THE SANI ABACHA LESSON AND WHY THE BIBLE JUSTIFIES MILITARY COUP AGAINST FRAUDULENT GOVERNMENTS UNDER THE DOCTRINE OF VINDICIAE, CONTRA TYRANNOS
Nwankwo T. Nwaezeigwe, PhD, DD
Odogwu of Ibusa & Leader, International Coalition against Christian Genocide in Nigeria
Email: [email protected] Website: https://icac-gen.org Date: November 20, 2023
***International Coalition against Christian Genocide in Nigeria is a US registered 501c Non-Profit entity. We Say No to Islamization through Muslim President and Muslim Vice President. Support our work. Donate via our website donate link***.
In his reaction to the judgment of Plateau State Governorship Electoral Appeal Tribunal that removed incumbent PDP Governor, Mutfwang Manasseh on November 19, 2023, Yusuf Adamu Gagdi, a member of Federal House of Representatives representing Pankshin/Kanam/Kanke Federal Constituency boasted:
“We know they Know. We have gone to Appeal Court and the final destination is the Supreme Court. We must meet there. That is where we will know whom they know. They will know whom we know.”
Of course Nigerians are fully aware of the presence of such corrupt judges as Justice John Inyang Okoro and his cohorts who sell justice for a morsel of bread. The simple question however is how long will this impunity persist in Nigeria? A situation where fraudulent Nigeria Police class represented by the like Nuhu Ribadu, a morally bankrupt judiciary and clay-footed armed forces collude with a putrid class of rogue politicians to subvert the Nigerian constitution against the will of the majority cannot stand for long. No sooner than later the episodes in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon will be replayed on the Nigerian political scene.
Exactly 30 years ago, precisely Thursday November 18, 1993, to the people of the then Apartheid South Africa, it was the day of their glorious entry into the realm of democratic governance. It was the day Black South African nationalists and their White Apartheid oppressors approved a new democratic constitution and subsequently saw Nelson Mandela being enthroned as the first Black President of the Republic of South Africa.
For Nigeria however, it was the same day that the dark clouds of iron-fisted tyranny set in. On that fateful day General Sani Abacha overthrew Chief Ernest Shonekan’s Interim National Government in what was no doubt a pre-meditated palace coup. His words were as mechanical as they were authoritative:
“The Interim National government is hereby dissolved. The National and State Assemblies are also dissolved. The State Executive Councils are also dissolved. The Brigade Commanders are to take over from the Governors until Administrators are appointed. All Local Government Councils stand dissolved. The Directors of Personnel are to take over the administration of the Local Governments until Administrators are appointed. The National Electoral Commission is hereby dissolved. The two political parties are hereby dissolved. All processions, political meetings and associations of any type in any part of the country are hereby banned. Any consultative committee by whatever name called is hereby proscribed.”
General Abacha’s words presents two outstanding lessons to current Nigerian politicians. First is lack of a sense of history. The current Nigerian political ruling class, including the judiciary have by the last General elections, including the just concluded Governorship elections in Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa States demonstrated that they are not subject to the lessons of history, but like the deaf housefly that escorts the corpse into the grave, all their sensory mechanisms for moral judgments have deviously been obscured by the cacophony of fraudulent self-preservation confidence. As the Bible rightly put, “and God hardened the heart of Pharaoh”, in anticipation of the day of the great judgment inside the depth of the Red Sea.
The second lesson on the other hand is the rekindling of the spirit of resistance against oppressive Governments which greeted General Abacha’s seizure of power and the attempt to perpetuate himself in power. The irony of this coming resistance is that those who professed to have resisted General Sani Abacha are the same people the masses are going to resist this time. And this raises the fundamental question whether it is spiritually legitimate for Nigerian Christians to raise the standard of revolt against the current fraudulent Government of a fantastically corrupt Muslim President and a terrorist sponsor Muslim Vice President?
In its 2023 report titled: “SOLDIERS AND CITIZENS: Military Coups and the Need for Democratic Renewal in Africa”, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) identified two types of coups. The first type represents the formal unconstitutional seizure of power by the armed forces. On the other hand, the second type is what the report refers to as “constitutional coups” which involves political leaders revising and abusing their constitutions for the purpose of fraudulently winning elections and changing their term limits.
