A Crack in the Wall Coups succeed coups. This won’t be the end of it – Major Hassan Usman Katsina

It chronicles the early life of Nigeria’s very popular former head of state, his active days in the Nigerian Army and his involvement in the country’s politics and policies. This week, Sunday Trust brings the third part of our serialisation of the book, which was published recently.Muffet disputes that contention. He points out that although […]

It chronicles the early life of Nigeria’s very popular former head of state, his active days in the Nigerian Army and his involvement in the country’s politics and policies. This week, Sunday Trust brings the third part of our serialisation of the book, which was published recently.Muffet disputes that contention. He points out that although Nzeogwu was “the leader (indeed, the instigator) of the mutiny in Kaduna,” he was not “the brains behind the plot.”11 John de St Jorre supports Muffet’s view. He argues that “contrary to popular belief and Nzeogwu’s own claim, it appears that the original caucus did not include him. Majors Ifeajuna and Okafor (commander of the Federal Guard) were the principal plotters and they brought Nzeogwu – dubbed by one writer, ‘the Brutus of the coup’ – in later since they needed an efficient and strongly motivated man to direct operations in the north.” 12
Ojukwu also believed Nzeogwu did not lead the coup. He contended that “Ifeajuna led a group of young officers, mostly of the rank of major and below and attempted to take over the government of Nigeria. Nzeogwu, he said, was credited with leading the coup because of the broadcast he made in Kaduna. “He did not (lead the coup). He actually joined that group.”13
It is unlikely that the truth about Nzeogwu’s actual place in the coup plot will ever be known. He ruled the Northern Provinces for all of four days. His revolution ended. But he succeeded in locking up democracy. Aguiyi-Ironsi assumed power as Head of the Federal Military Govern¬ment and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The man who did not dream of power became Nige¬ria’s first military ruler.
On Monday, January 17, Aguiyi-Ironsi, accompanied by the head of the navy, Commodore Akinwale Wey, and the Inspector-General of Police, Alhaji Kam Salem, addressed a crowded press conference in the senate building, Lagos. He said that his “main concern is to restore law and order as soon as possible” and that how long he remained in power would depend on how long it took to return life in the country to normal. He set up the Supreme Military Council as the highest legislative organ in the country. Permanent secretaries functioned as both administrative and political heads of their ministries at the federal and regional levels. The former regional governors became advisers to the military governors of the regions. He appointed military governors for the four regions Major Katsina (North), Lt-Col Francis Adekunle Fajuyi (West), Lt-Col David Ejoor (Mid-West) and Lt-Col Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu (East).
Nzeogwu and the other coup plotters were arrested. Ifeajuna escaped to Ghana but was later repatriated after President K warne Nkrumah was also over thrown in a coup.
When the smoke cleared the scale of the killing of senior army officers by the coup plotters shocked Nigerians. In addition to the Sardauna, the Prime Minister, Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, his minister of finance, the flamboyant Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the premier of the Western Region, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, had all been killed. The toll in the army was also heavy. Brigadier Zakari Maimalari, Brigadier Ademulegun, Col Kur Mohammed, Lt-Col Yakubu Pam, Col R. Shodeinde, Lt-Col Abogo Largema and Lt-Col Unegbe were dead. Of the officers killed, four (Maimalari, Pam, Largema and Mohammed) were from the north; two (Ademulegun and Shodeinde) were from the west and one (Unegbe) was from the Mid- West.
III
The Nigerian ‘revolution’ took off on the wrong foot. This dramatic development in the politics of this country ran into a cloud of mutual suspicions. To be sure, there was some relief at the going of the politicians. Their excesses generally denied them public sympathy. But questions turned to the real objectives of the coup. Like most things in Nigeria, both the north and the south perceived the mission of the military in politics differently. The South generally welcomed it with unguarded celebrations. According to 8t de Jorre, “In Lagos and other major towns there were popular demonstrations expressing support for Aguiyi-lronsi’s military government.”14
The north was less jubilant. Its suspicion about the real motives of the coup was fuelled by several factors. The first was the region lost nearly all its senior military officers in the coup. They were Brigadier Zakari Maimalari, Commanding Officer, 2 Brigade, Lagos; Lt-Col Yakubu Pam, Adjutant-General of the Nigerian Army; Lt-Col Abogo Largema, Commanding Officer, 4 Battalion, and Colonel Kur Mohammed, deputy commandant, Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna.
