Once upon a time, horses were one of the most devastating instruments of war. During the Anglo Boer War of 1899 to 1902 in South Africa, Boer cavalry units mounted on horses that caused such catastrophic damage to British forces that the Brits had to raise an army of over 400,000 soldiers before eventually overrunning them. 12 years later in 1914, the world was a different place for anyone engaged in the profession of war. Trenches, tanks, jet fighters, poison gas and especially the machine gun combined to make horse-mounted warfare totally obsolete. No amount of training in the skill of cavalry warfare could match a machine gun spitting out three bullets per second.
The Brits, however, did not get the memo.
Unwilling to adopt new tactics and still drunk on a proud tradition of riding into battle on horseback screaming “CHARGE!” commander David Campbell of the 9th Lancers cavalry regiment wrote one of the First World War’s most defining stories. On August 25, 1914, he led his men into a cavalry charge against a German infantry position dug into trenches and armed with machine guns. The result was that 250 men and over 300 horses died in a few short minutes, and just like that the era of mounted horseback fighting was over.
Any idiot could have told Commander Campbell and his superiors that sending men mounted on horses to face a German trench unit armed with Maschinengewehr 08 machine guns would only have one outcome. It wasn’t that they didn’t know that the cavalry regiment was hopelessly outmatched and really had no business doing anything other than sitting tight and waiting for backup armed with tanks. The problem was that their pride in a tradition of doing things a certain way outweighed everything else including common sense and a desire for self-preservation. In a world going through rapid and profound change, a group of small-minded men had to let the world know that their way of doing things was still relevant and effective — even if it meant that everybody had to die in the process.
Everybody except them obviously.
1914 Europe or 2021 Nigeria: Plus ca Change
Listening to Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed making his recent string of bombastic pronouncements that poured petrol on the mounting bonfire of anti-Fulani sentiment sweeping Nigeria, one would be forgiven for thinking that he has some sort of trump card up his sleeve. In fact, he does not. This is the bravado of the condemned prisoner defiantly thumbing his nose while awaiting his hanging at the gallows – there is nothing backing it up.
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The weak Nigerian state is already insolvent and is fast losing all of its international leverage due to a beached economy and circumstances outside its control. It is also degenerating into a series of ungoverned spaces interspersed with cities ruled by a coalition of the state and local warlords – a nation-state only in name. Is it under these circumstances that the ruling ethnoreligious cabal intends to take on the whole country in a conflict on a scale too terrible to even contemplate?
If the plan is to leverage the military to shoot its way through any opposition, as usual, the glaring reality is that Nigeria’s overstretched security infrastructure cannot possibly prosecute such a conflict. Even if the prospective enemy were a conventional one confined to a single defined geographical area (which it isn’t), the Nigerian state absolutely does not have the resources to take on such a fight. The more likely outcome, in fact, is that the armed forces would fragment into several loosely-governed ethnic tribal militia groups – with disastrous consequences for anything and anyone they come into contact with.
And yet, instead of finding a new way to do things that will not get all of us killed, the old and proud usual suspects are instead commanding their horse-mounted subordinates to “CHAAAARGE!” at an enemy that we are not in any way equipped to fight against.
A little humility might help — And maybe save lives
What this group of people needs now more than at any other point in their history are allies and goodwill. Instead, the usual suspects seem bent on simply making more enemies and taking on all comers with no strategy other than arrogance, bombast, misplaced confidence and crude violence. When they’re not needlessly poking the entire country in the eye with stupid, provocative pronouncements from the likes of Nasir El-Rufai and Bala Mohammed, they are effectively funding and subsidising the activities of terrorists by paying ransoms and advocating for “amnesty programs.”
From the French Revolution in 1789 to the Central African Republic’s anti-Balaka uprising in 2013, history repeatedly tells us very clearly what happens when a tiny and identifiable group of people attempts to use force and threat of force to bully larger, amorphous populations. I certainly do not want this to repeat itself, but if the situation does not improve drastically, it will soon no longer matter what a BusinessDay opinion column writer wants or does not want. Just like I warned about impending anarchy at the peak of last year’s #EndSARS protests in this column and it happened exactly as I predicted, this is a warning to the tiny ethnoreligious cabal currently mismanaging Nigeria into total freefall.
At this point, nobody is asking the people in question to reverse the problems they have engineered over the decades such as lack of electricity, subpar infrastructure, horrible healthcare, substandard education or any of that stuff. No one is even asking for good security. Expectations are so low, they have tapped into the groundwater supply. All anyone is really asking, for now, is that they don’t go and create the most avoidable and catastrophically destructive civil conflict in the history of the world. All it takes is just a little humility and self-awareness.
What is coming is very obvious, and there is no need for it to happen.
No need at all.
