British secret files on Nigeria’s first bloody coup, path to Biafra

Major Donatus Okafor, the officer commanding the Federal Guards was tasked with the assassination of the Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari. Above every other person in southern operation, it was important Maimalari was cold dead if their Revolution was to succeed. As the commander of the Southern brigade, Maimalari had under him all the fighting forces of […]

Major Donatus Okafor, the officer commanding the Federal Guards was tasked with the assassination of the Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari. Above every other person in southern operation, it was important Maimalari was cold dead if their Revolution was to succeed. As the commander of the Southern brigade, Maimalari had under him all the fighting forces of the battalions, the field artillery corps, the armoured and mechanised squads. He could effectively mobilise the entire brigade even if the country was suddenly attacked by a neighbouring army. He knew how. Without his name, the Revolution would not have taken off at all. It was forged orders given in his name that Ifeajuna had handed Captain Nwobosi head of the Ibadan operation and Lt Nwabuchi the liaison officer of the Enugu operation in case any senior officer challenged their troop mobilisation. It was forged instructions issued in his name that Ifeajuna had handed Nwobosi to bring the 105 mm Howitzer from the battery gun park in Abeokuta to Lagos. It was in his name that Ifeajuna had sent signals over the army signal network to give the all clear H-message and commence operations two hours earlier. The 3 day Brigade Training Conference which Ifeajuna used to bring all the battalion commanders together in Lagos for easy assassination was organised in his name. To ensure that these commanders did not travel back to their stations when the conference finished by 2pm on 14 January, Ifeajuna persuaded Maimalari to hold a small cocktail in his house to be attended by the brigade hierarchy. It was financed with brigade funds withdrawn in the name of Maimalari as Njoku the next brigade commander later revealed. Maimalari mattered too much. That was why he had to die.
Unlike Brigadier Ademulegun’s guards that were compromised up North around the same time, Maimalari’s guards challenged the intruders. Okafor ordered the sentry to call out the guard commander and tell him to take off his men and return to the barracks, there was some emergency. Okafor was his officer commanding but he doubted the emergency. According to the standard operating procedure, the guards were on duty to a superior officer, any change of instruction had to come from him not Okafor. The guard commander refused and Okafor’s men barged in.
Meanwhile the phone was ringing and Maimalari had woken up. It was Pam calling to report some shootings in his compound and that some soldiers had gained forceful entry into his bedroom to arrest him. Maimalari had hardly spoken to Pam that he heard the shootings at his front gate too. Pam also heard the gunshots before the line went dead. Pam immediately called the GOC stating that there was evidence of an ongoing munity. Just then Chukwuka re-entered Pam’s bedroom to inform him that the time they had given him to dress up was over. The gunshot Maimalari heard was that of Captain Oji the 2ice (second in command) to Okafor. He had killed Maimalari’s guard commander who adamantly denied the mutineers entrance. In the process a bullet ricocheted and hit L/Cpl Paul Nwekwe of 2 Brigade Signal Troop in the neck. They were roused for an internal security operation. They had prepared themselves to travel as far as Ibadan to engage Fani-Kayode’s thugs and Adegbenro’s hooligans. But they found themselves in front of their Brigadier’s residence wondering whether they had not been turned into demolition ants dedicated to bringing down the roof of their own house.
Immediately Maimalari heard the splash of submachine gunfire, he dropped the phone, ran upstairs to pick up his wife whom he did not want to disturb by picking up the phone downstairs. He fled across the large garden where cocktail party ended five hours earlier. He kept his wife at the boys’ quarters, scaled the tall fence and disappeared into the darkness. All senior officers that night were in their pyjamas when they escaped. They did not have time to dress up in combat fatigues. Except the GOC who left up fully geared up and even took his walking stick with crocodile carved into it.
When Okafor realised Maimalari had fled the house, he became very angry. He ordered his men to comb the compound and shoot the Brigadier on sight; he must not be given any chance to even surrender. He then jumped into the Land Rover driven by Lance Corporal Noji and searched around Brown Street, Thompson Avenue all the way to Glover Road and Bourdillon Road. Without Maimalari dead, they were doomed. As Ifeajuna later wrote in his manuscript, “We fully realised that to be caught planning, let alone acting, on our lines, was high treason. And the penalty for high treason is death.” Therefore, they had to be successful or die trying.