The second source of suspicion by the north was that four of the five majors who struck were Igbo. Only one, Ademoyega, was Yoruba. It was easy for the north to put two and two together and arrive at the conclusion that the political dis-empowerment of the region was the real objective of the coup.
Aguiyi-lronsi’s policies did nothing to dissuade the north from this line of thinking. He had his own solution to the problems of the nation. One of these was to abolish federalism and replace it with a unitary system of government. On May 26, 1966, he issued decree 34 of 1966. The decree abolished the regions and unified the federal and regional public services. The former four regions were renamed groups of provinces. The Federal Military Government was accordingly renamed National Military Government.
Aguiyi-Ironsi believed he took the right decision because he was convinced “that the bulk of our people wanted a united Nigeria … (and) one government … not a multitude of governments.” He appointed a one-man commission headed by Francis Nwokedi on the unification of the public and judicial services of the centre and the regions. He acted even before Nwokedi submitted his final report to him.
The north was wary of the unification decree. What may loosely described as the first northern reaction to it came in a letter published to the New Nigerian, a Northern Nigeria government-owned newspaper, on April 19, 1966. The writer, Alhaji Suleiman Takuma, was a senior producer with the NBC, Kaduna. He objected to the unitary system an argued that it was best for Nigeria to remain a federation. He pointed out that “the mad rush of application letters for jobs” in the north from the southern provinces raised the worst fears in the north about the real intentions of the coup plotters. He told Aguiyi-Ironsi that “a unitary government (would) not necessarily unite the people of Nigeria.”
The head of state responded to Takuma the only way dictators do. He locked him up. Takuma must have correctly represented the feeling of the north. Three days after Aguiyi-Ironsi abolished federalism, protest riots broke out in Kano and quickly spread to some other towns in the north. The decree had grazed northern sensibilities.
The north had some genuine reasons to suspect that the unification of the public services was patently against its political and economic interests. The region lagged far behind the other three regions in Western education. It could not compete with them in a unified public service structure. As at independence in 1960, the north had only 41 secondary schools. The Eastern and Western regions had more than four or five times that number each. Here is a fair picture of the level of the disparity between the Northern and Western regions and what the north was up against: At independence, the Western Region had 1,250,000 children in primary schools; the north, the largest and the most populous region in the country, had primary school enrolment of only 250,000 children.
It was struggling to train indigenous administrative and other critical levels of manpower when the change of government interrupted it. The implementation of its northernisation policy was even affected by its lack of manpower. The south resented the domination of political power by the north before the coup. After the coup, the north feared the same thing from the south.
As Professor Jonah Isawa Elaigwu very well put it:
The concentration of political and economic power in the hands of southern leaders had titled the delicate Nigerian balance. Political power had been the north’s safeguard against the south’s economic and educational advantages. With the military coup … the Northern Region’s political advantage was destroyed. The South’s advantage in the bureaucracy (which, if anything, was strengthened in authority by the coup) was greatly augmented. Thus, the efforts to strengthen and unify the civil services came to have political consequences.15
Aguiyi-Ironsi blamed the riots in the north on unnamed foreign elements. He remained unshaken in his resolve to have one Nigeria, one government. The emirs and chiefs in the north sent him a confidential memo advising him to abrogate the decree, return the country to a federation and try the coup plotters for treason. He had, indeed, promised to try them for mutiny and treason but he did not. He also ignored the memo.
