Gowon: 80 years young

and they still call him so, not because it is his name, but because it is the most affectionate nickname they could think of to describe his friendly disposition, that unforced geniality with which he goes into every encounter. Even today, it remains a nickname befitting a great leader without enemies, rendered by Mamman Shata […]

and they still call him so, not because it is his name, but because it is the most affectionate nickname they could think of to describe his friendly disposition, that unforced geniality with which he goes into every encounter. Even today, it remains a nickname befitting a great leader without enemies, rendered by Mamman Shata as Yakubu Gowon, mutumin kirki dan dattijo.
He was good with people and just as good at sports. They said the only game Gowon didn’t know how to play exceptionally well was the one he didn’t try to play. At school, he was an all-round athlete, cynosure of all eyes—champion of the mile and breaker of the long distance record in his very first year in school, a hockey dribbler of great promise and captain of the boxers, and goalkeeper of the Barewa soccer team.
And that was how t had been with him for the past eight decades. Gowon’s every conduct—personal, private, official, diplomatic, governmental—is always actuated and guided by genuine, deep-seated religious impulse; and it can even be said that if peace is a human being, it will look something like Gowon—always smiling, kind, ready with counsel, easy to please, difficult to anger, behaving as if he is just there to please others.
Described in a Cambridge University honorary degree award citation as a man of muscular Christianity, for him, the devoutness is in the blood. General Gowon was born in Wusasa, the spiritual capital of Northern Christianity, the scion of a devoted missionary family headed by Pa Yohanna Gowon, a notable resident and foremost Christian elder of the Wusasa parish community. In his student days at University of Warwick, he acted as churchwarden in the Hertfordshire neighbourhood where he lived.
Contrary to the reputation acquired by his regime, Gowon is himself blameless. Once, I found myself unintentionally eavesdropping as General Muhammadu Buhari was recounting the virtues of General Gowon to one of his visitors. While he [Buhari] was head of state, news reached him that Gowon, then a student at Warwick University, with children attending school in the UK, would not be able to pay his rent and school fees. Part in sympathy with Gowon and part in order to protect Nigeria’s name, the government swung into action and paid for him.
It was not surprising that the Buhari regime paid for him; what was surprising was how Gowon, at the head of a regime General Murtala Mohammed said was so corrupt, could himself have remained so squeaky clean—an absolute ruler absolutely broke on a foreign soil. It was just almost not done, because even if Gowon had not stolen anything himself, the functioning of a Third world government were of such order that, were Gowon into it, a multinational corporation, grateful for past favours, would have stepped in to pay for him.
On the day he was toppled, his wife, Mrs Victoria Gowon, was staying at a London hotel; and the first thing that came to his mind, was not to sit and mourn for power lost but to protect integrity so that it was itself not lost. From Kampala, he quickly rang the Nigerian High Commission in London asking them to kindly help evacuate her from the hotel. The High Commission then informed General Murtala of the development and he instructed them not to check her out but to pay whatever the bill was. On her part, Mrs Victoria Gowon, in power or out of it, has remained utterly self-effacing; and even today, she is the most unobtrusive—indeed almost invisible—of the former First Ladies.
Following his return to Nigeria in 1983, he went back to origin, and his faith in the Nigeria Prays movement, which he founded and leads, is genuine; and is probably to be taken as penance by a Prodigal Nation with respect to its past misdeeds, and as part-atonement for what military rule, of which he is the personification and human synonym, has done to the polity. In the long run, prayer has the transformative power to heal every wound. In addition to prayers, Gowon established the Yakubu Gowon Centre for National Unity and International Cooperation to help contribute his quota in helping the cause of governance and people’s health.
And in the goodness of governance, perhaps except for the soldier’s uniform, Gowon’s regime was a literal offshoot of First Republic’s parliamentary procedure. The history of Nigeria would have been vastly different and for the better if the military under Gowon or even subsequently has from the onset decided that it was democracy that it wanted for force Nigerians to adopt with immediate effect. And after the ouster of Ironsi, Gowon could—and really should –have instituted his own brand of a unitary system that was not for the ethnic or sectional supremacy that the rest of Nigeria suspected it was, and for that reason opposed, Ironsi’s Unification Decree.
If the only problem Nigeria had was how to spend its money in the heydays of the oil boom, Gowon sure spent some of it very badly, especially in staging the World Black Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC, and the ordering of an armada and flotilla of cement that choked the country’s ports.
Despite the faithfulness of his regime to proper procedure and adherence to the dictates of due process, his well-intentioned but ill-conceived indigenisation decree of 1972 led to foreign disinvestment and the flight of expertise from the management of the category of enterprises in which sole ownership by Nigerians was promoted.
As the chief political executive of the nation, he not only respected the independence and impartiality of the public service, he went out of his way to encourage it; and with the report of the Simeon Adebo and Jerome Udoji panels, he did much to reform it. His benevolent rule has also seen the rise of technocracy and the unintended politicisation of the public service as super permanent secretaries took on an overt policy formulation role; and within his nine years in office, he was able to build the nation’s extensive infrastructure and many of the nation’s greatest landmarks.
However, prosecuting the war to keep Nigeria one was his most important achievement. From the police action, which he initially ordered and which he thought enough, the situation quickly deteriorated into full-scale war; and it was possible that civil war had to take place not because any side wanted it, but because Ojukwu doubted Federal resolve to start or prosecute a full-scale war—and therefore tested it; and the mutual contempt with which the leaders held each other, obvious even before but in full bloom at Aburi and after, precluded meaningful dialogue from taking place.
But in prosecuting the war, Gowon did it as humanely as possible, giving his troops a code of conduct, allowing international observers at the front,  and implementing the policy of ‘no victor, no vanquished’ at its end. Yet, despite this policy and its accompanying three R’s, the nation seems to have learnt nothing from the war—and, of its causes, forgotten everything.
Memories of the days of Gowon always came with the nostalgia of a martial past, the innocence of days gone by and tranquillity in the land.

