Coda

Abstract

As one military regime gave way to another, the distance between soldiers and civilians grew. By the 1990s, the Nigerian military was a self-supporting structure, largely detached from the civilians it had once served. Critics began to describe it as a “cult.” During the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, soldiers no longer spoke of military rule as a “revolution”—it was an opportunity to loot the state, which they did brazenly. The Abacha regime abandoned law as an administrative contrivance, turning instead to raw force. Not all acts of decolonization were acts of liberation. There were decolonizations of the left and right, radical and conservative, nativist and internationalist. It was a process full of contradictions and complexity—not a singular event, and certainly not something everyone agreed about. Nothing shows its tensions better than law.