Had the head of state been sufficiently sensitive to the mood in the military, he would have realised that officers of northern origin were becoming increasingly unhappy with his molly cuddling of the mutineers. The mutineers continued to draw their salaries even in detention. This special privilege granted them fuelled fears among the northern officers that the head of state was privy to, and fully backed, the coup and, therefore, had no intentions of punishing his ‘co-conspirators.’
According to Danjuma:
We (the northern officers in particular) had expected the so-called dissident elements, as General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s announcement called them, to be tried. Then (the press) started saying the people who did it were national heroes and they should be forgiven. And the government was foolish enough to get carried away by it. It was an unpopular coup in the army because we said if you have to overthrow the government that is when you will need all hands on deck to run the country properly. Why do you have to wipe out half of the senior officers? These questions were not answered. Instead, we were subjected to all sorts of harassment. 16
At the time of the coup, Danjuma was a major and staff officer, administration, in army headquarters. He recalls that his “immediate boss, Col Pam, was killed in that coup; my former battalion commander was killed in that Coup.”17
The simmering feeling of discontent and betrayal among the northern officers was soon brought to a boiling point, thanks to their political education by the young northern bureaucrats. They educated the young northern officers on the implications of Aguiyi-Ironsi’s actions and how they affected the political and other interests of the north.
“They told us,” Babangida recalls,
that injustice was being done to the northerners. You could see a sudden awareness. Then they began to taunt us, telling us the Sardauna was killed, Balewa was killed, Maimalari and all those northern officers were killed. What were we going to do about it? There were publications in the New Nigerian along those lines. You could see a really orchestrated sort of thing. We were politically agitated.
According to Duba:
We were young officers and we were left without any reasonable leadership. At that time, officers did not care where you came from; whether you were Yoruba or lbo. All they knew was that you were a fellow officer of the Nigeri¬an Army. But then one night, we found out that one tribe, mostly lbos, woke up and eliminated northern or Hausa officers of the rank of major and above. That was the time we started thinking that something had to be done; something for the interest of this country, for the nation, for the north and for our own safety. And when the northern students in the universities, particularly at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, started this campaign of Araba, we had interactions with them and they told us that they could not just sit down when such a thing was happening to them. It was at that time that things like politics began to interest us.
IV
For most of the early part of 1966, Babangida was only part of the audience watching the drama. Nine days after the military took over, he enrolled in Course 38 of the Young Officers’ Course (ARMED C) in Britain where he received a four-month course in Saladin and gunnery. The course ended April 22. His confidential report from the course show that he was still having some problems with the weapons of war but he had begun now to influence others. He came ninth in the Saladin course. His senior instructor noted that Babangida was willing to invest extra time and energy in the course. “His general attitude to the course,” the senior instructor wrote, “and his time-keeping have been excellent and he has been an example to the others in his class.”
He did not do that well in the gunnery. Both the chief instructor of the Gunnery School and the officer in-charge of the Gunnery Wing, agree’ that Babangida was “a very cheerful and hard-working officer who achieved a satisfactory standard.” With a touch of a wry military humour the report went on to note that Babangida was” … a little uncoordinated and in practical work, seems to have more thumbs than he is really enti tIed to.” He took 17th.
By the time Babangida returned to his unit from the course, the political situation in the country was virtually racing towards a dangerous precipice. In only three months’ time, he would play his first role as one of the kingmakers in military politics in Nigeria.
Events moved rather rapidly in the army. After the May riots in the north, rurnours were rife in military circles. The rumours had two parts to them. One part was that northern officers were planning a revenge coup; the other part was that Igbo officers were planning another coup to finish up the ‘unfinished business’ of January 15. It would appear that both sides believed these rumours and did more than look over their shoulders.
Aguiyi-Ironsi was aware that esprit de corps, the bond of comradeship that holds armies together, was breaking down, thus occasioning these rumours. But he put it down to lack of adequate information on the policies of his administration. He decided to try and rebuild trust and confidence of the officers and men in one another and in his administration. He assigned the task to his chief of staff, army, Lt-Col Yakubu Gowon. It is difficult to establish how much Gowon did and to what effect. Perhaps, the Supreme Commander acted a little too late.
