The attack on Lagos BRT buses

The uniform is a license to not to pay fares on commercial transport. Any attempt to confront them with that reality and they will beat common sense out of you.It did not start today. The uniform arrogates to itself the role of enforcer of discipline in society since it bullied itself into national psyche barely […]

The uniform is a license to not to pay fares on commercial transport. Any attempt to confront them with that reality and they will beat common sense out of you.
It did not start today. The uniform arrogates to itself the role of enforcer of discipline in society since it bullied itself into national psyche barely six years into flag independence. Without the requisite training in governance, it is responsible for the rut that is perpetuated in our society today.
Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti captured the essence in his famous album – Zombie which cost him a limb and the death of both his 78-year old mother and his Kalakuta Republic. Stories of soldiers being hired to settle civil issues are rampant in different parts of the country.
On the road, the uniform thinks itself better than the best. It must have its right of way at all costs or all hell breaks loose. When the uniform shows up, no one is spared, not the young or the aged, no respect for women or children. Uzoma Okere was driving home after a hard day’s work in June 2008 when she became a casualty of the convoy of Rear Admiral Arogundade. Naval ratings beat her black and blue and even tore her dress.
Five years later in July 2012, Raji Fashola encountered two lawless military officers on BRT lane blocked and reprimanded them. One wonders if he would survive such ordeal in this atmosphere of political intolerance where the military seem to have regained its notoriety as outlaws.
With the infamous Ekiti election only a day away, a group of unruly soldiers waylaid an elected governor for hours and let in the convoy of a serving minister. A governor has the mandate of his people, but a minister holds his office at the behest of the president. The difference is clear except that the military cannot seem to see it.
Barely a week after, soldiers were on the streets, confiscating newspapers from their distribution points and burning them. Their excuse –they were looking for arms and believed that news distribution vans hoarded arms! It would have been funny if the late Dele Giwa had not first been accused of gunrunning before being blown up in Ikeja by agents suspected to be close to the uniform still at large.
And if you thought these things were just coincidences, well, let’s go to the next one – Aminu Tambuwal, number four citizen by rank. He was in a convoy to an official function when soldiers again stopped his convoy and insisted on searching him and his vehicle. Until the NSA apologized to him, spin-doctors nearly convinced us it was for his own good. Truth is, his office was denigrated, not by those who voted him or elected him, but those who ought to respect and protect him.
 But by far the worst assault was last weekend’s assault on BRT buses in Lagos. It was dastardly, daring and incredibly lawless. The most incredulous excuse in the era of citizen journalism in which every cell-phone is a camera is that the photographed pictures of armed soldiers committing arson in broad daylight was attributed to hoodlums. It would have been laughable again if Lagos had not been the hotbed of political opposition.
These coincidences are too close for a nation counting on its army to quell an insurgency that it cannot do without the help and loyalty of the citizenry. If the army continues to portray itself as the attack dog of the government in power the nation is jinxed. The army is the nation’s last bastion of culture and nationalism.
Let us hope that these are wrong interpretations and that these incidences are just bizarre coincidences. The day our armed forces lose the support of the people they were set up to protect, and smear their uniform of integrity with the cloak of partisanship and brutality, that will be the day the nation takes its final descent into abysmal disintegration. Let us hope that the ‘hoodlums’ who attacked and burnt four BRT buses in broad daylight are not the legendary ‘Unknown Soldiers’.
Let us hope that, the military high command, which identified the mutinous officers in Maiduguri, can fish these ones out too and make them face the full wrath of the law to serve as deterrent. The manual that turns protectors to assailants needs a change. Let us hope that the uniform would return to its pride; that the civil populace can look at those in uniform as friends duty bound to protect them against bullies, and not rabid dogs that attack and abuse them. If we fail to do this, then, we have failed indeed.