Did Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Emmanuel Ifeajuna get foreign help for Nigeria’s first coup?

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.