Cheta Nwanze: A history lesson – Nigeria’s first coup

by Cheta Nwanze

Nigeria-military-660x330

To understand first, the coup of January 15, 1966, we must not take it in isolation, something that a lot of people tend to do. We must first understand the world around the coup, Nigeria around the coup, and learn the important fact that idealism is bad

Because of the extremely sensitive nature of what we are discussing, today’s talk will have to be in three stages

Stage 1

Intro: Here, I will explain my reasons for doing this, and give some opinion, but not much.

We will not be discussing a blow-by-blow account of the civil war, that will be in future. Today, we will be talking of the causes of war.

Not a few people believe that we should forget about the events in Nigerian history, of 1966-70. They think it will open up old wounds. I think that these “old wounds” were never closed in the first place.

Be that as it may, “healing old wounds” is the preserve of the individual. The state, has no business doing such a thing. The reason, in my view, that the state must not partake in such foolishness is simple: forgetting means that it will happen again if conditions exist.

Happening again, is something that in today’s Nigeria, we can ill afford, as the consequences will be nothing short of devastating.

Again, another reason we MUST examine our past is found in the words of Confucius – “Study the past if you would define the future….”

To understand first, the coup of January 15, 1966, we must not take it in isolation, something that a lot of people tend to do. We must first understand the world around the coup, Nigeria around the coup, and learn the important fact that idealism is bad

Most of my knowledge about Nigeria of those days comes from the following books, which I recommend you find and read: My Command; Nzeogwu – both by Olu Obasanjo; Nigeria’s Revolution and the Biafran War – Alex Madiebo; Why We Struck – Ade Ademoyega; Nigeria’s Five Majors – Ben Gbulie; Biafra Story – Fred Forsyth; Civil War in Nigeria – Audrey Chapman. I also listened to a lot of family folklore, and have read a lot of the excellent research by Nowa Omoigui

Stage 2

This timeline of the build up to war will deal strictly with indisputable historical fact, no opinions will shared, just fact.

The roots of the first coup were laid 52 years earlier when JD Lugard brought together disparate groups for economic reasons.

Like many other countries, in Nigeria, the Europeans did not give a toss about the ethnic or religious differences of the people. Unlike most other places which had one dominant group, Ghana for example has Ashanti, Nigeria had three dominant groups in one super country.

As at amalgamation, the Fulani and their Hausa vassals were 65% of the North, Igbo was 70% of the East, Yoruba, 75% of the West. Complicating things, was the British approach to administering these different regions. The north’s centuries old system was left largely untouched. In the West, the British ruled more directly, because while the Western peoples had monarchs, they were less subservient than in the north. However, in the East, the Brits had to disrupt the entire village system and create warrant chiefs. But, demographic and geographical factors meant that most Easterners moved out of their region, more than any other. Also, the Hausa-Fulani were largely Muslim, the Igbos (when the Brits arrived) were largely animists, the Yoruba were mixed. These differences, were enhanced by the British in their very successful colonial tactic of divide-and-rule. Christian missionaries were in many cases forbidden from proselytising Northerners by the colonial administration, while in the East and West, proselytising was in full swing, and many Igbos and Yorubas dumped their old religions to become Christian. As a result, cultural change which normally follows religious change was a lot slower in the North than in either East or West.

Added to this was that the North, till this day has a larger population than both East and West combined.

So as at the time independence came by in 1960, there were certain imbalances already deeply rooted in the system. First, the North, by virtue of its population, had a larger share of parliament, NPC had 134 of 312 seats. Also in 1960, the NCNC (representing the East), had 89 seats, while the AG (West) had 73 seats. The NPC needed a parliamentary majority, so formed a coalition with the NCNC, leaving the AG in opposition.

At independence, it was expected that Ahmadu Bello, the NPC’s leader, would become the new Prime Minister. However, Bello chose to remain in the North as Premier,and instead, sent his “boy”, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to become PM. Essentially, the North was “in-charge” of the country, but had a lower Western literacy-rate

*Note that I used “Western-literacy”, because the North till this day has a very high literacy rate in Arabic script, but that’s not the language of science, the language of science and business, and hence, academia, and “literacy” is English. Western-literacy rate circa 1960 in the North was 2%, in the South it was 24%, and this was a major imbalance. Most of the 2% in the North were not Northerners, they were Easterners, a veritable source for resentment. The implication of this was that a lot of the highly paid jobs in the North, civil service, medical, legal and technical, went to Igbo people.

Again, in the run in to independence, the East and the West led the way, but the North preferred a continuation of British rule for the reason given previously. When Anthony Enahoro moved for independence in 1953, it was opposed by Ahmadu Bello, because one of the things that the Enahoro group proposed, was breaking the regions up into smaller, more manageable states. Eventually, a compromise was reached and both East and West agreed to leave the regions be, and postpone the proposed independence date.

So, we were in 1960, and the dominance of Parliament by the NPC/NCNC coalition, now we will move to the West…

In 1962, the AG broke into two factions, one under Awolowo, and the other under Ladoke Akintola, the premier of the West. Akintola believed that the Yoruba were losing their pre-eminent position in business to the Igbo because of the NPC/NCNC coalition. He (Akintola) reached out to Balewa, and sought to have the AG join the coalition. However, Awolowo did not agree with Akintola’s moves, and tried to replace him as Premier of the West.

When the Western Parliament met to approve the replacement, Akintola supporters in parliament started a fight in which the mace was used as a weapon. Following that, it became impossible to reconvene the Western Parliament, especially since the mace had by this time disappeared.

