Wladimir Klitschko and Dick Tiger: Boxing, Nationalism and the Lessons of History



Dick Tiger (Left) pictured in 1968 in the army uniform of the rebel Republic of Biafra, and Wladimir Klitschko draped in the flag of Ukraine

“How can I think about boxing when the men and women of Ukraine are being murdered in Kiev?”

The speaker of these poignant words was the heavyweight champion of the world, Wladimir Klitschko to a British journalist while on a brief stopover in London.

They formed the headline for an extensive article in the Daily Mail at the beginning of March of this year and were made soon after the displacing of the elected government of Ukraine headed by President Viktor Yanukovych and its replacement by an interim government. This had followed months of protests at Maidan Square in Kiev.

Klitschko’s words and press statements over the course of the present crisis in his homeland are reminiscent of those of another world champion boxer of a generation ago, Dick Tiger, the Nigerian-turned-Biafran campaigner, whose ruminations and propaganda proclamations at the height of the Nigerian Civil War were reported in the pages of Western newspapers.

Tiger did not receive an extensive formal education. He had barely managed to complete his secondary education before assuming the life of an itinerant petty-trader and pugilist. He was also a naturally reticent person.

But he was intelligent. And as a champion fighter who was based in New York City, he became an articulate spokesman for the emerging nation of Nigeria which had been granted independence by Britain in 1960. To the revered boxing writer A.J. Liebling, his interviews invariably often bore the tones of a ‘chamber of commerce pitch’.

The Nigerian political class acknowledged his usefulness as a tool in promoting the image of the country by expending a large sum of money in staging black Africa’s first world title bout in 1963 in the city of Ibadan. His victory over the American Gene Fullmer brought messages of congratulation from sources including the figurehead of pan-Africanist thinking, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Earlier in the year, he had been awarded the MBE medal by the British Queen, and later on in the month of his successful defence against Fullmer, President John Kennedy thought it apt to inform the Nigerian prime minister with whom he was engaged in a telephone conversation that he was looking forward to “having Dick Tiger come over” to the United States

Tiger was very much the ‘pugilistic plenipotentiary’ as described by an American sports journalist.

Wladimir Klitschko in contrast to Tiger is educated to doctorate level.

His older brother, Vitali who recently relinquished his portion of the world heavyweight title, also holds a doctorate.

Vitali is a politician in the thick of events in Ukraine where he heads the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform party or UDAR; the acronym of which in Ukrainian stands for ‘strike’ or ‘punch’.

Far from being the uneducated, ‘punch drunk’ stereotypical boxer out of Palookaville, the brothers, erudite sons of an officer who rose to the rank of major general in the Soviet army, were beneficiaries of a middle class upbringing.

The sport of boxing has from the time of its origins at times provided a conduit through which rivalries between different nationalities and ethnicities have been played out.

But it has also served as a pulpit through which successful combatants have in times of crisis advocated nationalist causes and actively striven to create an awareness of the plight of their people.

For both Dick Tiger, nomme de guerre of Richard Ihetu, and Wladimir Klitschko, the celebrity and status which they acquired from being world champions have been useful tools in overarching campaigns which have drawn widespread sympathy.

Both situations; that of the Biafran and of the Ukrainian are firmly grounded on the thesis of being the underdog. Both make the case for a people being imperilled by a larger group.

In the case of Biafra, it was that of an alliance of rival groupings based on tribal allegiances aimed at frustrating the advance of a progressive and largely Christianized ethnic group.

This anti-Biafran coalition of forces allegedly had a strong jihadist component; it being the supposed resuscitation of the pre-colonial southward advance of the Sokoto Caliphate with its avowed objective of euphemistically ‘dipping’ the Koran into the Atlantic Ocean.

There was much to engender the world’s sympathy for the cause Dick Tiger sought to promote; namely the secession of the largely Igbo Eastern Region from the larger body of Nigeria.

In May and September of 1966, there had been pogroms directed against his people in the mainly Muslim Northern Region, and in July of that year an army mutiny saw members of the Igbo military bear the brunt not only of assassination and summary executions, but also to suffer barbarous forms of torture designed to inflict pain and humiliation before death.

So far as the Ukraine is concerned, the blame for the woes of that nation is firmly affixed on Russia and its tendency toward chauvinism. Be it through domination by the Russian empire in Tsarist times, the Soviet era of communism and now the post-Soviet era presided over by Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian view as espoused by Wladimir Klitschko is that of a domineering and aggressive neighbour which does not countenance any move by Ukrainian’s in the direction of what he terms, “peace, freedom and democracy.”

The narrative holds that efforts made to achieve a genuine level of independence through the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004 and the ‘Euro Maiden’ protests which have led to the new interim government have been actively and perversely challenged by Russia.

These have included covert actions, the manipulation of elections, the leverage of economic blackmail and the recent annexation of Crimea.

At the heart of these Ukrainian aspirations is to become more Western; a line which was also taken in the Biafran case to the world. In each situation, the idea is that of a group of people wishing to emancipate themselves from what they perceive as essentially backward-thinking neighbours.

Each cause has felt the need to be supported by the West to be of vital importance, and as in the case of Biafra which directed its propaganda machinery towards the Western media, so it is with Ukraine.

As Wladimir Klitschko put it to the Daily Mail:

I was there in 2004 during the Orange Revolution and I learned then that our fight for freedom is impossible without support and aid from the West, so while my brother has been in Kiev all this time, working day and night for three months with barely any sleep, I have been talking in the West and obtaining influential supporters.

Support, he claims, has been garnered from the likes of former US president Bill Clinton, the actors George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as the composer and producer Quincy Jones and Klaus Meine, the singer of the rock group, The Scorpions.

“Without (the support of the West), we would have been swallowed up by the East,” he added.

While Dick Tiger did not gain a commensurate level of high profile supporters, he was nonetheless instrumental in providing information and raising awareness of the plight of his people to sports journalists such as Robert Lipsyte and Dave Anderson of the New York Times and the New York Post’s Larry Merchant.

To Lipsyte he showed pictures of the charred remains of Biafran victims of Nigerian Air Force raids and it was Larry Merchant to whom he turned when after the capitulation of Biafra and stricken with cancer he wanted a neutral person to bear witness to Nigerian assurances that he would be allowed to return to his homeland unmolested.

A necessary and essential centrepiece of the efforts made by both fighters to get their point across is in the build up to and the actual defence of their titles.

For Dick Tiger, the build up to his world light heavyweight title defence against Bob Foster in May of 1968, was marked by a series of emotive interviews highlighted by those which he granted to the New York Times and Sports Illustrated.

On the night of the fight, he climbed into the ring with his robe emblazoned with the Biafra emblem and the national anthem of the rebel nation, words set to the music of ‘Finlandia’, Sibelius’ homage to Finnish resistance to Russian domination, was played.

But even after Tiger lost this particular battle in the ring, the propaganda war continued to be waged outside of Madison Square Garden. As the audience streamed out of the arena, they were greeted by volunteers from the Biafran Mission who gave them leaflets detailing the evidence they claimed of the genocide being perpetrated by the Nigerian armed forces.