The report goes further to surmise that any act that undermines or abuses the constitution of a country, entrenches bad governance, and creates conditions that undermine human rights and civic freedom is not only a coup by definition but creates the enabling environment for future military coups. There is questioning the fact that the last 2023 Presidential election in Nigeria was a constitutional coup d’etat by the second definition and thus deserves to be treated as an illegality.
Under the present precipitous political situation and going by the foregoing UNDP definitions of coup situations, there is no gainsaying the fact that not only is Ahmed Bola Tinubu a product of a horrendous constitutional coup d’ etat but his government has by both the unconstitutionality of its existence and purgatorial policies created a veritable environment for a most desired military coup. This is a condition which no anti-coup speech from the Chief Defence Staff General Christopher Musa or the National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu can either deny or change.
Recently Nuhu Ribadu was reported to have said during his address to the Conference of Nigerian Military Attaches and Advisers in Abuja that, to quote him:
“From kidnapping to terrorism, the unconventional nature of security challenges is constantly taking new turns. Beyond internal challenges, military takeover of government in countries in West Africa and Central Africa also pose severe consequences in Nigeria’s security.”
Beyond the fact that Nuhu Ribadu was not truthful in the delivery of the above situation report on the state of Nigeria’s security, because he failed in the first instance to publicly acknowledge that, not only are the originators of the said kidnapping and terrorism members of his Muslim Fulani ethnic group, but that none of the above security conditions existed under past military regimes.
Emerging facts have shown that the people of Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and recently Gabon Republics heartily welcomed their military coups that ousted their fraudulent democratic leaders. Does Nuhu Ribadu think that any military coup attempt in Nigeria presently would be allowed to fail by the masses? Nigerians were witnesses to what took place in Niger Republic in which the masses were ready to sacrifice their lives for their new military leaders rather than have a minute more of the miserable experience of their fraudulent politicians. What makes Nuhu Ribadu think that Nigerians cannot do the same? It will only take any Nigerian with the deafened ear of the housefly that follows the corpse into the grave to chest out in defence of a fraudulent class of political leadership like the present APC Government under Ahmed Bola Tinubu against any military coup.
Nuhu Ribadu , a retired Police officer who was magically elevated to the questionable rank of Assistant Inspector General of Police from Deputy Commissioner of Police and now serves as Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s National Security Adviser is one of the two hydra-headed Fulani political monsters created and dumped on Nigerians by President Olusegun Obasanjo in his unappreciated bid to gratify imperious Sokoto Caliphate; the other being the now politically discarded diminutive, erratic and monstrous murderer of Southern Kaduna indigenous Christians, Nasir el-Rufai.
Nuhu Ribadu whose father Mallam Ahmadu Ribadu was an errand boy to the well-known First Republic Minister of Defence, Alhaji Muhammadu Ribadu, is today ranked the third richest man in Adamawa State after Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Alhaji abdullahi Bashir Haske, with an estimate gross worth of 60 million US dollars according Nigerian Infofinder, and 31 million US dollars by Forbes. What were his sources of income outside being a Police Officer up to the rank of Deputy Commissioner of Police and thereafter appointed Chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and subsequent promotion to the unmerited rank of Assistant Inspector General of Police at the twilight of his career?
In October 2009 Nuhu Ribadu was arrested for the offence of not declaring his assets on his assumption of officer as Chairman of EFCC. In March 2010 the then Acting President Goodluck Jonathan who was desperate to have his confirmation as President was pressurized by Sokoto Caliphate to drop the criminal charges against him. Meanwhile, this was the same crime of non-declaration of assets that forced Justice Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen out of office as the Chief Justice of the Federation.
The head of Transparency International, Auwal Rafsanjani once questioned Nuhu Ribadu’s dignity when he stated, “The same people he referred to as looters, he is interacting with them to gain their support.” The big question here is to what extent can Nuhu Ribadu be deemed competent to morally speak on the dangers of military coup in Nigeria, much more occupy the office of National Security Adviser?