About the middle of July 1966, Aguiyi-Ironsi, pressing on with his new doctrine of one Nigeria, one people and one government, announced he would rotate the military governors by posting them to groups of provinces other than their own. Hitherto, the military governors were indigenes of the group of provinces they ruled. This posting would, in his view, be in accord with the letter and the spirit of decree 34 that recognised Nigerians, not northerners, easterners, westerners or mid-westerners. Interestingly, although the north interpreted this rotational policy as part of the plot to subjugate it politically, Murtala Muhammed and subsequent military rulers from 1975 adopted it.
The Supreme Commander began a tour of the country that month to sell his policies and programmes to the people prior to the reposting of the military governors.
V
By early July, the northern officers had decided on a counter-coup. The inner caucus was made up of majors Murtala Muhammed, Yakubu Danjuma and Martin Adamu. They opted for a pre-emptive action to forestall the alleged plans by their counters from the eastern group of provinces. Members of the inner caucus sent emissaries to northern officers in military formations in some parts of the country. Lt Ahmadu Yakubu was one of those emissaries sent to Kaduna. “We knew some¬thing was in the offing,” recalls Babangida.
Yakubu briefed the selected officers about the rumours they pick-up concerning alleged plans by their colleagues from the east. He said that the rumours were so strong that they could not ignore them any longer. They had lost once; they were not prepared to lose again, he said. After the briefing majors Abba Kyari and Musa Usman and Lieutenant Babangida, Sani Abacha, Yakubu Dambo and Garba Duba, were selected’ to co-ordinate what Danjuma admitted many years later as “revenge coup.” 18
Babangida nearly ruined the plan. Two days before July 29, the date set for the coup, he made “a slip.” He told Lt Abdullahi Ahmed about it. Madiebo, commander of the recce squadron, reported the rumours he kept hearing about a coup plots by northern officers to Lt-Col W. U. Bassey, Ademulegun’s successor as the brigade commander. Both of them agreed that Madiebo should nose around to find out if the rumours were more than rumours.
Somehow, Madiebo got lucky. Ahmed told him what Babangida told him the previous day. Bassey and Madiebo summoned Babangida. He knew he was in trouble because “they got to know that maybe, I knew something about it. They called me and I knew that I was going to be in trouble. So, I went and told them I didn’t have any idea of what they were talking about. I told them I was chatting with Ahmed when I told him of the rumour I heard.”
Babangida was subjected to a series of questions. He maintained his ground that he knew nothing about an impending coup. He heard a rumour and told his friend about it. And that was that. He was allowed to go but he knew he had become a marked man. He managed to get through to the co-ordinators and all of them went for a meeting at the Kaduna Gardens near the police firing range. There, he told the rest of the group of his encounter with Madiebo. The co-ordinators took whatever measures they believed were necessary to protect themselves. But they had no intentions of calling off the coup.
In continuation of his nation-wide tour to meet with traditional rulers, Aguiyi-Ironsi was scheduled to be in Ibadan from July 28 to 29. The coup plotters decided to begin the operation with his arrest along with his host, Lt-Col Francis Adekunle Fajuyi, military governor of the Western group of provinces. The first shots went off in Abeokuta. On the night of July 28, fighting broke out in the army garrison there. The garrison commander, an Igbo officer, was killed along with several Ibo soldiers. Lts Onoja and Ibrahim Sauda led the northerners.
Some published accounts blame subsequent developments on this incident by saying that it “beat the gun,” thus suggesting, possibly, that a date other than July 29 was chosen for the revenge coup. Nasko said that the incident “prompted the counter-coup planners to hasten action.” It is still not clear what exactly led to the fighting. Some unconfirmed accounts say that the garrison commander had called either a meeting or a party of mostly Igbo officers and that because of the growing distrust among the officers and men of the Nigerian Army, the northern officers interpreted the meeting or party as the final rehearsal for the second coup allegedly being planned by the Igbos. The northerners, according to this account, quickly decided on a pre-emptive action. They rounded up all those who attended the meeting or party and killed them. On the night of the incident, two northern officers, Captains Remawa and Bali, were said to have been locked up in Bali’s office, suggesting that either they were not privy to the incident or the other group within the northern group did not trust them.
