January 15th
1966 is a date that is indelibly etched into the national memory of Nigeria.
Under the pretence of a military exercise codenamed ‘Exercise Damisa’, a young
army major named Chukwuma Nzeogwu led a group of soldiers on a mission to
eliminate leaders of the civilian government which had ruled Nigeria since it
had gained its independence from Britain in 1960.
In the
Northern Region where he was based, Nzeogwu’s men assassinated the premier of
the region at his home with the same occurring to the premier of the Western
Region. In the then federal capital of Lagos, the prime minister was kidnapped
and later murdered. The casualties were not limited to the political class. The
mutineers also murdered senior military figures.
Later in the
day at 12 noon Radio Kaduna broadcasted a speech which Nzeogwu had
drafted. Speaking in the name of what he
styled the “Supreme Council of the revolution of the Nigerian Armed Forces”,
Nzeogwu declared a state of martial law across the Northern Region.
After, in his
words, “acquainting” his listening audience with the ten proclamations in the
Extraordinary Orders of the Day which the Supreme Military Council had
promulgated, Nzeogwu gave a rationale for the severe action he and his men were
taking. They are words which would have struck a chord among most of his
countrymen who listened to it and those who would later read a transcript of
his speech.
Our enemies
are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in high and low places
that seek bribes and demand ten percent; those that seek to keep the country
divided permanently so that they can remain in office...those that have
corrupted our society and put the Nigerian political calendar back by their
words and deeds.
But the major
and his fellow conspirators failed in their objective of securing the reins of
power across the country. While the north was firmly in his control, his
co-conspirators had not managed to secure the Western Region or Lagos. Little
verging on nothing had happened in the Eastern Region.
Into the vacuum
created stepped in the surviving senior military officers. The General Officer
Commanding the army, Major-General John T. Aguyi-Ironsi headed a meeting at
police headquarters in Lagos among who were Commodore Joseph Wey, the head of
the Nigerian Navy, and a number of army Lieutenant Colonels.
They
discussed a range of options including the restoration of civilian rule. This
was eventually ruled out because many at the meeting came to the conclusion
that such an action might have prompted another coup by soldiers who were
against the largely unpopular civilian government including those who may not
have been connected with Nzeogwu and his circle.
The decision
was made for the army to take over the governance of the country with its
priority been to secure a formal transfer of power from the surviving political
leaders to the military and the neutralisation of Nzeogwu who was threatening
to march against them from the North.
The former
was accomplished when the civilian Vice-President Nwafor Orizu, after
consulting with President Nnamdi Azikiwe who was abroad, broadcast the
“voluntary” decision of the cabinet to transfer power to the armed forces.
After a brief
stand-off, Nzeogwu decided to subordinate himself to the authority of Ironsi
and he agreed to be accompanied to Lagos where he was arrested. Ironsi formally
established a Supreme Military Council on 17th January and Nigeria’s
first republic officially came to an end.
At the time
of the mutiny, my father Emmanuel Oladipo Makinde had been serving in the
Nigerian Navy for two years. He had previously served as an auditor for the
Federal Ministry of Works before opting for a military career. He was
commissioned as a sub-lieutenant and was soon appointed as the Flag Lieutenant
to Commodore Wey.
Flag Lieutenant
is the naval style for what military services generically refer to as an
aide-de-camp. In this role, my father served as Wey’s personal assistant and
office administrator at naval headquarters. But during the heightened tensions
following the mutiny, he appears to have also functioned as a bodyguard.
For some
years, I had been aware of the film footage below via grainy and truncated
reproductions but did not make out that the naval figure wearing a holster with
his service pistol half-drawn was my father.
The news
report by Britain’s Independent Television News (ITN) which reported the
aftermath of mutiny captures scenes both inside and outside of the heavily
guarded Parliament Building in Lagos where Ironsi gave his first press
conference.
At the 19
second-mark he is hovering at a checkpoint while soldiers question the
occupants of a car attempting to enter the building. Then he can be seen
liaising with army guards before turning around and giving a whiff of a smile
in the direction of the camera when he realises that it is trained on him; this
at the 25-26 second-mark.
Later on,
when the senior figures in the Supreme Military Council have arrived and are
inside the building, the footage captures him standing behind Wey, hands on
hips and turning his head from one side to another as Ironsi fields questions
from a mix of local and foreign press correspondents; this at the 54 seconds-1
min. 7 second-mark. He is visible again at the 1:47-2:03 mark.
While many in
the Nigerian population initially welcomed the intervention of the military
into the sphere of governance, Nzeogwu’s attempted revolution succeeded in
creating an atmosphere of mistrust among the ranks of the military and among
the country’s multifarious ethnic groups. It would lead to a brutally contested
thirty-month long civil war and military rule for twenty-nine of the
thirty-three year period which followed.