Okafor like other officers joined the Revolution because he wanted to free Nigeria from the corruption and indiscipline of politicians. But four weeks earlier, the Army Legal Officer, Chief Arthur Worrey found Okafor guilty of stealing his subordinates’ funds. The Federal Guards held a monthly raffle draw and social nights (Wassa). The proceeds from ticket sales and lucky dips were recorded in Army Book 64 and saved in the PRI (President of Regimental Institute) account. For months, false figures were recorded as Okafor was stealing this money and giving a fraction as hush money to the treasurer Corporal Magaji Birnin Kebbi, a NCO in his fifties. Unknown to Okafor, Magaji was recording actual figures in his private file. Later Magaji interceded on behalf of a friend and colleague Private Mamman Sokoto at the Motor Transport Section of the Federal Guards who had been overlooked for promotion for four years. Okafor did not honour his pledge to promote the man when the list of the promoted was published. When Magaji went back to Okafor in his office in November 1965, Okafor ordered him to be locked up as he a Major and the OC of the elite Federal Guards did not feel he was answerable to a mere corporal in matters of promotion. Magaji then spilled the secrets. Eventually Okafor was found guilty of stealing his soldiers’ funds. Lieutenant Tarfa who was one of Okafor’s junior officers at the Federal Guards served as Magaji’s interpreter before the panel of inquiry. For Magaji was an old illiterate soldier. Tarfa later wrote in his account that, Okafor was afraid of being severely punished that he appealed to Brigadier Maimalari to help. But then they never knew then that the main reason he was scared of punishment was that he would have been suspended and relieved of his command of the Federal Guards. That would have deprived him of both participating and making the resources of the Federal Guards available to their Revolution.
Maimalari, a Northerner intervened and cut tapes that let Okafor, an Easterner, off the hook. But Okafor had lost the total respect of most soldiers in the barracks for his action towards the elderly illiterate Northern corporal and for stealing their money. Had Maimalari allowed army procedures to properly take its due course, had he not allowed “kindness” to get in the way, that night of nights, he would not had been in a position where he had to be scaling his own high fence, hiding in shrubs, fleeing from the man whom he thought he had saved from punishment. Well, 90 minutes later, it was his own world famous brigade chief of staff, Ifeajuna, who had organised a befitting cocktail at his residence that eventually pulled the trigger, took his heartbeat and finally put him to rest.
The 31-year-old Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna was the brain behind the Revolution. He studied zoology for 4 years at Ibadan University and graduated with a B.Sc before being commissioned into the army in 1961. At the age of 20, he brought glory to the nation when at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, he won Nigeria’s first ever gold medal at any international games and set a new record in high jump. He refused to wear the athletes’ spiked boots or any shoe at all for the run-up competitions. At Vancouver, in front of the international cameras, he was persuaded to wear the boots. As a compromise, he wore a boot only on one leg and jumped the highest setting a new world record in high jump and in bizarre outfitting. Ifeajuna knew he was not born to be ordinary and so was addicted to breaking rules and setting new records. As a charismatic orator and Director of Information at University College Ibadan Students Union, he led the protest against the Queen’s visit to the University in 1956.
Ibadan City was born by dissident soldiers headed by Lagelu among seven hills as a refuge for immigrants fleeing wars in 1829. By 1960, Ibadan had become the most cosmopolitan city in Nigeria. Being an embodiment of the lure of consistent non-conformism, Ibadan like New York of that time, held an extraordinary collection of flame-headed intellectuals avid for novelty and whose creativity and distinguished activisms enriched the city and the country. There was nowhere in Africa that matched Ibadan’s assemblage of fire then. There was SG Ikoku who challenged and defeated his own famous father Alvan Ikoku at the Eastern Region Assembly elections of 1956 and then radicalised his new adopted father Chief Obafemi Awolowo into socialism. There was Anthony Enahoro, Chris Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, Chinua Achebe, Tayo Akpata, Benedict Obumselu, Chike Obi, Wole Soyinka, Sam Agbam, Akin Mabogunje, Bola Ige, Emeka Anyaoku, Elechi Amadi. Ifeajuna was a friend to most of them. He wrote in his manuscript:
“It was at Ibadan also I learnt my third lesson. One morning, workmen arrived in the campus with what looked like burglar grills. In a matter of days, they had sealed off each hall or residence from the outside and turned all into cages. Altogether, they gave the place the look of a zoo, so that students saw themselves as animals on show…Then the students took a decision – the cages would have to come down faster than they had been put up. But how to do it? Everybody knew what was wanted but they had not or did not know the means and the manner of effecting the change desired and demanded by all. Each waited for the other to act or simply waited in the hope that something would happen by way of providential intervention.
“At the appointed hour, I and two others met in a hidden rendezvous. We worked out the detailed plans and assembled hammers for the job. The events which took place a week or so later went according to plan. We called a Union meeting. There were speeches, moving speeches. Then one of my friends shouted: ‘Down with the cages.’ He led the way to the hammer dump. Before long the cages were down. At the end of it all a student friend reflecting on the incident made interesting comment that a collection of professors would still be a crowd: a group must have a leader or remain in chaos. The University College was closed for a term but we made our point. And the lesson that emerged for me from this incident was the need for careful planning before [undergoing] any operation; the chance of success can be said to be proportion to the work put into the planning.”
Ifeajuna informed Okigbo the discussed Revolution was in the works. According to Wole Soyinka, Okigbo informed Achebe and informed him also without going into details. Soyinka was then on trial for allegedly using a gun to persuade the state broadcaster that instead of Akintola’s tape announcing himself as the election winner, his own tape asking Akintola to pack and go was of better value to the people. He was later freed by Justice Kayode Eso on 12 December 1965.
Ifeajuna was pleased to hear about Okigbo’s friend subversive broadcast. He regarded it as theatre; they were plotting the real stunt. On the day of this stunt, more than anywhere else in the country, there was great euphoria of vindication in Ibadan as the people leapt around on the streets like compressed chests freed at last from the tyranny of pushdown bras. Ibadan claimed Ifeajuna as one of its very own and Okigbo distilled the joys of that day into his poem Hurray for the Path of Thunder. When Nzeogwu’s voice fountained out like a genie of the lamp amongst some Ibadan intellectuals clustered around their radio at Risikatu’s restaurant, Okigbo was reported to have called for patience, patience, patience. He confidently proclaimed that there was still another voice that would soon follow suit. He was referring to his friend and chief engineer of the Revolution, Major Emmanuel Arinze Ifeajuna born on 3rd March 1934, married to Rose on 16th June 1959 at Lagos Registry in Ikoyi and commissioned into the army on 6th December 1960.
On the night of the coup, after Ifeajuna concluded his address to his fellow mutineers in his sitting room, he led the largest unit comprising 22 soldiers. Reaching Onikan roundabout, he divided them into three groups. One officer, 2/Lt. G. Ezedigbo and 8 NCOs would go to arrest the finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh who was then the most corrupt politician in the history of Nigeria. Just like the Downing Street model in London, the Prime Minister and Finance Minister lived side-by-side. But they had become respectively like church and state that did not mix. Another unit comprising 5 NCOs commanded by second warrant officer Onyeacha was left behind to watch over their vehicles and ensure that no other vehicle entered or exited the Onikan roundabout during the course of the operation. Ifeajuna himself commanded the remaining soldiers whose task was to arrest the Prime Minister, Sir Tafawa Balewa Abubakar, the novelist and teacher turned Prime Minister.
Abubakar was widely known to hardly surround himself with guards at home or even when commuting. He always cautioned his household against striving for the inessential and ostentatious materialism which expressed itself in need for elaborate security measures. Only Abubakar could have a disabled cripple called Inspector Kaftan Topolomiyo from Nangasu in Chad as his head of security. It was only in 1964 that he consented to a supplement ADC, Sgt Maxwell Orukpabo fondly called “the Igbo” in the household. In February 1963 during a police council meeting with the four regional premiers, the newly restored Western Premier, Akintola proposed a budget for armoured cars for themselves given the security situation in the country. Abubakar softly reprimanded him: “Mr Premier, if I ever thought I would need an armoured car to go anywhere in Nigeria, I would resign.” In the pornography of corruption called the Nigerian government, Abubakar was a monk. And so Ifeajuna knew his task would be very easy. The soldiers he took to abduct him were service soldiers drawn from Signal Squadron, Lagos Garrison Organisation and Camp. None were combat soldiers.