As a result of the rioting, Balewa declared martial law in the West, had Awo arrested and charged with treason, and Akintola reappointed as Premier.

By the end of 1963, the country had become a republic, the AG had been manoeuvred out of control in the West, and Akintola’s faction had become the NNDP.

By 1965, Awolowo had been sentenced to prison for treason, and the elections of 1965 realligned the country, produciong a new alliance, NPC and NNDP. With this, the NCNC had no choice but to align with what remained of Awo’s AG.

During the elections of 64/65, there was widespread violence, rigging and rioting, particularly in the West where people refused to accept NNDP “victories”.

In all of this political confusion, the army was used to police the populace, and for the first time in Nigerian history, came in contact constantly with the people. The effect of this was that the frustrations of the people were felt by soldiers, and same soldiers became increasingly disillusioned with the government.

Starting in 1963, Emmanuel Ifeajuna, an Igbo officer had begun plotting to overthrow the government with Donatus Okafor, another Igbo officer. By 1965, they had brought in several other officers into their plot, most significantly, intelligence officer, Chukwuma Nzeogwu, also Igbo.

Just a quick aside about Nzeogwu, he had been born in Kaduna, spoke better Hausa than Igbo, and considered himself a northerner.

Being an excellent strategist, Nzeogwu took over the planning, and organised the exercise, Operation Damisa, to replace the “corrupt government” with Awolowo. The plan, quoting Ben Gbulie, was meant to achieve the following objectives:

-Chukwuma Nzeogwu, in Kaduna, to arrest (and kill if there was resistance), Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of the North.

-Tim Onwutuegwu, in Lagos, to capture and kill three top military officers – Gen Aguiyi-Ironsi, Brig Sam Ademulegun and Brig Zakariya Maimalari.

-Emmanuel Ifeajuna, in Lagos, to arrest (and kill of there was resistance), the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

-Emmanuel Nwobosi, was sent to Ibadan, his objective, to arrest (and kill of there was resistance), Ladoke Akintola.

-Adewale Ademoyega, was in Lagos, his objective was to arrest (and kill of there was resistance), the powerful finance minister, Festus Okotie-Eboh.

-John Obienu, a Major, also an Igbo officer, was detailed to go to Enugu and arrest or kill the Eastern Premier, Michael Opara. Unknown to his co-conspirators, he was having second thoughts.

-Ben Gbulie was in Kaduna, he was detailed to arrest Hassan Katsina, cut off communications and go to Kano to arrest Emeka Ojukwu.

-Another Igbo soldier, Udeaja, was meant to head to Calabar, and spring Awolowo from jail to head the new government.

The following people were killed during the coup: Tafawa Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Ladoke Akintola, Festus Okotie-Eboh, Sam Ademulegun, Zakariya Maimalari, Kur Mohammed, Ralph Shodeinde, Abogo Largema, James Pam and Arthur Unegbe.

The plotters failed to arrest or kill, Michael Opara, Dennis Osadebe, Aguiyi-Ironsi, Yakubu Gowon, Hassan Katsina, Conrad Nwawo, Emeka Ojukwu.

Because of the coup, the government collapsed, and the head of parliament, Nwafor Orizu, handed power over to Aguiyi-Ironsi, the head of the army. Ironsi quickly had the majority of the mutineers arrested, but failed to prosecute them.

He also inflamed tensions, by declaring Nigeria a unitary state, essentially doing one of the things that Ahmadu Bello kicked against in 1953. As soon as Ironsi established Decree 34, rioting broke out in the North, and this almost directly led to the counter coup of July 1966.

The subsequent massacre of Igbo people in the North, prompted hundreds of thousands of them to return to the south-east. The rest, as the cliche goes, is history. As I promised earlier, I won’t bore you with a blow by blow account of the war, yet!

Stage 3

My views and possible recommendations. Although not much, it will be a bit opinionated, so you can kill me if you want…

So, what have we learned? First, our country was not constructed for altruistic reasons. It was constructed to fill the British Crown’s economic needs.

This experience is not unique to Nigeria, or Africa. The Europeans did it across Africa, Asia and the Americas. However, countries that they settled en masse got a better deal. Hence Hong Kong, South Africa are better than India and Nigeria.

The most similar case to Nigeria is India, where at Independence, there wasn’t a dominant group. Both countries were set up to fail. However, in India, the shit hit the fan the day after independence, they went to war, and emerged as India, Pakistan and eventually, Bangladesh.

In Nigeria, we waited six years before melting down, and well, the TWO sides which wanted to secede did not. One lost, one was told to stay. Biafra lost the war, Northern Nigeria, which wanted to secede during the counter-coup, was convinced to stay by the British High Commissioner, David Hunt.

In my own not-so-humble opinion, I think that the window of opportunity to break Nigeria has passed, and passed for good.

This means that we are left with a broken nation, and this is no time to blame the Brits for our problems. Nominally, they’ve been gone for over fifty years!

So, how do we fix the myriad issues that Nigeria has, most of which are structural?

It all starts by being honest with each other. Mistakes have been made and to move forward, we must understand them. We must also identify the grave danger we currently face: Nigeria is undergoing a repeat of 1962-1965.

We can only pray that no soldier is thinking of a coup. Fact, is that in Nigeria today, IT CANNOT BE WELL EXECUTED. We can only hope that this will not happen, but the signs are all there, shifting alliances, rigged elections, violence, politicians who play zero-sum games, this is some really scary sh_t.

—————————

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail