by Eromose Ileso
By
January 15, 2016 it will be 50 years since Nigeria’s first military coup.
The military foray into the country’s political landscape changed the structures
of the country entirely, and the domino effect of that singular act by several
young officers in the army is still being felt still date.
Prior to the coup,
there were four semi automonous regions that were developing at their own pace.
The Northern, Western, Mid-west and Eastern Regions did not need to go cap in
hand for federal allocation as is the case now to develop their regions.
However, that coup ripped off those structures, and General Agoniyi Ironsi’s
Decree No 34 of 1966 which introduced a unitary system destructed whatever was
left of the country’s regional system, and Yakubu Gowon’s creation of states to
prevent Biafra’s succession plans was the final nail on the head of Nigeria’s
striving post independence regional and federal structures.
The January 15, 1966 coup
d’etat which was orchestrated by five majors with Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu
and Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna as the arrow heads of the coup started at about 2am.
The coup’s only complete success was in the North where Major Nzeogwu led other
officers to put down the structures in Kaduna
where several top military officers were killed.
The Northern region Premier
Sir Ahmadu Bello was killed along with his senior wife. The brigade command was
successively sealed.
Major Ifeajuna led the Western Region part of the coup,
but despite the fact that the prime minister, Tafewa Balewa and other top
military officers were killed in Lagos,
the coup failed in the West. The head of Nigeria’s army at the time, General
Agoniyi Ironsi survived the killings, and rallied the army to put down the coup.
No shot were however fired in the Eastern Region as the officers at the heart of
the plot there somehow developed cold feet.
With the kind of planning
that went into that coup and the fact that logistics and communications are key
components in carrying out coup plots, it becomes key to examine whether there
could have been foreign support in the planning of the coup.
One of the officers that was
part of the execution of the coup in Kaduna, Ben Gbulie who was a captain at
the time, was on record to have said that the situation of the country was
discussed within the officers at the officers mess on a regular basis, and
speaking against the situation in the country at the time, was a clue that such
an officer was going to join in its execution.
That aside, General Yakubu
Gowon said in an interview during his 80th birthday celebrations in 2014 that
when he sailed on an ocean liner from the United Kingdom to Lagos in 1965 after
attending series of military courses abroad, the possibility of Nigeria’s
military staging a coup was put to him as a question by a foreigner during
their voyage to Lagos, according to him, it was a notion he quickly dismissed,
with the answer that the Nigeria military comprised of professional soldiers who
would not venture into politics.
For a foreigner to have raised such question
months before a coup eventually took place raises some questions as to whether
the possibility that some sections of the Nigerian military would end up
staging a coup was not known to foreign intelligence services?
It is not
outside the realm of possibilities that there could have been interventionist
powers from outside the country that played a role in the planning of the coup at
the time judging by the prevailing circumstances of the iron curtail that was
the norm during the cold war.
The 1960s was the height of
the cold war with the Western and Eastern blocs fighting several proxy wars.
While the Cuba missile
crisis was just one of them, a crisis that almost brought the Soviet
Union and the Americans to the brink of nuclear war.
But it was the direct
intervention of these powers in the politics of Africa at the time especially
through the barrel of a gun rather than ballot boxes which raised questions
whether there was no foreign help in Nigeria’s first coup.
For instance, the assassination
of Patrice Lumumba in January, 1961 the independence Prime Minister of Congo
Kinshasa was orchestrated by the West through the Belgians and Americans after
he sought Soviet help to quench an uprising in the Katanga province at the time.
Besides that his strong criticism of the Belgian colonist during Congo’s
independence ceremony in June 30, 1960 did not go down well with the Belgian
King who was in attendance. Patrice Lumumba’s aim to attain control of the
mineral wealth of Congo was
antithesis to what the West wanted and his leaning towards the Soviet Union was the last straw that caused him to be
overthrown and later killed.
In those early independence
days of Africa countries, any flirting with the Soviet
Union from an African leader was met with displacement through
coup d’etat by the West.