The fight had been broadcast live in America and was seen by an international audience. It is precisely this sort of opportunity which Wladimir Klitschko is preparing to utilise when he fights Alex Leapai just four weeks before the scheduled presidential elections in May. As he told the Daily Mail:

This is not just another fight. It is my stage. I’m expecting the whole of Ukraine to want me to win for our country. More than 150 countries will tune in to watch the fight. I am working on a few plans to help my country in the build-up and on the night. Trust me; I can do a lot for Ukraine on the night of April 26.

Later, in a video widely circulated on youtube, he urged the Russian president, Vladimir Putin “not to repeat the mistakes of history”. It was an indictment of past Russian transgressions in invading countries within its sphere of influence; most notably those instigated during the Soviet era: the crushing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the neutralising of the Czechoslovakian ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968.

But there is another side to the arguments proffered by both Biafran and Ukrainian nationalists which nestled sympathetically into the ears of the Western media and public.

One crucial point relates to the historical basis of the existence of their respective nations. The other challenges each nation’s asserted right to pursue a course totally independent of the larger entities within which they belonged.

Nationalism is a phenomenon which invariably to a great degree is reliant on invented histories, and this factor is present to a remarkable degree in regard to both Biafran and Ukrainian claims to nationhood.

The claim made by the Igbo secessionists was that they were a kindred people whose unity and claim to nationhood was predicated on an ancient kingdom of Biafra.

Yet, claims of the existence of such a realm are doubted by serious scholars. There are no records, archaeological or otherwise, which can confirm this.  There is no oral chronology of its kings and queens. No accounts of how it was formed or of its system of laws.

The supposition that its name is derived from a composite of the words ‘bia’; Igbo for ‘come’ and ‘Effriam’ or ‘’Ephraim’, the Hebrew patriarch, together supposedly meaning ‘coming from Effriam’, is a fanciful contrivance locked into the recent historical phenomenon of those wishing to promote the thesis of the Igbos been a lost tribe of Israel.

The word Biafra, which was derived from the ‘Bight of Biafra’, can trace its origins to the language of Portugal. The Portuguese were the first European explorers to chart the coast of West Africa.

The existence of a vast kingdom as postulated by Igbo nationalists is suggestive of a people with a unified and cohesive past. However, the realities underpinning the modes of organisation of Igbo-speaking communities in the period before colonial conquest, was anything but the case.

Igboland was composed of an aggregate of separate villages and hamlets, the inhabitants of who ploughed the land, crafted tools and ornaments, and traded. The aspect of trading took on a grim tone with the rise in the demand for African slaves by Europeans.

The supply of slaves was facilitated by Igbos dominated by the Aro community and their attendant cult of the ‘Long Juju’. By the end of the eighteenth century, an estimated yearly total of 20,000 slaves were being sold by Igbo rackets dotted around the eastern Niger delta. 

The reality behind the often trumpeted allusion to a unified Igbo people was that the facade of unity was facilitated through the conquest and colonisation of their communities by the British who incorporated them into the southern protectorate of a polity they named Nigeria.

The existence of an historical state of Ukraine arguably fails to stand up to scrutiny. The name Ukraine itself, meaning in Russian ‘the land on the edge’ is suggestive of a smaller geographical component of a larger corporate entity.

Kievan Rus, the Viking created, medieval era centre of a collection of eastern Slavic tribes, which is located in modern Ukraine is the acknowledged birthplace of what came to be known as Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. However, it is a struggle to find any cartographical representation through the ages of a distinct and definable entity of a state of Ukraine.

What can be ascertained is that the area located on the Pontic step, that is, on the flatlands north of the Black Sea was subject over the ages to a series of occupations by different empires whose influence has shape and moulded what in modern times came to be conceptualised as a Ukrainian state.

That a dialect and culture bearing distinct divergences from its ancient Russian roots metamorphosed from these events cannot be denied. Starting with the Mongol invasion of the middle thirteenth century and continuing with overlord empires that extended from Polish, Hungarian and Austrian lands the division from Russia became in some ways pronounced and in others less pronounced.

However, the impetus for the actualising of a state of Ukraine arguably came from external sources. True, expressions of a Ukrainian entity as an autonomous body within the Austrian empire were the longings of some romantic poets and historians, but the actual idea of bringing the first Ukrainian modern state into being found its birth in the Imperial German High Command headed by Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff.

A central plank of German strategy during the First World War was Revolutionspolitik. This was a policy aimed at encouraging subversion and revolution in the vulnerable regions within the empires against which Germany was waging Welt Krieg.

A notable example of this was the facilitating of the bomb-proof sealed train which carried Lenin from Switzerland and across German territory. The intention was that the revolutionary would help foment chaos in Tsarist Russia and so give Germany an advantage in its war on the Eastern front.

The basis of creating a Ukrainian state was similarly rooted in the overriding plan to undermine the Russian Empire. The Germans scoured their prisoner of war camps for Tsarist troops whose birthplaces and dialects identified them as originating from the region from which they had earmarked to constitute the new state.

These POWs were given lessons in Ukrainian history, socialist doctrine and agronomy; useful for farming the land which they were promised would be confiscated from the large holding estates which would be broken up after the fall of the Russian Tsar.

The Germans financed the apparatus of propaganda among refugees from the area designated as Ukraine which included the publication of newspapers, pamphlets and books.

A Ukrainian Rada or council was created in Kiev under the auspices of the Germans in February of 1918. Thus a Ukrainian state was created for the first time as an ‘independent’ state which was a protectorate of the German and Austrians. The purpose of this state was to serve the material needs of the Central Powers who were suffering from the effects of an Anglo-American sea blockade.

The coal-rich Donets Basin was later added to the borders of the new nation again to service the needs of the German war effort and not by any popular will of the inhabitants.

This first incarnation of Ukraine did not last for long as the Bolsheviks and later the Poles carved up Ukraine into western and eastern parts until under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the Soviet Union extended its influence to the western part.

A second short-lived Ukrainian state would be declared in 1941 by nationalists including Stepan Bandera who along with his cohorts hoped for an alliance with the Nazi invaders who in accordance with national socialist philosophy ultimately aimed to make Ukraine into a German colony and turn its Slavic inhabitants into a slave class to serve the needs of Lebensraum or ‘Living Space’.

The other crucial aspect which impinged on the viability of carving a Biafran state out of Nigeria and one which similarly affects the idea of a Ukrainian state being totally divorced from Russian influence relates to the ethnic composition in both lands. There were geo-political realities which needed to be respected in the case of Biafra and which require the utmost attention in the case of formulating the basis of a viable Ukrainian entity.

Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu’s declaration of an independent republic of Biafra on May 30^th 1967 may have borne the trappings of justification given the horrors visited upon the Igbo people.

However, the designated Biafran state whose borders equated to the Eastern region which encompassed a range of communities of non-Igbo ethnic groups who did not want to secede from the Nigerian federation did not make the decision one of unanimous consent. Indeed, the act of secession offended minority groups who were fearful of Igbo hegemony.