Around thirty minutes later, without a single shot fired, the cool and soft-spoken Prime Minister emerged from the front gate of his residence untied, gently rattling his prayer beads and was dressed in a white flowing jalabiya and a pair of sandals. A lifetime of emotional discipline had rendered his signature face docile and unconquerable by fear. The dead silence of the night lent a hallowed majesty to his steps as he advanced towards his Golgotha. Behind him was Ifeajuna and eight other non-combat soldiers with guns drawn. By the time the entourage reached the parked vehicles, Okotie-Eboh his NCNC Finance Minister had been arrested with his hands tied. Abubakar was assisted into the backseat of Ifeajuna’s luxurious red Mercedes Benz while Okotie Eboh was tossed like a sack of potatoes into the back of the 3 tonner. The convoy drove to report to Federal Guard’s Officer’s Mess.
Why was Sir Tafawa Balewa (meaning Black Rock) so powerless an agent of change in the face of his colleagues’ corruption extremisms? Why wasn’t there enough of him to go around? In February 1964 for instance, the NCNC parliamentary leader and Minister of Trade Dr Ozumba Madiwe was caught using his office to divert a government land at Ijora Causeway to his private company Afro Properties and Investment Company since 1961. He then assigned the land lease to Nigerpool in return for a hefty annual profit. The discovery generated another media-exposed corruption scandal. Abubakar met privately with Babatunde Jose, the editor of the powerful Daily Times spearheading the intense campaign to remove the corruption extremist if he declined to resign. Mbadiwe never bothered. There were those who were attracted by the durability of rock. They wished to be massive and unmoveable. They wished not to change. Abubakar told the editor: “You want me to remove this man? What he did fell below what is proper. Under British standards, he would go, but the NCNC who put him in my original coalition are solidly for him. Its central working committee had just passed a unanimous vote of confidence in him. If they withdraw, since Awolowo can’t join, the [coalition] government will collapse.’ Hence, Abubakar made peace with being a little rock thrown to the bottom of a polluted river; the polluted waters washed over him all the time but never penetrated him. On 19 December 1965, he even attended the commissioning of the Mbadiwe’s Palace of People constructed with the proceeds of corrupt practices in the village of Arondizuogu. But on the night of the Revolution, it was Abubakar that Ifeajuna arrested and marched on to his eventual death while Mbadiwe kept on sleeping at home undisturbed by bedbugs. He lived happily ever after.
When Ifeajuna and Ezedigbo’s unit reached the Federal Guards Mess, Anuforo was nowhere to be found. He had gone with Chukwuka to end Pam on the Ikoyi Golf Course. And so Ifeajuna decided to take up his assignment of terminating all the 2nd Brigade battalion commanders residing at Ikoyi Hotel. But he did not know the rooms where they were lodged; Anuforo and the Brigade adjutant were in charge of the reservation. The assassinations supposed to have happened on the night of 13th of January. All the principals slated for death were already within reach except Brigadier Ademulegun who went to attend an OAU Defence Commission meeting in Ghana from 6th – 10th January. When he was told of an imminence of a mutiny in Nigeria, he argued against its possibility. He said none of the top commanders was interested in taking over government. And if some renegade unit in the South –they had to be from the South because that was where the seat of government was – he would mobilise troops from his brigade in the North to crush them. The maths of an armed takeover in Nigeria unlike Egypt (1952) or Togo (1963) could not add up.
When he arrived Lagos on the 12th January, Major Anuforo the staff officer in charge of accommodation offered the Brigadier reservation at the plush Ikoyi Hotel before his flight to Kaduna the next morning. The Brigadier refused. He then asked Major Madiebo, lodged at the Apapa Officer’s Mess chalet and who had just finished eating a recruitment lunch with Ifeajuna, to vacate the place for the Brigadier. Ademulegun was not interested. Had he accepted to stay at Ikoyi Hotel, his assassination would have been blessed for that very night: His door would have been knocked several times in the middle of the night by the night receptionist just as he did to Largema’s Room 115 door. He would have been told there was an urgent phone call for him. And because the phone was situated at the end of the corridor, he would have been told to come out and pick the call. He would have come out and like Largema, bullets would have been pumped into his heart and lungs as he picked up the phone. Ademulegun refused Anuforo’s hotel offer. Instead, he went to stay with a friend somewhere in Lagos and was off the radar. On the morning of Friday 14 January, he showed up at his office at the 1st Brigade. Captain Ben Gbulie confirmed his presence to his fellow mutineers. Like a clock’s hands at twelve o clock, both the Northern and Southern rebels joined hands to set the H-hour.
