Why Coup Plotters Want General Musa Dead
The trial of the sixteen military officers implicated in the attempted coup to overthrow the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu may not be as quick as many Nigerians anticipate.
The wait may be a little long. Sources close to the investigating team tell Signature TV that the team is reconstructing the beginning of the plan, the factors that created the attempted coup, and the endgame of the coup.
From their findings, according to our sources, the factor of disgruntled soldiers seems to be mere willing tools in the hands of deeper ideological and politically corrupt interests.
Last week, the Minister of Defence, General Chris Musa, told a television channel that he was to be killed by coup plotters if he resisted arrest.
General Christopher Gwabin Musa
But why was General Musa a prime target? And why did the coup plotters want to stop Bola Ahmed Tinubu from taking over from Muhammadu Buhari?
In the last four years of the Buhari administration, insurgents and insurgency sympathisers had begun establishing strongholds in key positions within the judiciary, military command, and political institutions.
The Buhari government appeared helpless in dealing with the situation, causing insurgency, banditry, and allied terrorist activities to fester.
The separatist agitation in the Southeast was elevated as a main national survival challenge to divert attention while extremist insurgency gained financial resources, judicial protection, and security sympathy.
The coming of Tinubu, alongside the emergence of General Chris Musa as Chief of Defence Staff, created a major ideological and policy shake up.
Musa insisted on more boots, more guns, and no negotiations with insurgents or bandits. He also played up regimental accountability and discipline, which strongly hurt sympathetic military officers who played hide-and-seek with terrorists and mismanaged resources meant for theatre operations.
Many politicians were caught in their own game. With the policy of non negotiation with terrorists, many politicians who used negotiations to fund insurgency and at the same time launder public funds in the name of appeasing terrorists, discovered that the game was beginning to end.
The coup plot, as now being pieced together by investigators, was a convergence of the interests of extremists, insurgency financiers, thieving politicians, insurgency -sympathetic military officers who wanted to change the government.
These interests were ready to use some disgruntled or ambitious military personnel.
The delay in the trial of the military officers may arise from efforts by investigators to establish if those already implicated exhaust the entire network that masterminded the attempted coup.
Sources tell Signature TV that the investigators are also trying to understand the involvement of former Minister of State for Petroleum, Timipriye Sylva, in the whole plot.
Has he been used to fund insurgency all along, or was he drawn into this plot because of his ambition for power?
For now, the investigators are said to be working together with French and American intelligence teams to get to the bottom of the entire plot and net in all possible players.
The military authorities are also said to be interrogating the continued exposure of military officers to political activities in the course of being deployed for internal security duties.
Such exposure is said to be giving investigators cause for concern.
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