Furthermore, the fact that the region contained a large amount of Nigeria’s crude oil reserves meant that a shooting war over resources would be inevitable.

The reasons for wars are never always clear-cut in favour of any of the protagonists, and the Nigerian Civil War is no different in this matter. However, one crucial point stressed by Colonel Yakubu Gowon who assumed the mantle of head of state after a counter-coup instigated by Northern military officers in July of 1966 was that permitting a Biafran state would have led to the balkanisation of Nigeria.

The country would have been in serious danger of disintegrating into warring armed camps with each group being backed by competing foreign powers. This stance was vindicated by the backing Nigeria received from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). 

The steadfast policy of this body was that whatever the severe problems caused by European draughtsmen who during the 19^th century ‘Scramble for Africa’ created a series of artificial states to suit their national interests, the breakup of these nation states was not to be countenanced.

In other words, the allowing of secession would only serve as a precedent for chaos and encourage latent separatist movements which the continent could ill afford.

Ukraine itself is a composite of different ethnic and linguistic groups which tend to be reduced to the western and eastern divide. The former were for lengthy spells under either Polish or German-Austrian influence and follow the Greek Orthodox Church, while the latter are Russian-speaking and Eastern Orthodox in denomination.

It is something of a misnomer to refer to ‘Russian-speaking’ since virtually all Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language. The Ukraine-born literary figure, Nikolai Gogol wrote his famous works in the Russian language and even an avowedly nationalist figure such as Yulia Tymoshenko admitted that she did not speak Ukrainian until well into her late 30s.

The overthrow of the Yanukovych government in February was greeted with alarm in the eastern part of the country when soon afterwards a proclamation was issued banning the Russian language in areas of the country. 

That Ukraine will not be able to survive governance by those with a rigid nationalist agenda became all too apparent by the secession of the Crimean region and the threatened secession of other parts of the east.

The viability of the state is clearly dependent on its relationship with Russia which has a legitimate interest in it for historical, cultural and geo-political reasons.

The ‘land on the edge’ with its flat surface that is bereft of natural defences has historically been the entry point of aggressive armies bent on destabilising Russia.

For instance, Crimea was attacked by France and Britain in the 19^th century, while in the following century France seized the ports in the cities of Sevastopol and Odessa during the First World War. In the 1920s, Ukraine became a battleground between the Polish nationalist regime of Marshall Pilsudski and the Bolsheviks.

Two decades later, it would also serve as an entry point for the German Wehrmacht after the launch of Fall Barbarossa and would be the staging post for furious battles between Soviet defenders and Nazi forces that included fanatical divisions of the Waffen-SS.

The measures taken by the European Union that are aimed at ensnaring the Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit of influence as well as the efforts undertaken by United States agencies in sponsoring the so-called Orange Revolution, and evidently, the recent ‘Euro Maidan’ protests together form an updated form of utilising Ukraine as a means of weakening the Russian state.

And so it stands to reason that Russia was not going to sit back until NATO established military bases and American nuclear warhead missile defence shields became deployed on a territory right next to theirs.

Wladimir Klitschko’s warning to President Putin about the need to avoid making the “mistakes of the past” bears thinking about.  But the thrust of such examination cannot only be focused on what are perceived as Russian mistakes, but also on Ukrainian blunders.

What lessons are there from history in regard to the expressions of Ukrainian nationalism?

The answer reveals a troubling and unappealing array of issues including a recurrent xenophobic sentiment as well as a tendency for the country and its people to be injured by foreign manipulations that have resulted from schemes encouraged by its nationalist activists.

A common thread running between the two short-lived Ukrainian states respectively in the early and middle parts of the 20^th century were the vicious pogroms executed against Jewish communities by followers respectively of Symon Petliura and then Stepan Bandera. 

It cannot have escaped the attention of the Klitschko brothers that the interim government installed after the overthrow of the legitimately elected government of Viktor Yanukovych is composed of members of the Right-wing extremist parties Svoboda and Pravy Sektor who are the ideological heirs of Bandera.

The leaders and followers of these parties are prone to making not only anti-Semitic, but Russophobic and anti-Polish comments and gestures. For instance, the leader of Svoboda is on record as having called for Ukraine to be liberated from what he terms the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”

They resent what is seen as centuries long domination by Russia and maintain land claims against Poland. The catastrophic famine which consumed millions of Ukrainian lives during the 1930s known as the Holodomor, they view as a deliberate policy engineered by the Bolsheviks in Russia; with blame also apportioned to Jews for having formed a significant proportion of the Bolshevik elite.  The figure of Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, is identified as the overseer of a diabolical plan by Stalin to destroy Ukrainian nationalism.

The true face of Maidan was not the beautiful young Ukrainian woman featured in a youtube video gone viral who dreamed of a future equating to Wladimir Klitschko’s hopes for “peace, freedom and democracy”; it was the balaclava-wearing fascist thug armed with a gun, a knife or a Molotov cocktail.

They had been detailed to serve as protectors of a hardcore of protesters -culled from the ranks of the unemployed and paid a stipend- who had been bussed into Maidan Square from parts of western Ukraine.

The number of portraits on display at the square during the protests which were dedicated to Stepan Bandera confirms him as serving as a sort of spiritus rector for these neo-Nazi enforcers.

The other warning from the past concerns the use by foreign powers of Ukrainian nationalists for their ends.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Bandera felt that he could forge an alliance with Nazi Germany as head of an independent Ukrainian state. If he was properly acquainted with the ideology laid out by Adolf Hitler in ‘Mein Kampf’, he would have been aware of Hitler’s dreams of Lebensraum in the eastern Slavic lands key among which would be the Ukraine which would serve as the ‘breadbasket’ of an envisaged German empire. As a Slavic people, the Ukrainians were designated as untermenschen; that is, sub-human under national socialist doctrine.

Unsurprisingly, the Nazis refused an accommodation.

Twenty-three years earlier, the creation of the Rada-led Ukrainian state by the efforts of the German High Command had been geared towards simultaneously weakening the Russian empire and meeting German needs.

The Germans effectively used the Rada as a tool to loot Ukraine in order to satisfy a shopping list which consisted of a million tons of grain, 400 million eggs and 50,000 tons of beef. There were also demands made for the supply of coal and manganese.

An analogy can be made today regarding the interest of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the United States-NATO in Ukraine.

There has been a great deal of evidence gathered over the past two decades that an overarching goal of the United States has been to contain and destroy the military capacity as well as the political and economic influence of what remained of the old Soviet Union.

In this regard, an understanding of the plan formulated by the influential US foreign policy thinker, Zbigniew Brzezinzki is essential.

These efforts have seen a missile defence shield program being implemented in nations bordering Russia as well as sponsored agitations including the financing through front organisations of the Orange Revolution and the Maidan protests.

In early February, wiretaps of Victoria Nuland, the US state department official, record her essentially picking the individuals who would later form the government which would succeed the one led by the soon-to-be-overthrown Yanukovych.

