LAST week, we recalled how I came across the term Afghanistanism as an undergraduate and student’s activist at the then University of Ife in the 1980s, during the Major-General Muhammadu Buhari/Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon military rule. The regime had reasoned that the problems plaguing Nigeria was the indiscipline of the citizens.
The War Against Indiscipline, WAI, was so elastic and nebulous in definition but the enforcement was with military precision. It included staying patiently on the queue in public places, observance of monthly environmental sanitation and barring women from wearing trousers in public.
The penalty against transgression was either summary trial in WAI courts or instant corporal punishment of flogging or combined with some aerobic exercises, particularly frog-jumping, enforced by the ubiquitous soldiers and WAI Brigade officers.
Fundamental issues of the economy, and particularly a programme of return to democratic rule, were not part of the regime’s agenda which also outlawed political parties and all associations considered to harbour opposition or radical tendencies against military dictatorship.
Lecturers perceived to harbour or inculcate radical thoughts were dismissed from the university system “for teaching what they were not paid to teach”; top journalists were jailed and newspapers barred from reporting any event which the government considered embarrassing, even if it was true. Laws were made with retrospective penal sanctions where the accused was presumed guilty with the onus of proving his or her innocence.
Many Nigerians woke up to the knowledge of the existence of hard drugs, like cocaine, when the regime arrested Bartholomew Owoh (26), Bernard Ogedengbe(29), and Alhaji Akani Lawal (29) tried, found guilty for trafficking in such drugs and killed them by firing squad under Decree 20 of 1984 for the offence they had allegedly committed before the promulgation of the decree. The Taliban rule which took off in Afghanistan, much later in 1994, was not more draconian.
Human rights groups and civil society community in general took up the challenge in diverse ways. Newspapers adopted several creative means of writing and presenting informed criticism of the mindless dictatorship. Some public commentators also resorted to analysing and criticising events and leaders in foreign lands as euphemisms of happenings at home, while others, in frustration or fear of persecution, deliberately shifted attention to mundane issues at home or became emergency experts in international affairs.