The fighting in Abeokuta had immediate ripple effect in other military formations. In Ikeja, Lagos, “the Abeokuta fighting touched off an expected barracks revolt. Northern soldiers pounced on their Igbo colleagues and killed many of them.”19
In Ibadan, Danjuma and Lt William Walbe, took charge of the execu¬tion of the plan. They arrested lronsi and Fajuyi. The rest of that is now history. Lt Sani Bello, aide de camp to the head of state, was caught in a delicate balancing act. He is a northerner but he was not aware of the coup plot. When the shooting started in Ibadan, Bello took steps to protect the head of state. But he was more or less lost because he was a stranger in Ibadan. His unit was in Enugu before he became ADC to Ironsi. The only officer he could think of immediately was Lt Ibrahim Umar Sauda, his classmate in Bida. He telephoned Sauda in Abeokuta and told him: “Look, things are getting tough here.”
Sauda told Bello to hang on; he would drive his armoured vehicle all the way to Ibadan to help. That would have taken ages. Sauda remembered that Lt Mohammed Magoro and Captain Garba Dada were in 4 Battalion right there in Ibadan. Dada, who was the adjutant, was Bello’s senior in Bida. Magoro was his classmate. Sauda told Bello to reach them to see what they could do. Magoro had no telephone, so Bello contacted Dada who promptly took steps that, Bello says, saved his life.
Bello and an Air Force officer, Captain Andrew Nwankwo, who was also with lronsi, witnessed the death of lronsi and Fajuyi at an isolated bush on the outskirts of Ibadan. Col Hilary Njoku, who was also with lronsi, was said to have escaped with gunshot wounds.
It remains a painful experience for Bello. He liked Ironsi because he found him to be “very pleasant, a typical army man.” He said Ironsi “looked hawkish from outside but inside, he was a very soft person, a loveable man.” The head of state impressed the young officer, or as Bello referred to himself, “a miserable second lieutenant,” when he went for interview as his ADC. He was late for the interview but he was the choice of the commander-in-chief.
In Kaduna, as soon as word about the shooting in Abeokuta was received, the co-ordinators swung into action. They rounded up the southern officers, mostly those from the east and the mid-west. Most of them were course mates of people like Musa Usman, Hassan Katsina and Abba Kyari. Babangida himself had been pretty close to some of them too, having worked closely with them. The northern officers did not want to burden their conscience with the blood of their military colleagues. They decided to save them.
All the officers were herded into protective custody at Kanta barracks. A day or two later, the officers, worried stiff about their fate, asked Nasko if any harm would come to them. He assured them that as long as he himself lived, no harm would come to them. But one of the northern officers, Lt Yakubu Dambo, was conducting his own private war against the eastern officers. He went to them at the Officers Mess, Kanta Road, and persuaded them that they would be safer and more comfortable in the state house.
Dambo then sought permission from Kyari to transfer the men. Kyari, innocently, gave his approval. When they were being taken out, they expressed their gratitude to Nasko for saving their lives. Nasko was unaware of Dambo’s motives. To Babangida’s shock, Dambo had all the five affected officers shot at a spot on the Kaduna-Jos road. The next day, in an attempt to cover up what Babangida still regards as “a dastardly act,” Dambo floated a story to the effect that the officers had escaped and that someone had come with an aircraft to spirit them away. It was not a neat story. Dambo later confessed that the officers had been killed. Babangida’s first boss in the recce squadron, the man who took him under his professional wings, Captain Isong, was among the dead. Dambo was one of the early casualties in the civil war on the federal side.
Two hundred days after Aguiyi-lronsi took assumed office as Nigeria’s first military dictator, he was dead. The coup that brought him to power had given birth to the country’s second coup.