Idan kunaso mu shirya,Idan kunaso mu shiraya,
Ku janye suna Biafra, Ku aiko da wadansu memba,
Su gana da Gowon Maigirma.
Karya Ojukwu yana fadi, Wannan yaki yafi karfinsa.
Dr Okpara ya gudu, Dr Azik ma ya gudu;
Munci Nsukka, munci Benin, munci Enugu,
Karyan Ibo ya kare!

But that was all before selfish, insensitive people robbed this society of its camaraderie and innocence; before sciolism replaced religious scholarship and the seeds of religious disharmony were planted and watered by this raging river of ignorance; and well before religion became an outright for-profit enterprise—and, on both sides, the briskest business in the land. Nonetheless, to keep Nigeria one was a task that was done; and, whatever latter-day contrarians might now say, it was a task that Jack accomplished with full humanity and great distinction.
And, now, 80 cheers from a grateful nation that, but for him, perhaps wouldn’t have been. Here, then, is to the health of the true father of modern Nigeria—hero of the war and hero of the peace and hero of the pieces with he is now picking up with his prayer. Here again is to the health of this hero who will never blow his own trumpet; because the closest this humble leader ever gets to blowing his trumpet and drawing attention to himself and his achievement is probably when, down with a bad bout of catarrh, he blows his nose.
It is almost 40 years since he was toppled from power and more than 38 years since he was implicated in the failed 1976 coup in which General Murtala Mohammed was killed, but the affection people have for him has weathered those difficult days and is today undiminished. It is not difficult to see why.
There is worth and intrinsic value in every human person of which, irrespective of his riches, religion or roots, he cannot be deprived of and which he wants acknowledged and massaged; and which only he, through his actions and inactions, can squander or fritter away.
 It is clear that in his interpersonal relations—even when these are strictly formal—Gowon has been able to strike the chord: it is the respect that begets itself, which you can only get by giving; and which he has been able to give to all who came into contact with him. With an appointments diary more choked up than that of youngsters, this General is 80 years young today! Happy birthday to you, Sir.