Turkey
is about five hours away from Nigeria by air, about 2, 634 miles from here, but
the night there was a coup attempt in Turkey, July 15, with soldiers shutting
down parts of Ankara and Istanbul, you’d think Ankara is a city somewhere in
Nigeria and Istanbul is an extension of our country. Commentaries kept flying
up and down on Nigeria social media space, with the coup attempt in Turkey
becoming a trending topic.
And
yet the strongest connection between Nigeria and Turkey is probably trade,
tourism, socio-cultural affinities, and the fact that many Nigerian travellers
now find it easier and cheaper to travel through Turkey to other European
capitals, with Turkish Airlines making all the profit and no Nigerian airline
on that route!
Still,
if Turkey finds itself in a bad shape, as it has, that is not likely to affect
the already sorry fortunes of the Naira or the forbidding cost of food items in
Nigerian markets. On Friday, many Nigerians stayed awake and projected their
own worst fears unto the Turkish situation.
By
way of summary, there was among the Nigerian commentators an all-round
condemnation of any attempt to upturn the Constitutional order either in Turkey
or anywhere else in the world. When it was reported that a former Turkish
President had remarked that the coup will not stand, because “Turkey is not
Africa”, (former President Abdullah Gul actually said Latin America), there was
also a feeling of outrage. How dare he make such a racist comment in the midst
of such a serious situation?
When
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took to Facetime on his mobile phone to get
himself onto television, and he pleaded with the Turkish population to take to
the streets to resist the coup makers, and his call was heeded, not a few
commentators at this end wondered if Nigerians would have answered such a
summon to patriotism and whether or not religious and ethnic sentiments or the
fear of being shot to death would not have kept the people indoors. Concerns
were also expressed about the fate of Nigerians living in Turkey in the event
of a blowout at the crossroads of Europe. By Saturday morning, the coup had
failed. Erdogan was significantly back in control. About 200 persons had died,
and over 2,000 persons were recorded as injured. As I monitored the situation
in Turkey and the reactions in Nigeria, I was struck by how so much can be
learnt from the strong interest that the failed coup attempt has generated among
educated Nigerians.
Nigerians
know what it means to have a constitutional order derailed by military
intervention. Between 1960 and 1999, Nigeria moved from one form of military
rule to another, characterized by obstinacy, and absolutism, experiencing only
short spells of civilian rule. Similarly, the military in Turkey have since
1960 intervened directly at least four times (1970, 1971, 1980, 1997). And in
all instances, the Turkish coup plotters always claimed that their role was to
restore order and stabilize the country. This is a rhetoric that is quite
familiar to Nigerians. Every military coup is justified on messianic grounds.
In the latest onslaught in Turkey, the plotters claim they want to establish a
“Peace Council.”
Between
1993 and 1999, Nigerians fought the military to a standstill, insisting on a
definite return to civilian rule and the institutionalization of democracy.
Sixteen years later, the democratic spirit is well established among the
people, if not the Nigerian leadership elite. The people have seen what a
demonstration of people power can achieve: they used it to get the military out
of power, they relied on it to insist that the Constitution be respected and
obeyed when a President died in office and certain forces did not want his
successor to get into office, and again, they have seen people-power at work in
removing a sitting government from power. Right now in Nigeria, to toy with
this power of the people in any form is to sow the seeds of organized mass
rebellion.