Ifeajuna then went to fetch 2 NCOs to load Largema’s corpse into the boot of Mercedes Benz in the car park. The Prime Minister heard the gunshots, saw the corpse and lost his cool. There was another senior officer, David Ejoor the commander of 1st Battalion in Enugu who had come for the Ifeajuna-organised Brigade Training Conference and was in Room 17. He was at the cocktail hours earlier. They knocked and burst into many rooms but they could not find him. As it will be seen later, a modesty incident caused Ejoor to change rooms earlier hence missing his allocation of death.
When Ifeajuna left, the night manager of the hotel picked up the phone to report the incident to the police but the phones were dead. He drove down to the Force HQ. Two incidents had been reported: the kidnap of the Prime Minister and the assassination of a senior officer of the army. There was a coup going on. The scrambling of police chiefs and senior politicians began in earnest. It was around half three.
As Ifeajuna’s unit tore through the dark to the Mess (a mere three minutes’ drive), the headlamps sprayed out light as if from a water hose until they picked out an impossibility. They did not notice it until they passed by and they had to stop when they were hailed down. It was Brigadier Maimalari in pyjamas hailing them to stop, stop. When he escaped from his home, he hid in shrubs and watched as Okafor’s Land Rover sped up and down searching for him. He had been hiding and running trying to make his way to the Federal Guards barracks. When he heard or saw the light of an oncoming vehicle he dived into the road side shrubs again. An average walk from his house to the barracks was 22 minutes. Running was around 10 minutes. One hour after scaling his fence, he was already on the last lap of his journey to the Federal Guards.
When he saw some headlights turning in from Kingsway Road, he ducked into the shrubs again thinking it might be Okafor and his men. Instead, he recognised the red Mercedes Benz and his famous brigade major. It was not immediately clear to Maimalari that Ifeajuna was no longer in mufti but in combat uniform. Instead, Maimalari saw Ifeajuna as his hope and dashed for him. Ifeajuna slammed the brakes, stepped out with his SMG and sprayed his boss. In 1965, according to the outgoing British GOC, Major General Welby-Everard, Maimalari was brilliant but too young that was why he was excluded from the list of his possible replacement. When Maimalari’s killers lifted his body into the Land Rover, its spring sank. Maimalari was born in a little town called Maimalari in Borno Province on 2nd of January 1932. He attended Officer Cadet School, Eaton Hall in England from January – May 1951; attended Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst from August 1951 – February 1953; attended Staff College, Quetta, Pakistan from January –December 1961. He spoke five languages (English, Fulfulde, Hausa, Arabic, and Kanuri). He enlisted in the army on 10th of July 1950 and on 5th February 1953, he became the 6th Nigerian commissioned into the army after Ugboma, Bassey, Ironsi, Ademulegun and Ogundipe in that order. Maimalari was survived by his parents, a teenage wife and three children.
When Ifeajuna arrived at the Mess which also doubled as the senior officer’s mortuary, Anuforo and Chukwuka had returned with Pam’s corpse. Major Adewale Ademoyega too had finished his assignment of placing rebel troops at NET building, Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), and disabling the telephone infrastructure. The fifth Major unaccounted for was Donatus Okafor who was still searching for Maimalari. Ademoyega and Captain Adeleke then jumped into the Land Rover driven by Lance corporal Omeru and off they sped to Maimalari’s residence to inform Okafor that the Brigadier had become a stiff corpse at the Mess. The night was eventually going on as planned. It was around four o’clock. The rebels were already feeling the triumph of flying to the highest skies where stories transformed into glories. This was the time Ahmed Kurfi Secretary of State in Ministry of Defence went to inform Shehu Shagari the Minister of Works that some soldiers had vanished with the Prime Minister.