A serious argument can be made that the interim government and any succeeding pro-Western administration will like the Rada of the early 20^th century be utilised as foreign instruments –effectively puppets- who will be tasked to oversee an economic assistance package which will be tilted in favour of Western interests.

The role of an IMF funded bail out would inevitably lead to asset stripping ventures and foreign speculators buying out Ukraine’s industry and natural resources – much of which is concentrated in the Russian dominated regions in the east. The appointment of members of the Ukrainian oligarchy to positions of power notably in the eastern region, somewhat mirrors that of the composition of the Rada which was made up of figures from the property owning classes and the petty bourgeoisie.

One great lesson that ought to be learned from past mistakes in European history concerns that of entrusting the governance of a country to extremist figures. The Nazis who were allowed to form a coalition government in early 1930s Germany supplanted those who felt that they could be controlled and manipulated while in power.

The presence of groups designated ad ‘fascist’ and ‘neo-Nazi’ within the Ukrainian interim government is an altogether disturbing development and does not portend well for the future direction of the country.

The enterprise of Biafra supported by Dick Tiger ended in disaster because the leaders of his people failed to acknowledge the historical legacies and the contemporary realities which informed the capacity of the Igbo people to create and sustain a viable nation state.

They failed to arrest the perception that they were seeking to impose a form of tribal hegemony over other groups after the first army mutiny, led largely by middle-ranking officers of Igbo descent contrived a casualty list of politicians and senior military officers which was composed of victims drawn from the Northern and Western regions.

The assertion of a fundamentally anti-Christian strategy by the rest of Nigeria later touted by the Biafran propaganda apparatus did not measure up since many of the rank and file soldiers who staged the reprisal coup were Christians from the Middle Belt of the country and the man who emerge as the new head of state, Yakubu Gowon, was himself a devout Christian.

It was a war the Biafrans fought without any overarching philosophic idea which could have fostered alliances with other groups in Nigeria. It was also a war for which they were woefully ill-prepared and which they would go on to fight with limited means.

It was a war which sapped the spiritual energy and the finances of Dick Tiger who before he died would acknowledge that he had felt used.

At the height of the war in 1968 while been interviewed in the fatigues of a Biafran army Lieutenant, he had ruefully told the New York Time’s Lloyd Garrison that it was a war which the world did not understand and a war which the world did not care of:

I know that this is a forgotten war as far as the world is concerned. Nobody really cares about Africa. Nobody in America understands.

His final gesture before the collapse of Biafra was to return the MBE medal which had been bestowed to him in 1963 to the British embassy in Washington as a protest against the British government’s material and moral support of the “genocidal war against the people of Biafra.”

The situation in Ukraine for which Wladimir Klitschko hopes through his fights to serve as a symbol of national unity, is one which could degenerate into a civil war and even worse, to a Third World War.

His proclamation that “nobody should determine our future except ourselves” is, granted, an incontestable one. But it is also one which as history shows should be exercised with an appropriate level of prudence and political maturity.

These are qualities which appear to be lacking among the corruption ridden Ukrainian political class. It is a nation, which bereft of a lengthy period of self governance, should focus on building a national consensus and a proper political culture among its different ethnic and linguistic populations.

They need to create a national identity within which its political, economic and cultural interests can be accommodated within an arrangement which straddles both Western and Russian interests.

It would be an understanding which would likely bear the hallmarks of ‘Finlandization’, that is, an active form of neutrality that bars entry into the EU and NATO.

And to assuage the fears of the eastern provinces, it may need to embark on a process of constitutional reformation with the end of achieving a con-federal like system such as is practised by the Swiss.

But, importantly, such a framework must be effective in isolating, diminishing or, as best as can be hoped, eradicating from its political mainstream, those parties and politicians who feed on a platform based on Russophobia, anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalist sentiment.

It must be a framework which involves a grassroots originated settlement and not the sort which has typically been imposed from the top by people acting on the instructions of foreign powers.

It is the sort of transformative process; non-partisan, apolitical and shorn of the historically negative connotations of Ukrainian nationalism to which Wladimir Klitschko could lend his enormous prestige.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2014)

Adeyinka Makinde is a lecturer in law with research interests in intelligence and security issues as well as in the sport and culture of boxing. He is the author of Dick Tiger: The Life and Times of a Boxing Immortal and Jersey Boy: The Life and Mob Slaying of Frankie DePaula

COMMENTARY: Tony Benn and the Defeat of the British Left

After the death of Tony Benn, I find myself ruminating over whether socialism can ever prevail. By socialism, I refer to all parts of the political compass-spectrum from 'centre' Left to 'extreme' Left.

Tony Benn was an English aristocrat who found his political conscience from, I believe, the tenets of Christian Socialism - not Bolshevism, Trotskyism or other Left 'ism'.

When as a teenager I became aware of him from the early 1980s, it was clear that he was considered ‘hard’ Left and that the media and a lot of fellow ‘Old’ Labour party socialists were against him.

There was a tremendous battle between the political Right and the Left in the United Kingdom after the Second World War –maybe not as dramatic as places such as Italy and West Germany- but a battle nonetheless in which the Right-wing establishment prevailed.

The advent of the nationalising, welfare state-creating Labour government of Clement Atlee and the rise of trade union power led to the feeling among UK figures in the far Right Tory establishment, the security services and the military that Britain was “going Red”.

Some actually believed that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent who had assumed the leadership of the Labour Party by the grace of the Soviet’s ‘assassination’ of Hugh Gaitskell who seemed prepared to institute reforms of the sort not accomplished until the metamorphosis of New Labour.

The same sort of people also felt that Moscow was giving direct orders to trade union leaders to make Britain ungovernable.

The attempts to destabilise Wilson’s government in the 1970s by renegade members of the security services and threats from elements in the military to stage a coup d’état, as well as the tactics used specifically to destroy the power of the miners’ union during the strike of 1984 and the general laws passed by the Thatcher administration to curtail union power in general, show how far the Right was prepared to go.

And as a figurehead of the Left, Benn was a target. Apparently he was at one time marked down for assassination if he ever became the leader of an elected Labour government. It was alleged that Airey Neave, an establishment figure of the Tory Party with connections to the security services and military, had once issued such a threat.

Benn of course failed in his bid to become both leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party.

The advent of Thatcher, the defeat of the miners as well as the reform of Labour, which renounced Clause 4 of its constitution on social ownership, into New Labour confirmed the defeat of old-style socialism and its removal from the mainstream of UK politics.

Tony Benn obviously did not like the course New Labour took, but even if people on the Left are correct in their assumption that the mass of people have been brainwashed by the Althusserian-styled Ideological State Apparatus, it is simply the case that most people in the UK simply do not go for old-style socialism.

Will the patently obvious failings of deregulated state structures which have bequeathed the casino culture of profiteering bankers, corporate fat cats and the soulless, market-orientated league tables which determine areas such as health, education and law enforcement bring about a resurgence in classic socialist beliefs? For the moment it appears not.

