Beyond the above summation of military pedigree, a clear understanding of military
knowledge of power will serve to clarify issues further. At this point it will be necessary
to state that the finicality of drawing a line between coups and revolutions will be
superfluous. This is because, using Gordon Tullock’s (2005: 78) paradigm, all the coups
that have occurred in Africa right from the sixties set out in the fashion of revolutions.
Whether they succeeded in bringing about the “rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic
change” (Huntington in John Foran 2005:6) is a different kettle of fish. And if
“historically, the common form of revolution has been a not-too-efficient despotism
which is overthrown by another not-too-efficient despotism with little or no effect on the
public good” (Tullock 180), then this categorization perfectly limns what Nigeria and
Ghana witnessed during the decades of successive military rules.
In Tullock’s theory which radicalizes the popular notion of the masses with respect to the
necessary primacy of public good, Tullock contends that by the very act of coup planning
itself, the planners have already constructed for themselves an identity which, should the
coup succeed, is expected to benefit the planners to the detriment of the identity of the
people. This is the case whether in the commonplace view in which military dictators are
overthrown by other dictators who head the army, or through the other forms of junior
officers, or uncommissioned men. What is paramount is what they intend to gain
ultimately. The argument is to the extent that the commitment they demonstrate towards
the people is less out of the recognition of an obligation than from a sense of charity
(Tullock 182). However, the strategy is to invoke patriotism which they only verbally
affirm. They can even purport that such patriotism which is germane to their intervention
is greater than that of any other class in the nation. This could be illustrated with those
moving take-over speeches which summon in the populace an outburst of emotions and
support for such coups. Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born provides
one of such instances of the people’s response:
The unionist turned round and went down to join his crowd. Through the windows their
sounds came: old songs with the words changed from the old praise for Nkrumah to
insults for him. So like the noises of the Party when all the first promise had been eaten
up and it had become a place where fat men found things to swell themselves up some
more. (158)