers and the entire nation waited for his move or voice as the Chief of Staff and most senior surviving member of the Supreme Military Council. But, instead of a power move, Babafemi continued the self-preservation one by privately extracting an agreement from the mutineers to be allowed to sail away, with his family, to the island with the best climate in the whole world, Las Palmas,  in the northeastern part of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, 150km off the Moroccan coast of the Atlantic ocean – for a two weeks holiday. As part of the agreement he would return to his former base in London first as Nigeria’s Representative to the 1966 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London and thereafter, a four year stint as Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom that ended in August 1970. He died about a year later on November 20, 1971.

Viewed from different angles – except as a Chief of a Staff, it is easy to ridicule Babafemi and even more his seeming belief that he deserved a two weeks holiday in an exotic site (after all, danger is real and its trauma true for both those who confront it and those who run from it). Indeed, it is convenient to misrepresent his abilities as a soldier based on his seemingly flight-flight instincts during his last days as COS except that it is worth remembering that he was a World War II combatant in Burma, India fighting with the famous Royal West African Frontier Forces between 1942 and 1945. So, perhaps, his problem was not as Ibrahim Kashim, one-time Governor of the Northern Region was reputed to have quipped to the then Chief Justice Adetokunbo Ademola (when the latter asked for Kashim’s endorsement to install the hiding Ogundipe in ‘acting’ capacity until things became ‘clearer’). Kashim is on record to have shot down the suggestion by putting it to the Chief Justice that “If Ogundipe had the nerves of a soldier, he should have assumed authority immediately” the power vacuum emerged . To which the suave Chief Justice replied, just to reclaim some of his personal dignity as the nation’s custodian of supreme judicial thinking: “Well, I don’t think it is too late for him to put things right”.

Perhaps, what both the Chief Justice and the Governor, like the rest of us miss is that Ogundipe may belong to the clan of Nigerian soldiers who never truly reconciled themselves to the idea of military intervention in political governance and frankly could not wait to get out – to return to familiar duties even if as diplomat, playing High Commissioner – if they can afford it without being court-martialed. While it may have been the job clearly on offer which he was commandeered to do, it seems he did not have the stomach to play night-soil man for Ironsi so as to clean up the bloody mess and the sectoral bitterness that the coup which threw up the regime engendered across the military and in political circles. Ogundipe, in that sense laid the foundation for the office of the Chief of Staff in Nigeria on the footing of a reluctant COS, one that fit rather smugly into the category of  “I no fit kill myself for oga.”

That foundation would define how successive Chiefs of Staff of Nigeria’s presidency would fare trying to distance themselves from his example or to redeem its virtues as they understand it – with varying degrees of success.

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[Sam Eleanya, founder/Editor of lawnigeria.com, is Principal Strategist at Tree & Trees JusticeMedia, Lagos, Nigeria]