MurtalaMuhammed: Memories of a folk hero

Come to think of it, some of the critical attribution of the kind of leadership of our aspiration are found in the personage of the late Murtala himself and thus makes this piece a kind of continuation of that series, thus lessening the burden of a delayed piece that could have been written around February […]

Come to think of it, some of the critical attribution of the kind of leadership of our aspiration are found in the personage of the late Murtala himself and thus makes this piece a kind of continuation of that series, thus lessening the burden of a delayed piece that could have been written around February 13. Yet, the subject of General Murtala Muhammed remains forever fresh in the national memory, especially at a time where countries, which have benefitted from his foreign policy drive which placed Africa at the centre. Consider a country like South Africa to which Nigeria became a frontline state from great distances  in order to dislodge heinous Apartheid but  which began to point to Nigeria with an ungracious left hand. We must continue on the positive part of reconstructing our heroes in this country.
Anation still in search of its essence, its truly defined identity and selfhood, requires heroes or people with heroic attributions; people with vision, courage, strength of character and a capacity for selfless service, even self- sacrifice. This is the stuff out of which those who set modelsetch a path for great heights for the society, their community and their world, are made of. This is the mould in which heroes are cast – be they political, folk, cultural and spiritual heroes….
Inspite of the flux and fluid state of our national incoherence—a situation in which we are yet to structurally define the nature of our national wholesomeness, what people glibly describe as true federalism– we have been visited by people of heroic attributes, even if we have not converted their visitations to instruments of national becoming. Last month, we commemorated the death of one such men who planted themselves in the popular imagination of Nigerians—and in a very short span of life, amidst zest and courage, damning hubris and errors, but unmistakable commitment to the ideals of nationhood. That man was Murtala Ramat Muhammed—the soldier who became a populist leader and lost his life when the nation needed him most and had just begun to be swept off their feet for the difference that he had just begun to make to the life of the nation.
It is meet- in an age suffering from rank national amnesia and memory lapse; an age in which History, that connects the past with the present and sends signals to the future, has been yanked off the school curriculum by an act of unthought-through policy fiat- that we begin to document, celebrate and serenade the few among us, who have shown a difference in the life of a community adrift. Those few heroes that have walked our earth- people like Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sir, Abubakar Tafawabalewa, Herbert Macaulay, Margaret Ekpo, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Queen Amina of Zazzau, Aminu Kano, Michael Imuodu, must be brought back to the consciousness of our present and coming generations, who are fed only with despicable exploits of the mimic men of today in the corridors of power. It is time to carve a symbolic hall of fame; build Museums with walls and without walls– to house those who fetch fires from the gods to light our national paths—glimpses of which still shed the relic of rays on our horizon today, relieving us of the awesome burden of a life of total, blinding darkness.
No doubt, these leaders were, by no means saints. They had their faults, blemishes and short-comings, like all mortals—some of those flaws were even of such obvious magnitude that some may wonder why, in spite of those failings, they could still pass as heroes, worth ritualizing and ceremonizing. What marks these people out is the balance of probabilities, which when put on relative scales, shows them as dwarfing the rest of us in the stature and profile of the value and quality they bring into our lives. It is within that context that we remember General Murtala Muhammed, who matched, with instructive temporal brevity on our national landscape and left memorable signs behind for us to savour. It is best to, first of all, dispense with those flaws for which those worst- hit by his activities as a soldier would reckon as putting a blot on his memory. They will point out his role as a coupist, who once preached secession of the North from the rest of the country. They will also talk about his excesses in the command of his Division Two during the Nigerian Civil War, especially the recovery of the Mid West from Biafra—a feat accomplished with so much ruthlessness and killing of innocent citizens, living very bitter memories in Asaba and Benin, where his soldiers were alleged to have looted the bank.

His quixotic crossing of the Niger with disastrous human casualties among his forces, also put some blight on his military careerism. Even his sweeping anti-corruption campaign and purging of the civil service was said to have been marred by arbitrariness and absence of due process with evidence of victimization of innocent people, beginning the downward flow of the civil service culture in Nigeria.
Yet, it is the speed of recovery, the power of critical self-retrieval and self-cleansing, which he demonstrated in a manner that could be said to be unprecedented in the history of national leadership that began to restore value, believability and conviction in his leadership of seven brief months between July 1975 and February 1976, that begins to justify his immortality in our national consciousness. He began by shedding all genuine and doubtful material encumbrances, property and wealth—that he acquired once he took over the leadership of the country and lived a simple, uncorrupted life thereafter, to the extent that he left scant survival means for his relatively tender family, at his death.
His art of charismatic leadership, commitment, simplicity, discipline and decisiveness in governance, during the short span of his governing aegis of the country until he was cut down by the assassin’s bullet through an unpopular and abortive coup, earned him instant popularity and visibility across the country.
He inherited a state already in the clutches of frustration, disillusionment and despair as the military government of Gowon was unable to appreciably convert the abundant human and material resources of the country to the benefit and fulfillment- yearnings of the Nigerian people. It was a drifting nation that Murtala Muhammed shook and jostled awake in July 30, 1975.
General Muhammed ran a dynamic, decisive, forthright, purposeful, action-packed and programmatic regime.  His administration’s signature was ‘with immediate effect’. It ramified all his actions. These include the whittling of the civil service, dismissing about 10,000 of the work-force; the setting up of the 50-man Constitution Drafting Committee; his setting aside of the 1973 census and his adoption of the 1963 census figures for official use; his low profile style of governance, shunned of ostentation and opulence (he ordered that no official should ride a car higher the a Peugeot and he remained in his residence rather than moving to the fortress at Dodan Barracks); his federalization of the two national dailies—The Daily Times and The New Nigerian as well as the universities that were in the hands of the regions, such as Ahmadu Bello University, University of Ife and University of Nigeria; his creation of additional seven states; the decision to move the Federal capital to Abuja and his ramifying indigenization of the commanding heights of the economy, which also saw to the highly popular nationalization of British Petroleum company. All these, in seven brief moths!—even though the implementation of most of these policies was done after his death by his reluctant (as we were told) but faithful deputy and successor, General Olusegun Obasanjo. There was also, and this is most instructive of his genuineness to be a corrective regime, his transition programme to hand over power to a civilian government in four years and return the military to the barracks after a protracted period of professional rot in politics.
On the international scene, Murtala’s foreign policy was, by and large, the most dynamic in Africa in its Nigerian, nay Afro-centric vision. A man determined to remove the shackles of dependence and over-reliance on foreign philosophies and ideologies, General Murtala threw the weight of Nigeria behind the liberation struggles in Southern Africa. His material support for and recognition of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) attracted the displeasure of the United States of America and Britain, as they both frowned on the Communist links of the ruling party of Angola. Many would argue, with a high degree of justification, that his assassination was inseparable from his policy of fierce independence and the unease of Western capitalist institutions with his political and economic programmes.
As a result of his fervent nationalism, his reformist, even radical domestic and foreign policies, his swash-bucking forthrightness, his simplicity and daringness in governance, and above all, his long walk from the myopia of a secessionist instinct to a broad, patriotic Nigerian nationalism, Murtala became a folk hero whose memory is indelibly ingrained in the nation’s consciousness. He was one hero whose flaws the nation found easily forgivable and whose dynamic exploits earned him a secured place in the nation’s Hall of Fame.