The vestiges of a National Health Service, free education and social security system are in themselves symbols of a kind of triumph of socialism.

But they are all presently under attack under the pretence of austerity measures, the need for ‘efficiency’ and the apparently impossible financial burdens an ageing population would place on the state.

Also, the repressive features developed by many socialist regimes in power during the 20th Century, at the helm of which was that of the old Soviet Union, purportedly leading mankind into a communist utopia, were not a good advertisement for the cause of the Left.

I’m no ideologue or soothsayer, so only time will tell.

In the meantime, RIP 'Wedgy' Benn, you stuck to your belief system right to the end and your eloquence, humaneness and charisma mean that you will always be remembered.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2014)

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

The Ukraine Crisis: The Case for Russia

The narrative given by most mainstream Western media outlets in relation to the current crisis gripping the nation of Ukraine runs something as follows: A former Eastern Bloc country and subject nation of the old Russian Empire with yearnings for economic growth and democratic freedoms of the sort practiced by Western European nations experiences a sudden and popular revolutionary ferment and by means of a constitutional coup unseats a ravenously corrupt president backed by Russia which then mobilizes its armed forces to intimidate the military of its smaller neighbour which it ultimately threatens with invasion and occupation.

The subtext behind this appraisal posits the Russian Federation as headed by a former KGB ‘thug’ named Vladimir Putin; a man not so much as imbued with dictatorial tendencies (since that would pre-suppose that he had at least some redeeming democratic tendencies), but one who is comfortably and unabashedly authoritarian in nature; who sits atop a kleptocracy, where the operation of the rule of law is but a figment of the imagination of Russia’s present written constitution.

The threats supposedly posed to Ukraine by an aggressive Russian state is to many Western –and Eastern- European eyes redolent of the tactics utilised by the Soviet Union which was willing to trample under foot any dissenting nation wishing to jettison itself out of the orbit of its larger, more powerful neighbour. It was Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Soviet-era and it is Georgia and Ukraine in the post-Communist era.

The big, bold, bad bear of the east it would seem carries the same mark of the communist beast. It may have changed the colour of its fur but underneath it all it remains the same; something his critics are often quick to remind was confirmed by Putin himself when quoting him in 2005 as having said that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the century”.

That unflattering condensed portrait may be considered to be a faithful rendition of the orthodox view of Russia today.

But is it the whole truth? The Western eye has for long gazed eastward simultaneously perplexed and horrified by the foreign policy inclinations of the Russian state. In 1939, Winston Churchill characterised it as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

Yet, whether Churchill’s words were referring solely to the thinking behind the communist regime alone or, on the other hand, to an overarching, historically continuously unpredictable system of thought patterns held by successive Russian leaders, they spoke more from an instinctive standpoint rather than any form of enlightened and empirical examination.

To understand the present crisis in Ukraine just as should be the case in understanding any crisis of this sort, one must place it within its proper context: the historical, geo-political and economic forces which have collided to create the situation.

Thus, it is important to understand at least a distilled history of what makes Russia different from the West even after the fall of communism and the importance to Russia of Ukraine with which it shares a common border as well as a common heritage.

It is also of crucial importance to understand the long-term foreign policy objectives which the United States, at the helm of a military empire named NATO, is pursuing in relation to Russia, and, as far as can be discerned, the role of the United States and the European Union in colluding to precipitate the crisis that has ensued.

The meaning of Ukraine, literally ‘the land on the edge’, while suggestive of a patronising attitude and hegemonic policy is also informative of the Russian psyche of insecurity. Understanding Russian sensitivities about its security and the historical difficulties it has found in protecting itself against external aggression through its vast and open borderlands is of the utmost importance.

This also gives an idea about why the style of Russian governance has tended towards autocracy. Despite a post-communist constitution providing for a clear separation of the powers of state and guarantees of personal freedoms, Russia, while no longer subject to the totalitarianism of the Soviet era, is clearly far from operating along the lines of a liberal democracy.

But the claims by Ukrainian separatists that they are somewhat naturally inclined to practice Western notions of a representative democracy while the Russians are inherently receptive only of governance bearing the trappings of autocracy is a slanted and ethnicized perspective that is wide of the mark.

It is true that the civilization of Kievan Rus bore vestiges of consultative government which in the course of time could have metamorphosed into a fully-fledged democratic tradition, but it was a loose confederation of princely states including that of Novgorod – a state readily identified even by non-Russians with modern Russia- and cannot be claimed solely as the inheritance of modern day Ukrainians as it is also the inheritance of the Russian people.

An appreciation that Kievan Rus, part of which was situated in modern Ukraine, is the cradle of Russian civilization is thus critical in understanding the strong attitude held by Russians towards Ukraine.

The reason why Russia has a leader such as Vladimir Putin can also be explained by an examination of the past.

There have been several key moments in Russia’s history when it could have turned away from autocracy and leant towards notions of the law governed state of the sort which aspects of the governance of Kievan Rus promised.

But the Mongol invasion and crucial events such as the ‘Years of Trouble’ which followed the death of Ivan The Terrible, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the chaos during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin all played out in such a way that the need for ‘strong’governance came up trumps.

It is the fear of descending into chaos which has prompted acquiescence to ‘strong government’, in Russian parlance expressed as Zhelesyana Ruka (Silnaya Ruka) which roughly translates as ‘rule by the iron fist’.

Such mentality is at the heart of the formation of Russia given that the chronicles state that the feuding eastern Slavic tribes invited Rurik, a Viking king to rule over them so that order and not chaos be allowed to prevail.

It has even been argued that the legacy bequeathed to Russia by Mongol invasion and governance; that of autocratic rulership, is somewhat analogous to the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.

If an increasing number of Russians are privately tired of Putin being at the helm of the affairs of state, most are still thankful for the decisive role that he played in bringing order to the chaotic state of affairs which resulted during the post-Soviet era when Boris Yeltsin occupied the presidency.

It was during Yeltsin’s time in office that assets of the Soviet state were sold off at knockdown prices and acquired by those who became known as the ‘Oligarchs’.These men perpetuated their wealth through fraud, bribery and murder.

They enriched themselves while the vast majority of ordinary Russians, totally bereft of a protective state apparatus, desperately improvised the means of ensuring their survival. In the chaotic transformation from the controlling Soviet state to an unregulated free-for-all, cowboy state of laissez faire economics, many literally starved to death.

It was Vladimir Putin, the anointed successor of Yeltsin, who put a stop to this state of affairs. The rape of Russia’s economy and the plundering of its assets, a great deal of which were secreted outside the country was brought to an end. The economy was stabilised.

Putin then took on the Oligarchs. His message was blunt, “You can keep your ill-gotten wealth, but do not interfere with the political direction of the country.” Those who did not heed this warning like Vladimir Guzinsky and Boris Brerezovsky were forced to flee the country, while others such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky at one time reputed to be the richest man in Russia and the head of the Yukos Energy Corporation was stripped of his wealth and Yukos nationalised.

While the West viewed his actions against Khodorkovsky as having been in contravention of the norms of due legal procedure, many Russians applauded Putin’s actions as those of a patriot who was standing up for Russia’s interests.