Besides Patrice Lumumba,
Sylvanus Olympio of Togo was assassinated by the Togolese military in 1963
largely due to the help of the French. The Togolese coup was the first in West Africa and indeed in sub Sahara Africa and it was
due entirely to the handiwork of the West just like most coups on the continent
at the time.
In the same vain, Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana
was removed from office in 1966 through a coup d’etat sponsored by the West
after his leaning towards the communist Eastern bloc. Despite the fact that his
popularity had waned in Ghana
due to his dictatorial tendencies which affected the economy, it took flirting
with the East for him to be removed.
The independence leader of Mozambique and
head of Frelimo Eduardo Mondlane was also a victim of a Western backed assassination in 1969.
What was clear from the
early years of African independence was that any leader that entertained
communist tendencies was swept from power through the pains of coup d’etat.
That most of the leaders that eventually came to power became puppets of the
West despite their poor handling of their country’s resources only reveals another
side of the West’s self serving voracious interest as they turned a blind eye
to such plundering.
In this case, Mobotu Sese Siko could be found as an
example, despite amassing the wealth of Congo Kinshasa for his own personal
use, he enjoyed the goodwill of the West for more than thirty years before he
was toppled from power by Laurent Kabila.
It is this carriage of
events that does not rule out the possibility of foreign support in the
military coup of January 15, 1966.
The world was a polarised
place and most interventionist plans at the time were not carried out in
isolation, but through the help of a foreign power.
The entire officers of the
Nigeria military at the time where products of training from the Sandhurst
military academy in Britain and majority of the officers that were involved in
the coup passed through the famous Sandhurst Academy before returning to the
country.
With the way the twentieth
century world was structured, especially with the contending powers of the Western
and Eastern blocs, it was common place for the principal players within these
blocs to openly intervene in the internal politics of African countries during
the sixties to suit their interest.
Major Chukwuma Kaduna
Nzeogwu was known to have been a charismatic soldier who was opinionated on
several issues. He had an independent and revolutionary mindset which meant he
held to his principles no matter what they were. It is not clear whether his
decision to spearhead the removal of Nigeria’s first elected government
was influenced purely by his principles or it was fuelled by intervening forces
from outside the country?
Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna was
the polar opposite of Major Nzeogwu. He was already famous and a
pre-independence national hero before he joined the Nigerian military in 1960. He
was the first Nigerian to win a gold medal in long jump in the 1954 Empire and Commonwealth
Games. An achievement that made him famous. He was also a student of the University of Ibadan
where he was a compatriot and friend to Emeka Anyaoku who later became the Secretary
General of the Commonwealth of Nations. Major Ifeajuna
had displayed revolutionary tendencies during his days as a secondary school student in Onistha where he played a frontline role in a protest in 1951.
He also led
students protest triggered by poor living conditions during his University days
in 1957 after a rousing speech. He later
carried on to the Nigeria
military, and like others that partook in the
planning and execution of the coup, they felt they could not stand still and
watch things go bad as Nigeria’s first government after independence was
bedeviled by crisis.
Yet the independent views
shared by these two men whose history in the roles they played both in the coup
and in the Nigerian civil war have received opposite views largely due to the
way their lives ended.
The fact that the coup d’etat
was purely the handiwork of a group of young officers would not have been lost
on the powers that be at the time. While the success of the coup was depended
on the assassination and arrest of senior military officers several of whom
lost their lives during the process, and the decision to take down all of Nigeria’s
independent leaders was also of similar linings. It would have taken a huge
task for this group of young officers to have undertaken such a mammoth
decision if there was no measure of support from somewhere.
Again, the plan
that was hatched to completely eliminate a generation of Nigerian top military
officers was both daring and herculean, and there is every possibility however
remote that support could have been gotten from outside the country to carry
out such a huge task.
The interventionist nature
of world politics in the twentieth century, because of ideological differences
only serve to show that there could have been a tweak from a world power at the
time.
Nothing is known for sure
yet the domino effects of the singular actions of a group of five majors
continue to reverberate in Nigeria
today.