Not
surprisingly, in the past few years, every display of the people’s supremacy in
other parts of the world has attracted either interest or a copy-cat instinct
among Nigerians. First, there was the Arab Spring, which resulted in calls for
the Nigerian Spring, which later found expression in the politically motivated
Occupy Nigeria protests of January 2012. And now from Turkey, the major point
of interest for Nigeria has been in my estimation, how the people took to the
streets to confront soldiers. The coup failed in Turkey because it lacked
popular support. Turkey has for long been considered an embarrassment in
Europe. A successful coup in 2016 would have put the country in a worse shape
and done further damage to the country’s reputation. The people stood up for their
country, not President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
They
stood up for an idea: The idea of democracy. The three major political parties
disowned the coup. Mosques called on the people to go to the streets and fight
for democracy. Even Erdogan’s critics, including the Kemalists and the
Glulenists, denounced the coup plotters. The images that came across were
images of the police confronting the soldiers and disarming them (This was
intriguing- can anyone ever imagine the Nigeria police protecting democracy:
they would have since collected bribe from the coup plotters, there is massive
corruption in Turkey too but their police fought for the nation). Ordinary
citizens lay down in front of the coup plotters’ tanks and asked to be crushed;
brave citizens disarmed the soldiers and took over the city squares.
It
is the kind of bravery that Nigerians find surreal. The coup attempt in Turkey
comes at a time when the civil society in Nigeria is beginning to lose the
spirit to stand in front of tanks, and guns: the people have been battered to a
point where their strongest protection is their power of the ballot and so the
average Nigerian endures suffering, convinced that when again it is time to
vote, no one can rob him or her of his power to choose. But the situation in
Turkey reminds us of the kind of danger that any democracy, with troubled
foundations can face, hence Nigerians ask if they too can be as courageous as
the Turkish have been, with both Turks and the much abused Kurds, and other
divided groups, uniting, momentarily, on one issue.
Not
that Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan deserves the victory over the coup plotters,
though. Outsiders, including Nigerians, consider him a bad guy; and even if he
is still popular and blindly followed by the majority of his people, his
13-year record in office falls far short of standards. He came to office on the
wave-crest of popular appeal. In Istanbul where he was a city mayor at a time,
he remains immensely popular, and he is also probably the most popular leader,
not in Europe, but the Arab world. Thrice, he and his party, the AKP, won
nationally organized elections. But success soon got into Erdogan’s head, as he
descended into the lower depths of arrogance and dictatorship. He started
having issues with neighbours and allies.
He
became undemocratic, shamelessly alienating civil society, the press and the
judiciary. He is so temperamental and intolerant of criticism and alternative
views, he is now surrounded mainly by sycophants and relatives. In his attempt
to dominate everything and everyone, he became known as the “buyuk usta”, that
is “the big master”, and of course, he now lives in a $615 million Presidential
palace with 1, 150 rooms! In addition, he wants to acquire US-style executive
Presidential powers and he is busy battling, real and imaginary enemies.
He
may have been saved by the people’s rejection of the coup attempt, but perhaps
Erdogan has been saved more by his own cleverness. The coup attempt against his
government was an amateur, unorganized effort. It lacked the support of the
military command, which Erdogan had cleverly subjected to civilian control, and
among whom he had built centres of personal loyalty. Over the years, he
weakened the military and strengthened the police and the intelligence
services. The coup plotters over-estimated their capacity and misread the
people’s mood.
Their
failure may embolden Erdogan and even make him more authoritarian: he is
already sounding off about being in charge and dealing with the coup plotters
(over 2,000 of whom have already been rounded up and arrested, even judges have
been fired). But Turkey is in a very bad shape. Resentments run deep. There are
deep fears about threats to the country’s secularism, and attempts to
Islamicise the country. A paranoid Erdogan could worsen the situation. Both the
United States and the European Union should take a keen interest in what
happens in Turkey after the coup attempt, to ensure that rather than dig deeper
into authoritarianism, Erdogan would see the need to run a more open, inclusive
and democratic government.
The
coup may have failed, and democracy may have won, but whatever issues led to a
group of ill-prepared soldiers taking the law into their hands cannot be wished
away. To tell the truth, Recep Erdogan acts very much, in all respects, like an
African leader in Europe - that probably explains the keen Nigerian interest.
The key lesson, all told, is that the importance and survival of democracy
relates to the importance of civic virtue, this is why leaders must rely not
just on the people’s commitment to an idea, but must seek to make democracy
work for all the people.
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