With Khodorkovsky at the helm of a body controlling a vast amount of Russia’s natural resources parts of which potentially, perhaps even inevitably would be sold to Western commercial interests, Putin was not going to countenance the control of these resources effectively falling into the hands of foreign interests.

The need to protect Russia from external efforts geared towards its destabilisation and potential domination by the West is based on fears which are not ill-founded.

There is evidence that the thrust of American policy towards Russia is based on a desire on the part of the United States to effect the destabilisation of the Russian Federation as a continuum of objectives conceived at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

A plan formulated by the influential political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski involved a strategy aimed at containing and then destroying the military capability of what remained of the Soviet Union. The idea would be that Russia would be reduced to a peripheral status which would be used to service the energy needs of the West.

There had been an agreement between James Baker, the US secretary of state of the day and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader that in return for allowing East Germany to re-unite with West Germany, NATO would not extend its reach into Eastern Europe. This agreement was of course not adhered to.

Russia has seen NATO and the European Union expand their spheres of influence by co-opting most of the Eastern European states which were members of the Warsaw Pact and is naturally wary of having NATO bases right on its perimeter.

That the conflict between Georgia and Russia was set up by the West to test the resolve of Russia is now beyond any doubt. Mikheil Saakashvili, the irascible Georgian leader prompted an incident which led to a short, sharp and brutal beat down by the Russian military.

The incursion into Georgia and the threatened incursion into Ukraine, while seeming to be aggressive manoeuvres by Russia are arguably defensive measures. The fears that the Bolshevik regime had about Western capitalist encirclement is replicated contemporarily by the actions of the United States which Russia views as aggressively pursuing a similar policy.

America’s deployment of nuclear defensive shields in locations such as Poland, Bulgaria and Turkey which the United States reassures Russia is aimed at defending against Iran’s non-existent nuclear capability, as well as from rogue missiles launched from North Korea, must be taken into account when judging Russia’s actions. Such assurances are clearly disingenuous as the reality of their being deployed against Russia would be apparent to any neutral bystander.

Indeed, putting American sincerity to the test, the Russians offered to share the burden of placing radar technology in Azerbaijan on the Russian border with Iran, but this offer was met by a resounding silence from Washington.

The implications of such a policy are clear: That the United States seeks to create an advantage in the ultimate scenario; namely that in a war with Russia, it will have the capability of mounting a first strike at a nuclear armed rival with the assurance that it will be protected from retaliatory strikes.

It is arguably a dangerous policy which on examination presents the United States in the mould of the aggressor rather than a party on the defensive. The danger here is that as the United States nears a the situation where Russia becomes locked in by the Ballistic Defence Shield programme, the Russians will be tempted to use a pre-emptive strike option if and when it is drawn into a grave crisis with the United States.

Lacking a significant access to sea routes on all points of the compass, the crisis in Ukraine affects Russia’s vital interests to the extent that any threat that it could be severed from the only route that it has to the Mediterranean ocean is one which cannot be countenanced.

Russia believes that it is being targeted because it is the only country other than China which is capable of defying the United States and which in fact has frustrated American goals on a number of occasions.

Russia stood by while the United States and NATO waged an illegal war of aggression against Iraq and looked on wearily as it invaded a country near its borders: Afghanistan.

The Russians were clearly duped by the United States into supporting the United Nations resolution which led to NATO’s war in Libya, ostensibly conducted to protect innocent civilians from being slaughtered but in actuality a pre-designed plan geared to effect the overthrow of Colonel Muamer Gaddafi.

Putin’s sleight of hand in diffusing imminent American military action against the forces of the government of President Bashar Assad in Syria was an excellent demonstration of statecraft which frustrated the objective of giving advantage on the field of battle to the so-called Free Syrian Army action and other avowed Islamist insurgents and not the publically stated aim of protecting innocent civilians or of punishing the regime for unleashing chemical weapons, which were blamed on the Assad government, but of which no tangible evidence of the Syrian government’s culpability has been presented.

The Russians were not going to be fooled again.

As with the case of Georgia, there is ample evidence available which makes it clear that the crisis in the Ukraine was a manufactured event bearing the hallmarks of manipulation by the United States.

What effectively can be considered to have been a coup d’état against an elected leader was executed against President Viktor Yanukovych between February the 21^stand the 23^rd.

It was a culmination of a prolonged period of agitation referred to as the ‘Euro Maiden’protests which despite the impressions given by the Western media was not a widely supported movement and in fact was spearheaded by a hardcore of far Right radicals including members of a neo-Nazi militia named Pravy Sektor (‘Right Sector’) who with the connivance of the main opposition parties were tasked with protecting a rent-a-crowd brigade drawn from the ranks of Ukraine’s unemployed who were bussed in from areas around the country.

When events took a more violent turn, Pravy Sektor members armed with guns, laser weapons and Molotov cocktails were at the heart of it. This was a deliberate escalation designed to portray disorder and a sense that things were out of control to discredit the Yanukovych government.

Most Ukrainians, whatever their ethnicity and apathetic about the state of affairs of their country, simply were not a part of the protests.

Yanukovych, whose election was considered legitimate according to independent election monitors, was removed by means which did not follow the procedure for presidential impeachment as laid down in the Ukrainian constitution.

It was a coup which was apparently encouraged by the United States government; evidence of which surfaced through the dissemination of intercepted wiretaps of an early February conversation between Victoria Nuland and the United States ambassador to Ukraine.

The footage catches Nuland in her inelegant brand of English decrying the caution of the European Union in their attitude to the Ukrainian issue. It is apparent that she felt that that institution was not being forceful enough in persuading the Yanukovych government to bow to Western pressure to move away from Russian influence.

But Nuland was not only raging about the EU’s lack of aggression. She can be heard to be actually handpicking the people who would become members of the so-called ‘interim government’ installed after the overthrow of the Yanokovych government.

The sight of United States government figures such as Nuland and Senator John McCain meeting with opposition figures and giving succour and encouragement to anti-government protesters bear witness to its blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation.

McCain himself is a representative of the International Republican Institute, a body created under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy during William Colby’s tenure as head of the Central Intelligence Agency which has a remit to do what the CIA did, namely that of instigating regime change, only through private means.

The IRI may be one source through which the funding of foreign groups opposed to governments not to the liking of the United States can be channelled. And if not providing funding, since there are Ukrainian opposition figures with huge amounts of wealth available to perform such task, it can provide the necessary directions in terms of strategy.

The United States certainly has a history of financing destabilisation in Ukraine. NGOs such as Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy utilized funds emanating from the government and channelled them around the country in order to foment what came to be known as the ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2004.

Another disclosure adding great weight to the belief that the series of events leading to the removal of Yanukovych were planned and executed by covert actions is that of the intercepted telephone conversation between Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister who had recently been in Kiev, and Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign minister.

