That ‘Orkar attempt’, 25 years ago

Early that morning some young military officers assaulted the president’s official residence in Dodan Barracks Lagos, with heavy armour in a surprise and brazen attempt to overthrow the military government of Ibrahim Babangida. He and his family narrowly escaped death. Major Gideon Gwaza Orkar announced the coup against the president. The Orkar group, likeChukwumw Nzeogwu’s […]

Early that morning some young military officers assaulted the president’s official residence in Dodan Barracks Lagos, with heavy armour in a surprise and brazen attempt to overthrow the military government of Ibrahim Babangida. He and his family narrowly escaped death. Major Gideon Gwaza Orkar announced the coup against the president. The Orkar group, like
Chukwumw Nzeogwu’s in 1960 was mostly of young and middle-ranking officers. The attempt failed
Most of the young officers involved were Babangida’s students when he was an instructor in the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna.  Babangida’s confidence in his primary constituency was badly shaken and his ego sorely bruised by the coup attempt.
Orkar accused Babangida’s adminis-tration of being “…dictatorial, corrupt, drug barons, evil men, sadistic, deceitful, prodigalistic and unpatriotic”. The coup script read like a minority revolt.
Babangida’s immediate reaction was to narrow the circle of his trusted friends in the military. “I really had to change my attitude in governance, even my perception about people and individuals “.
There were implications here. It redefined the character of the Babangida administration for the rest of its life, where Babangida was open and casual he was now decidedly remote and even cold. Something always gives when a man has to watch his own shadow. Babangida said he learnt a must valuable lesson from the failed coup. He became more individualistic, thinking of doing things the way he perceives them and then leaves everything to his conscience.
By being individualistic, he meant that he withdrew more and more into himself. A small circle of faithful formed around him and deemed it its profound duty to shield Babangida from possible harm from any and all directions. The secret of his survival so far had much to do with his capacity to open himself up to all manner of views, now he was forced to rely on the views of small circle of the faithful. Babangida’s first major public comment on the failed coup “the event of the April brought home to us the fact that the internal mechanism of institutional coherence and survival in the armed forces appeared to have dramatically failed.”
He put the blame on politics, or more correctly the military’s involvement in politics since January 1966. It was his view and is difficult to disagree with him on this point, that the military involvement in politics had eroded “our organizational ethos and much valued professionalism“. Inevitably therefore, Babangida argued that “cohesion, discipline, hierarchical structure of command, nationalism, a sense of Puritanism and esprit-de-corps were being dangerously subverted”.
It confronted the military with a new challenge, which according to the president was how to pull back and rebuild what had been or was being systematically destroyed. The attraction of political power for young element in the military put the future of the military in jeopardy.

Abdullahi Mohammed <[email protected]>;