By Yinka Odumakin
Shockwaves  reverberated globally last Friday as news came of a coup attempt in Turkey. A good read of that country’s history for 40 years however shows that the putsch was coming about a decade late as the military in Turkey had thrown away a despised government once in 10 years.

As the ill-prepared   and incompetent plotters wobbled through their putsch,President Recep Tayyip Erdorgan who once banned social media sites ironically took to Facetime and Twitter to rally the people to confront the soldiers on rampage.

The coup plotters failed to arrest the President and the Prime Minister which is rudimentary to any successful putsch.This has made conspiracy theorists to advance that this could have been staged .

The almost 20-year interregnum between the last military intervention in 1997 and last weekend’s putsch created the impression among many in Turkey and the West that the coup era was over. The same way pro-democracy forces humiliation of the military to the barracks in 1999 after five years of street and intellectual battles with the murderous Abacha junta has given Nigeria non-stop 17 years of break from military intervention in governance.

Criminal  prosecutions

During this period, the ruling Justice and Development Party, known as AKP, and its leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, used both constitutional reforms and dubious criminal prosecutions of senior officers to bring the military under control.

This was why it was astonishing to so many, especially Turks, when tanks appeared on the streets of Istanbul and fighter jets streaked low across the sky. For a few hours, it seemed to those nostalgic for another era, when the military’s general staff styled   itself as the last check   on   the excesses of Turkey’s civilian leaders, that the military had finally returned to its old form and was resetting Turkish politics.

The coup, however, failed as the people trooped to the streets to confront the tanks joined by the deliberately equipped police who were disarming the soldiers. It was a titanic battle for the lesser of two evils as Erdogan is not a leader people should ordinarily lay their lives down for.

His skin is so thin to criticism. He has promoted nepotism to a state art as he is surrounded by his relations.He has waged wars of attrition against the press,civil society as well as the judiciary. His ostentation knows no bound as he resides in a presidential mansion that had 1,150 rooms built at a cost $615 million. Corrupt officials of the regime are above the law in a country of unequal justice.

The benevolent dictator has however ensured that Turks have better infrastructure and more money in their pockets which have endeared him still to about half of the electorate which has consistently elected him since 2007.This gives him the social base to rally as it would have been totally impossible to rally a dejected,hungry,angry and disoriented people to go confront the tanks.

Turkey has indeed changed since coups seemed a routine feature of the country’s politics. In previous eras, the military could easily intimidate opponents into succumbing to the   repressive principles of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Yet as Turkey has become a more complex society and the AKP has sought to integrate it   globally, the conformity of  Kemalism  no longer works. In 1997, many Turks welcomed the military’s intervention to undermine Turkey’s first experiment with Islamist-led government. A decade later when the military sought to prevent one of the AKP’s founders, Abdullah Gul, from becoming president,  opposing, among other things, the fact that Gul’s wife  wore a headscarf,   Turks protested, declaring that they neither wanted Islamic law nor military rule.

Having survived, Erdogan    has already portrayed the failed coup   as an assault on Turkish democracy. Yet he is largely seen to have something other than democratic politics in mind. Arriving in Istanbul, he  declared  the coup “a gift from God … because this will help us claim our military from these members of this gang”- referring to followers of exiled cleric  Fethullah Gulen, who was once a partner of the AKP, but has more recently become Erdogan’s enemy.The colour of things to come is emerging .

The implications are clear: AKP will now hunt down opponents -real or imagined – with impunity, consolidating Erdogan’s already formidable personal power and fueling his ambition to further transform Turkey.  Rather than an opportunity for democracy, the failed coup will only consolidate Turkey’s elected autocracy with festering impunity .The big man will likely become bigger.

The fact that this coup failed is   not as important than the fact that, in a region that has been descending into chaos, Turkey (which borders the chaos in Syria and Iraq but is also a NATO ally) was touched by chaos. The fact that this coup was not successful does not mean that chaos has not come to Turkey. A heavy handed response by politicians seeking to use the coup as an excuse to completely eliminate their opponents is not the sort of thing that will eliminate the threat of chaos to Turkey.

Turkey needs a leader who can step back and reconfigure to be able to stabilise the polity.But Erdogan does not carry that anointing .He is likely to continue his hard line posture and bulldozing which can only mean that chaos is only suspended in Turkey.

Niyi Adewumi: The dove exits prematurely

WHEN my phone rang on  Saturday and I saw it was Adeyinka Olumide-Fusika I had expected his usual “just checking on you “ as he does now and then.But after a terse compliment he dropped the bombshell: “We lost Niyi”.I didn’t have to ask him “which Niyi” as we had only one Niyi.

I was shattered that death has again surfaced to take one of our best.Niyi Adewunmi was one of those bright young men   we bonded together at Ife 31 years ago under the aegis of Alliance of Progressive Students, ALPS. We rocked campus politics as were the best organised and most disciplined group on campus with radical ideas as our bedrock.

Niyi was the Speaker of the Students Representative Council of the students union while I was its Public Relations Officer with another colleague of ours in ALPS,Alfred Adegoke as the Secretary General.

After Ife,we were both posted to Ogun state for our National Service where we made mutual friends and acquaintances like Femi Ige,a Commissioner in Ekiti state a while ago and and his wife.We shared the camp with Isaac Kekemeke the current chair of APC in Ondo State,Panaf Olu Ojedokun who teaches at Lead University and a host of others.

Relationship  manager

We have remained friends ever since as Niyi is a jolly good fellow who can’t hurt a fly. I do not know of anyone who could justifiably say that he was deliberately hurt by him.

He was too good. A good friend of ours Bimbo Oguntunde   said: “In City Point Chambers(the law firm he partnered with friends from Ife) Niyi was the relationship manager”. So true, he managed so many of us in our years together that you would think he is older than us.

Apostle   Paul in moment of remembrance said of Copernicus the blacksmith that he did him so much harm and God should recompense him. In Niyi’s case he did me so much good that I can only pray that God should bless his soul and and be with the family he has left behind.

How could I forget what Niyi did for me in 1987 after the university authorities rusticated me and 11 other students in December 1986 over the chasing of Babangida’s representative out of the convocation arena.We were suspended without investigations or any indictment.

A relation who worked in the varsity establishment said he would take me to go and beg the Vice -Chancellor. I refused because that would be a betrayal of our decision to challenge the action in court. It meant I had to avoid home while our struggle lasted.

Generous spirit Niyi came to the rescue. He was getting N120 monthly allowance at the time. Once the money came,he would take N20 out of the money and ask me to keep the remaining N100 for the upkeep of the two of us.

He feared we could have nothing to live on if he had the money with him as he was generous to a fault .You can never forget such a man!

I called him a few weeks back and he told me about his health challenges but that he was trusting God for the best.I promised I would come and see him but unable to make it because I had spent considerable time outside these shores.The only thing left now is to say eternal bye to him at the graveside on Saturday.

He has done his bit and has moved on to higher glory.His widow,Bola told me that four days to his death he kept on saying they should cease to pray for his recovery but keep thanking God as it was soon going to be over. Just like he did not expect too much from this life while he lived in it ,he could not give too much worry when he was about to exit it.

The demise of good men like Niyi teaches all of us to number the days of our lives and try to do the good we can because that is all that would be left when we are gone. May the Almighty comfort his immediate and extended families,colleagues,friends and associates at this grievous moment. Goodnight gentleman Niyi Adewumi!