In it, Paet informs Ashton that the sniper killings in the square which had been the focus of the protests had been carried out by “someone in the new coalition”. The snipers were shooting at both police and protesters. This is the classic modus operandi of a secret third force mounting a ‘false flag’ operation and seeking to discredit an opponent by laying the blame on them.

Keen on putting up appearances before the foreign news media, Yanukovych had actually restrained himself from taking a hard-line against the protesters by sending the police out to confront the protesters unarmed, a fact to which he alluded during this last press conference.

However, events eventually overwhelmed Yanukovych who lost his nerve and fled. He was presumably threatened and reached the conclusion that his safety could not be guaranteed if he continued in office.

The fear which presumably overcame Yanukovych becomes appreciable when considering the sort of people now ascended to the interim governance of Ukraine. And it is all the more disturbing that the United States and the European Union have failed to publically register their protests, or at a minimum, to express concerns about the appointment of those whose political stripes bear the unmistakable marks of the extreme political Right.

While Russia has placed a great deal of focus on the presence of xenophobic and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis among the appointees to the new government, the United States appears to be downplaying these concerns.

For instance, the new minister of defence belongs to Svobada, meaning ‘Freedom Party’, whose members are the spiritual disciples and worshippers of Stephan Bandera, the World War Two-era Ukrainian fascist leader who headed the Galician Division of the Waffen SS. The leader of Svoboda has in the past talked about liberating Ukraine from what he described as the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”

Yet, Victoria Nuland, herself Jewish, happily consents to pose with the leader of this party. And Senator McCain who shamelessly posed with members of the imported, mercenary death squads in Syria does the same with Svoboda Party members.

The present state of affairs has an element of the surreal about it. It all seems rather strange when, as reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Israeli Army veterans instructed by Svoboda activists are leading street-fighting units in clashes with law enforcement bodies during the agitations which led to the overthrow of an elected government.

The members of Pravy Sektor and Spilna Sprava which Israeli news outlets have described as “Fascist” and “neo-Nazi” have met with the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine to give assurances that they are “no longer anti-Semitic”.

The United States, of course, has a history of dallying with extremist groups in order to combat those who stand in opposition to its objectives. It utilised neo-Fascist groups in Western Europe via its Gladio operations to neutralise the influence of the political Left during the Cold War-era and more recently, has given support to Islamist groups in the Lebanon, Libya and Syria in order to pursue overarching foreign policy objectives.

The presence of neo-Nazi elements who are also Russophobes naturally strikes a chord of concern among the ethnic Russian population. One of the first decisions of the newly installed government was to ban the use of Russian in parts of the country. Ethnic Russians are unlikely to have their confidence reposed in the minister for food and the anti-corruption minister who are Ukrainian ultra-nationalists.

The Russian decision to intervene in order to protect the ethnic Russian population, while difficult to justify under the strict tenets of international law, does have more than a veneer of justness about it given the illegal removal of a head of state and because of the genuine fears held by a section of the population.

The intervention in foreign nations under the ‘Right to Protect’ doctrine is admittedly a policy utilised by Adolf Hitler regarding ethnic German populations in the Sudetenland and Danzig. However, it was revived in recent times as a legitimate basis for the sanctioning of foreign intervention by the United States.

The coup against President Yanukovych was a concoction encouraged, and from the chronology of available evidence, engineered by the United States and the European Union. The deadline given by the EU to Yanukovych concerning the offer of a bailout was designed to precipitate the unrest that transpired.

It was not a popular wave of unrest which caught on to 45 million Ukrainians who are concerned about the levels of corruption across the political class of their nation. This has contributed to the economic malaise which may be set for an even worse turning due to Western efforts in removing an elected government and installing an unelected one.

Russia is unlikely to step in to bail out Ukraine given the recent course of events. The economic deal that Ukraine has with Russia is a largely fair one which takes Ukrainian interests into account including a subsidy in the cost of gas.

The International Monetary Fund on the other hand can only offer Ukrainians a dose of painful austerity measures: the removal of gas subsidies, a cut in pensions and a devaluation of the national currency.

The EU would also be unlikely to provide a panacea for Ukraine’s financial ills. With bailouts given to Greece and Portugal and with the economies of Italy, Spain and the Netherlands looking distinctly shaky, support from member nations of a substantial package to Ukraine would be lacking.

The United States, itself under strict self-imposed budgetary constraints, is unlikely to come to the rescue given the difficulty of justifying such aid in a situation that is largely of its making.

The wider, long-term solution to this geo-political quagmire surely lies in steering a course which sees Ukraine develop along the lines of Finland during the Cold War-era. The Fins supported Nazi Germany when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union which led to Finland acquiring Russian land.

The deal reached after the war’s end, and one which endured and from which both nations profited, was that in return for Soviet respect for Finnish sovereignty, they were to remain neutral: not to join NATO or the Common Market and to renounce claims on Russian territory which in effect led to an effective marginalising of Finnish ultra-nationalist groups.

In the same way, Ukraine should give up hopes of NATO and EU membership and marginalise those far Right and ultra-nationalist groups which are being given a say in the running of its government.

At the same time, the United States should cease its efforts geared towards destabilising Russia’s borderlands. The sanctioning of the coup in Ukraine in which ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis are given significant access to power has nothing to do with the urge to spread freedom and democracy and everything to do with an overarching policy of diminishing Russian power and influence.

There also needs to be an open public debate in the United States regarding the spread of the ballistic defence shield program which would enlighten the American public about the offensive capacity that it poses to a potential Russian foe and hence, the inherently mistrustful atmosphere that pursuing this provocative policy will continue to breed.

There are a number of geo-political situations which conceivably could lead to a World War Three situation, and the United States long-term policy toward Russia is one of them.

(C) Adeyinka Makinde (2014)

Adeyinka Makinde is a London-based writer.

Friday, February 13th 1976: Remembering the Day General Murtala Muhammed was Assassinated

General Murtala Ramat Muhammad

The first inkling that I had of anything occurring that was out of the ordinary was when a teacher entered our classroom to whisper a cache of words into the ears the teacher who was writing on the blackboard.

It might have been a geography class and the person instructing class 5B that morning of Friday the 13^th at Command Children’s School, Ikeja may have been Miss Essien. She remained still as a look of concern came over her features.

The lesson resumed, but then another teacher entered to quietly exchange words in front of the class as we looked on in perplexity.

An announcement was soon made for all the pupils to gather in the assembly hall. We trudged there in orderly formation in our all-green uniforms which on this day would not be bearing the brunt of the wear and tear of children’s horseplay at our break times.

There would be no football today, no rolling around in the grass or jumping from the concrete edifices that seemed plentiful at our site, a second establishment of the formerly named Army Childrens’ School.

In the teeming assembly hall, the wall of sound quickly evaporated as our headmistress, the sternly and formidable Mrs. Kukoyi regretfully announced an astounding piece of news: school hours would not be going the full distance on this day.

We were we were grouped according to our standard transport arrangements. Those of whose parents served in the Nigerian Navy had a special school bus which every morning would make a journey from the Naval Dockyard in Apapa, stopping at a number of residential districts and military barracks before heading northwards onto our school which was situated within an army cantonment.