It is therefore instructive to point out that Nuhu Ribadu with his overloaded unanswered moral questions is the most incompetent person to speak on the current security situation in Nigeria, because he is one of the beneficiaries of the robust stinking corrupt political cartels that perennially constitute themselves into a hindrance to the peace, progress and security of the Nigerian nation. We know that people like Nuhu Ribadu are apprehensive of military coup, but that will not change anything when the time comes. In fact, this time it will not be business as usual.
In 1579 AD the French Protestant political thinker Philippe de Mornay anonymously published a pamphlet titled: Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (A Defense of Liberty against Tyrants). Vindiciae Contra tyrannos raised two fundamental issues that bother on the responsibility of the ruler to God as the source of his authority on one hand and the ruler’s responsibility to his people in the conduct of credible leadership on the other; with the corresponding right of the people to revolt against their ruler in the event of his failure to meet his obligations as a ruler. This means that the people are as much under obligation to obey their ruler so long as he rules justly in accordance to his oath of office, as they reserve the right to revolt against him when the reverse becomes the case. The conclusion of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos is that every Christian is under divine commission to revolt against any bad leadership.
This divine commission is further extrapolated by Reverend John Calvin emphasizing that the mere refusal of any Christian to revolt against an oppressive leadership is considered a heinous disloyalty to God. In his words:
“I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy.”
The above injunction by Reverend John Calvin clearly explains the practical meaning of Hebrew Chapter 9, verse 22, which clearly states that without the shedding of blood there can be no liberation from oppression. Ironically, it is those Christians who are afraid to shed their blood for the redemption of their people from oppressive rulers and their killer-kinsmen that are having their blood shedded in the hands of Fulani-herdsmen, Bandits, Boko Haram and ISWAP. The question of whether Christians should legitimately disobey and where possible remove any Government they consider oppressive to the common people is therefore in the affirmative. God not only punished Pharaoh but escorted him to his death in the heart of the Red Sea.
Today Nigerians are no more and no less like the Children of Israel under bondage in Egypt and Ahmed Bola Tinubu acting as Pharaoh. Acts of Apostle Chapter 5 verse 29 taught Christians the obligation to disobey bad instructions from oppressive rulers through the acts of Peter and the Apostles when it declared: “But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘we must obey God rather than men.” The question is, are Nigerian Christians obeying Ahmed Bola Tinubu rather than God today? Peter and the Apostles by the above standard of resistance are commanding the oppressed Nigerian Christians to raise the standard of revolt against Ahmed Bola Tinubu and his Government.
It is therefore as John Calvin rightly commanded, a heinous crime for any Christian to sit down like a lame-duck pitiably watching the Nigerian nation sliding precariously to self-destruction. If you cannot fight speak out. If you can neither speak nor fight, then disobey. Daniel’s action founded on courage and faith as portrayed in the Book of Daniel Chapter 6 verse 10, explicitly defines this pattern of Christian spirit of resistance:
“Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.”
]
The courage and faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego as shown in Daniel Chapter 3, verses 16-18 are further instructive grounds for the Nigerian Christian to prove his faith and courage as a follower of Christ by fearlessly coming out to resist Ahmed Bola Tinubu and his Government:
“Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
It is therefore imperative for every Christian to consider the Military coups in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Gabon as democratic counter-coups against fraudulent Constitutional Coupists, and which must be replicated in Nigeria. In challenge is therefore before the Nigerian Armed Forces to do the desirable to save their country. The Nigerian Armed Forces should know that there was an army in Cote d’ Ivoire before Alassan Qatarra. Now there is a new army. There was an army under Samuel Doe. The army no longer exists. There was an army before President Idrisse Derby of Chad. The army no longer exists.
In Central African Republic, Congo Republic, Congo DRC, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda the existing armed forces uprooted old armed forces. Who knows whether the next armed forces in Nigeria would be the ones led by Boko Haram, ISWAP, Bandits or Fulani Herdsmen, with the Sultan of Sokoto as the King of Nigeria as in some Muslim nations.
a
Can you be more specific about the content of your article? After reading it, I still have some doubts. Hope you can help me.