Why Military Rule is No Longer an Option: Dr. Umar Ardo Explains

“…Military rule, once a recurring nightmare, is no longer an option.”

By Emmanuel Kwada 

Amid a wave of military coups sweeping across Africa and persistent whispers of a possible intervention in Nigeria triggered by economic hardship, spiralling insecurity and widespread public discontent, constitutional scholar and veteran politician Dr. Umar Ardo has delivered a powerful and closely argued rebuttal yet to growing fears of a military coup in Nigeria.

In his landmark press, “Fragmented Guardians, Stable Republic: Structural Inhibitions to Military Intervention in Contemporary Nigeria,” Dr. Ardo contends that the country has crossed an irreversible threshold.

After twenty-six uninterrupted years of civilian democratic rule, the longest stretch in Nigeria’s history; the political, social and institutional landscape has changed so profoundly that a successful military takeover is no longer undesirable or merely unlikely; it has become structurally impossible and rationally suicidal for the armed forces themselves.

Nigeria, he stresses, is fundamentally different from the Sahelian states that have fallen to coups in recent years.

Where those countries often have relatively homogeneous officer corps capable of acting in concert, Nigeria’s military was deliberately constructed along federal character lines from the moment of independence.

Ethnic, religious, regional and educational diversity was baked into recruitment and promotion policies to prevent any single group from dominating the institution.

The result is an armed forces that has never acted as a unified corporate entity when seizing power; every coup in Nigerian history was carried out by a fragment, never by the military as a whole.

That same fragmentation, now deepened by decades of deliberate balancing and professionalisation, would make any contemporary putsch fracture almost immediately along the country’s familiar fault lines, inviting counter-coups and possible disintegration of the military itself.

Layered on top of this internal diversity is what Dr. Ardo describes as a mature civil–military class equilibrium. Today’s senior officers and the political elite share the same broad worldviews, lifestyles and economic interests.

The military benefits enormously from democratic governance through generous budgets, overseas training, lucrative postings, security contracts and unfettered access to the commanding heights of the economy.

A return to junta rule would jeopardise all of those privileges, invite international sanctions, collapse the economy and destroy the corporate cohesion that the officer corps has spent decades protecting. Staying out of direct power, far from being a sacrifice, has become the most rational strategy for preserving both personal gain and institutional survival.

History, Dr. Ardo reminds readers, bears this out. From Aguiyi-Ironsi’s declaration in 1966 that his regime was strictly interim, through Gowon’s early transition plans, the exemplary Murtala–Obasanjo handover of 1979, Babangida’s protracted but ultimately unavoidable exit, and Abdulsalami Abubakar’s swift ten-month transition in 1998–1999, Nigerian military rulers have repeatedly discovered that clinging to power eventually becomes more dangerous than relinquishing it.

Regimes that reneged on promises to leave – Gowon after the civil war, Buhari after 1983 – were promptly removed by their own colleagues. Disengagement, not domination, has been the enduring pattern.

Add to these structural realities the transformations of the past quarter-century: an entrenched democratic culture that has delegitimised khaki rule in the eyes of both elite and masses; a vastly more complex security architecture with multiple armed agencies and overlapping command chains that make a clean takeover logistically nightmarish; constant public scrutiny enabled by social media and a vibrant press; and the certainty of swift global isolation.

All combine to raise the cost of intervention to levels no rational officer corps would contemplate.

“Nigeria’s armed forces today are not the military of 1966, 1975, 1983 or even 1993,” Dr. Ardo writes in his conclusion. “They are a professionalised, heterogeneous, democratically embedded institution with far more to lose than to gain from extra-constitutional adventurism.”

While acknowledging that hardship and anger are real and vigilance remains necessary, the scholar insists that contemporary fears of a coup, however emotionally understandable, rest on nostalgia rather than on any serious analysis of present-day realities.

Nigeria, for all its imperfections, has finally outgrown the coup trap that continues to afflict much of the continent. Military rule, once a recurring nightmare, is no longer an option.