I remember it as something of a lengthy stay in the assembly hall before we embarked on our strange, almost surreal mid-day journey back to our homes. The roads were clear and the journey home exceptionally fast; this, a remarkable thing in the normally chaotic circumstances of Lagos city traffic. Something was definitely in the air. But what it was, I don’t recall being told either at school or in the bus.

No specific announcement had been made about the reason for this masterpiece of confusion. But at home it was finally mentioned to me that a military coup was underway and it was not certain who would emerge as the leader of the country.

The previous July, during the school holidays, a ‘bloodless’ coup had taken place. General Yakubu Gowon who had become the head of state back in 1966, had been overthrown while attending a Commonwealth nations summit in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda.

The import of a second coup occurring after only six months was not lost on my young mind. Nigeria was the as it is now a volatile country and as a current affairs-following and history-obsessed youngster, I was well acquainted with the fact that two army mutinies in 1966 had led to a protracted, bloody civil war which began in 1967 and ended in1970.

The cantonment on which our school was situated, I would learn later, had been a staging post in the macabre events of the second mutiny of 1966. This was the counter-coup staged by officers and men from the Northern Region and led by Lt. Colonel Murtala Muhammad who had succeeded General Gowon in 1975.

The Ikeja cantonment was one of the sites where the Notherners had seized the keys to the armouries and exacted what they considered to have been justified retribution against Eastern Region-originated soldiers for the earlier mutiny which had claimed a disproportionate amount of political and military figures from their region. The victims, drawn mainly from the Igbo ethnic group, were subjected to various acts of torture and summary execution.

From my window view on the bus heading home that mid-day, all had seemed quiet. I did not notice any tanks or armoured carriers or columns of troops at any point from our departing the cantonment or on the roads and flyways which led home.

At some point, as the day drew on into night, the news flittered through that General Muhammad had been ambushed and assassinated by a group of military officers earlier that morning while on his way to work.

This was shocking, frightful news.  I remembered the morning just over a week earlier leaving home to wait for the school bus as my father sat in his naval uniform watching the loudly calibrated TV set while Muhammad delivered a national broadcast announcing his intention to create an additional seven new states to Nigeria’s twelve. My father had worked with Muhammad a few years earlier while posted to London as the Deputy Defence Adviser at the Nigerian High Commission.

Muhammad had been a genuinely popular Nigerian leader. His style reeked of simplicity. He dispensed with the extravagant ritual of travelling with motor cycle outriders and sirens blaring. The Mercedes Benz staff cars utilised by senior military officers were by edict replaced by the more modest Peugeot 504.

He projected a determined, no-nonsense approach to the affairs of the state. This was encapsulated in his inaugural address to the nation when he asserted that “this government will not tolerate indiscipline. This government will not condone abuse of office.”

He was bold in his policies such as the sacking of thousands of civil servants to promote efficient governance and the retrenchment of many soldiers of Nigeria’s heavily swollen and unsustainable post-civil war army.

“Gone are the days when we will ever bow to any so-called super power,” he defiantly intoned at an Organisation of African Unity conference held in Ethiopia in January of 1976.

Africa had come of age Muhammad had insisted, and his support of the Soviet-backed, Marxist MPLA party of Angola was hugely influential among the African nations, although it brought with it expressions of concern from the United States. Nigeria’s support for the frontline states which bordered Apartheid South Africa became more pronounced under his regime.

But as I grew older and learned more of him there were disturbing aspects to the man who I had grown to idolise. The second mutiny which he had led in July 1966 had witnessed the slaughter of a great many soldiers and civilians from the Eastern Region.

During the ensuing civil war, it is acknowledged that the massacre of civilians in Asaba, a part of the former Mid-Western Region which was populated by ethnic Igbos had been conducted by troops under his command.

There were claims that for all his later battles against Nigerian corruption, he had enriched himself by lootings which had occurred in the Civil War. Muhammad filed a libel action which was pending at the time of his death.

Yet, the reputation of Muhammad appears largely undimmed now as it was in the aftermath of his death. The international airport at Lagos, not far from my old school, is named in his honour. And the 20 Naira note of the Nigerian currency is adorned with his portrait.

I recall seven days of national mourning during which the regular pattern of TV programming was cancelled and mournful music was played on largely static TV broadcasts which bore his portrait and later pictures of the arrival of his body in his native Kano for burial according to Islamic rites.

I had been greatly excited by the visit of Pele, the legendary Brazilian footballer, to Nigeria. He had been due to play in a special match on Saturday, February 14^th between the nations two top teams, Enugu Rangers and the Shooting Stars of Ibadan. The idea, if I correctly recall, had been to play for both sides during each half.

In the following weeks came the public executions. These were common enough spectacles for Nigerians during the post-civil war crack down on armed robbery when the convicted were tied to posts behind which were placed sand-filled drums and shot to death by a firing squad at Lagos’ Bar Beach.

The first batch of those who were condemned to death by a military tribunal included Major General Illiya Bisalla, the minister of defence, whose features were mutilated by a team of overzealous executioners. The second, in May, featured the key putchist Lt. Colonel Buka Suka Dimka, an officer of the Army Physical Training Corps, who had made an eccentrically-laced broadcast which purported to impose a curfew from “dusk to dawn”.

After the coup had been crushed Dimka had been apprehended, it was alleged, while slightly the worse for drink and in the company of a “lady of ill-repute.”

In the coming months, there would be numerous commemoration items: mugs, tea sets, plates, photographs and the like. I wore a much cherished T-shirt with his uniformed visage. A couple of years later as a secondary school pupil, I would make a trip to the national museum where his bullet-ridden black Mercedes Benz had been put on display.

What I came to understand as time developed was how important a figure such as Murtala Muhammad can be to a relatively young, turbulent and fractious nation such as Nigeria. If he himself had been at the centre of the ugly and destructive series of tribally motivated bloodlettings in the 1960s, the purposeful course of his brief time in power may have been partly motivated by a need to make amends.

There were mistakes no doubt. He was by nature an impatient man and for some who had known him intimately, his war against indiscipline was tinged with deep irony because they detected in aspects of his character a lack of discipline.

What his guiding principles were in terms of an overarching philosophical viewpoint are not known. He was trained in the field of soldiering and it was the accident of Nigeria’s history that he was earmarked to play a key role in its political evolution.

But from his deeds including the decision to weaken the hold over Nigeria by the three old regions, we can assume he was a nationalist by sentiment, and his role in defying the wishes of the United States over Angola, that he was pan-Africanist in his foreign agenda.

It is only within the realms of imagination and guesswork that we can contemplate on what he might have achieved had he lived and applied himself longer to his role as the leader of a nation.

But it is fair enough to say that Nigerians have often felt that all the leaders who have followed in his wake have lacked the sort of purpose, the resolve and dynamism required to take the troublesome Nigerian bull by it horns.

The more reason why I ruefully remember the day Muhammad died thirty-eight years on.

(c) Adeyinka Makinde (2014)

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London.