CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION
Background of the study
The name “Nigeria” was coined by Flora Shaw, who later became the wife of Lord Lugard, the British colonial administrator, on 8 January 1897, which she used as the title of an article in The Times (Meek, 1960), to describe the vast land around the River Niger and its basin. It was then called Niger-area, but after a long usage it was shortened to Nigeria. Mungo Park was exploring the River Niger when he stumbled into this vast area along the River. Nigeria presently has a population of about 150 million people; this made th e country the most populous nation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The country has a population density of 145 inhabitants per km2 (Nigerian National Population Commission: Abuja, Nigeria, 2001).
The country is located on the extreme inner corner of the Gulf of Guinea on the West African coast and there are over 250 nationalities in Nigeria. The three most populous nationalities are: The Yorubas in the South West, Ibos in the South East and the Hausa- Fulanis in the North; these three main nationalities constitute 65% of the population while the remaining 35% are made of minorities (Butts & Metz, 1996). About 250 languages are spoken in Nigeria (Agbaje, 1990), although some studies allude to 400 languages.
The military took over the governance of the country through a very bloody coup led by Major Nzeogwu in January 1966 (Osoba, 1996). This coup was claimed to end the misrule, ineptness and corruption of the preceding five years of the civil rule (Olutayo, 1999). The coup lasted for just a couple of days; it could not be said to be a total failure as “it set(s) the agenda of military rule in Nigeria as a ‘corrective’ form of governance against corruption and indiscipline and in favour of restoration of democracy and justice” (Olutayo, 1999). Nigeria has been governed for a longer period by the military junta than by civilian rule after her independence in 1960. Starting from January 1966 to October 1979 and December 1983 to May 1999, the military has ruled the country for about 30 years. The six year mistakes of the First Republic politicians invited the military to interfere in governance after more than a total of six decades of colonial misrule (Roberts, 2005; Babawale, 1993; Gambari, 1995). Since then, military rule has been a recurring phenomenon in Nigeria. Political change came about far more frequently through military intervention in politics than through open, competitive elections. The military in the country falsely appeared in self-assumed messiah-style to save the polity. The military sometimes portrayed as an island of unalloyed patriotism amidst the chaos of the turbulent decade of the 1960s as Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu is said to have remarked, “It is only in the Nigerian army that you find Nigerians” (Suberu, 1997) an assertion that proved otherwise after decades of misrule.
Military intervention is basically an attempt by military officers to get involved in the political process to improve upon what they assumed to be the major problem associated with it. This explains why every time a group of military officers take over power, the major justification they give in order to legitimize their intervention are problems such as instability, official corruption, violent political crisis associated with elections and partisan politics (Amujo, 2011).
When the military came to power in Nigeria on January 15, 1966, they became deeply involved in the political process. In fact, the got involved in a process which is incompatible with their professional training and orientation. They attempted, for example, to restructure the polity, through series of policy statement backed by military decrees (Olutayo, 1999). It is in this context that they created states and local governments and it is also in these contexts that they introduced administrative reform affecting the bureaucracy and the civil service in their attempt to restructure the civil service (Amowo, 1995). Some of these may be legitimate while in most cases they were undertaken to satisfy parochial interests which invariably gave rise to additional problems which the military seems incapable of addressing. After decades of military misadventure in politics Nigerians came to realize that military intervention which they were so ecstatic about and welcomed, was an aberration and a huge retrogression for the country (Elaigwu, 1986). Military rule is not open and inclusive, but rather it is restrictive, exclusive and quite often outright authoritarian. In its attempt to rule, the military mobilized ethnic, regional, religious and communal identities. The more the political process is heightened, the more the political process is threatened with instability and therefore the easier it becomes for the military to legitimize its stay in power on the ground that it wants to prevent the dismemberment of the country life named Nigeria in 1900.