The majority
of the conspirators in the mutiny including Major Nzeogwu himself were ethnic
Igbos. The fact that the overwhelming number of victims in the purge hailed
from the north and the west of the country led many to believe that the coup
had been tribally motivated.
While General
Ironsi, himself an Igbo, had not been privy to the coup, certain policies and
certain decisions which he would go on to make were interpreted as favouring
his kinsmen.
His
indecision about how to deal with Nzeogwu and his co-conspirators who were held
in various prisons, his approval of a number of promotions within the army and
finally his Unification Decree of May 24 1966 which altered Nigeria’s federal
system to a unitary one all contributed to the concatenation of violence which
spiraled into an armed conflict.
In May of
1966, a pogrom was directed at Igbo residents in the north. Then on July 29
1966, a second mutiny this time engineered by officers from the Northern Region
targeted their mainly Igbo comrades for assassination and a series of summary
executions were carried out. Major-General Ironsi met a gruesome fate while on
a national tour. He was assassinated in the city of Ibadan, capital of the
Western region.
The man who
emerged as the head of state was Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon, a Christian
from the largely Muslim north. However, the military governor of the largely
Igbo Eastern Region, Lt. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu refused to accept Gowon’s
authority.
A further
massacre of Igbo residents in the north in September of 1966 did not help the
situation and Nigeria, the creation of imperial draughtsmen, appeared on the
brink of splitting into its component parts.
In an attempt
to forestall this, the military ruler of Ghana, General Joseph Ankrah invited
Gowon, Ojukwu and other members of the Nigerian Supreme Military Council to the
city of Aburi for a peace conference held between the 4th and 5th of January
1967. Commodore Wey was one of the invited figures and my father, now a
Lieutenant, accompanied him to Ghana.
While Wey’s
square-jawed, focused demeanour suggested the quintessentially stiff upper
lipped military sort, he also had a gregarious and humourous side which he was
often prone to display.
My father
told a story about how Gowon and the rest of the military governors including
Ojukwu were sitting at the conference table waiting for their host-mediator,
Ankrah to enter the room to start the talks. As they sat in awkward silence,
Wey decided to break the ice. He brought out a large comb and while remaining
poker-faced began stroking his bald pate. Ojukwu, who had maintained an air of
solemnity and circumspect silence, joined in the ensuing laughter.
The following
archival footage of the aftermath of the Aburi Conference captures my father
looking on in the background as Colonels Gowon and Ojukwu toast each other. He
can be seen third from right from 0.22 to 0.30.
One of the
issues of the Aburi conference concerned the fate of Major-General Ironsi. That
he had been kidnapped and murdered by dissident soldiers just over five months
earlier was beyond doubt. The problem was that the succeeding administration
led by Gowon had made no reference to this fact and Ojukwu demanded that his
death be formally announced to the Nigerian public.
An
announcement was soon made to Nigerians and Ironsi’s remains were exhumed from
the military cemetery in Ibadan and transported to Umuahia, his hometown in the
Eastern Region. Commodore Wey led the delegation sent to represent the federal
government and once again my father accompanied him and witnessed the funeral.
While the
positive immediate aftermath of the Aburi Conference had raised hopes for a
peaceful outcome to the crisis in Nigeria, the catastrophe which it had sought
to avoid would come to fruition.
The Eastern
Region formally declared its secession from Nigeria on 30th May
1967. A “police action” mounted by the
federal government did not succeed in dismantling the rebel state of Biafra and
so a full-blown a civil war followed which cost the lives of millions.
The war
officially ended on January 15th 1970, precisely four years after
the fateful mutiny led by Major Nzeogwu.
Footnote:
My father
continued his professional relationship with Commodore Wey who was promoted to
Rear Admiral in 1967. Wey became the acting foreign minister which meant that
my father accompanied him on trips to destinations that including the Vatican.
The purpose of these travels was to drum up international support for the
federal government’s prosecution of the civil war.
After the
war, my father was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander in 1970. He was appointed as the Deputy-Defence
Adviser at the Nigerian High Commission in London, a position he held between
1970 and 1973. During this period he got to know Colonel Murtala Muhammed, a future
head of state who had led the second mutiny of 1966, while Muhammed attended the Joint Service Staff College in Latimer. In September 1975, soon after the coming-to-power of the military regime headed by Muhammed, he was appointed to a five-man panel tasked with grappling the post-civil war issue of Abandoned Properties in the three eastern Nigerian states which had comprised the old Eastern Region.
He was
promoted to Commander soon after his return to Nigeria and served as Director of Supply and Secretariat, alternating his base of operations between the Ministry
of Defence building in Marina Lagos and the base of the Western Naval Command
in Lagos’ Apapa district. He would later become the Director of Naval Logistics.
He retired
voluntarily in 1982 having attained the rank of Captain.
(c) Adeyinka
Makinde (2016)
