THE attempt to oust the Balewa government on 15th January 1966 shouldn’t have led to a civil war if leaders had stood up for principles. Had an acting prime minister been named that evening as the coup unraveled, there would have been no military government in Nigerian history.
The coup attempt deserved a swift response so as not to leave a power vacuum,but it was also true that the rump of the cabinet was unsure of how to proceed, the acting president was unsure how to act, the Army Commander, too, was unsure of his role. So, it would appear that the best option would have been to allow the government enoughtime to work its way out, resolve differences if any and, if need be, seek a legal opinion to be sure it was acting according to law.
That way, there would be no military environment. Without a militarized setting, subsequent calamities – the pogroms, the revenge coup, futile negotiations – would never have befallen the country. The proof of this is that there had been big crises in the country’s past including the 1963 Census, the 1964 Federal Elections, which were equally contentious. Somehow, the politicians found their way round them without resort to violence.
Major-Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, famous for his bravery, was a soldier who didn’t nurse political ambitions, who assumed power out of good intentions. As he soon found out, good intentions were not enough. On 29th May, less than a week after he announced the unification of the country on the 24th May 1966, he was shocked beyond words by the ISIS-like pogrom that followed his “modest proposal.” To back the free-for-all massacres of Eastern Nigerians, especially Igbos in all parts of Northern Nigeria, vociferous protests against unity arose everywhere with urgent demands by Northerners to secede from the Federation of Nigeria.
The Unification Decree No. 34, for what it is worth, was Gen. Ironsi’s answer to the frequent political quarrels of the country. He thought it was the panacea needed for a peaceful Nigeria. It was trenched on the belief that the path to a united Nigeria lay in greater interaction and exchanges among its peoples supported by a unified, interchangeable administration in which every Nigeria would feel at home wherever he found himself. The regions emphasized differences rather than similarities, and were the handiwork of the divide-and-rule colonial administrators, Ironsi felt. Besides, the unitary system was in sync with the military command structure. Prof. Sam. Aluko, Nigeria’s foremost economics professor is said to have backed it for being most cost-effective in terms of cost of government. If you abolished the regions you won’t need to build huge mansions and maintain expensive retinue of officials.
But by May 1966, the Nzeogwu coup had been sold by Northern politicians and civil servants as a grand Igbo conspiracy to take over Nigeria and subjugate and take jobs from Northerners. Thus unification was seen as another Igbo ploy to continue what they had started on January 15. The exodus from the North began on May 29 and with it shocking tales of horror. The pogrom went on for a week unimpeded in which thousands of innocent men, women and children were daily slaughtered in a manner reminiscent of the Rwanda genocide. The misfortune of Easterners, especially Igbos, was that then television as a medium of information was in its infancy. The world was thus unable to visually see the horrors of the pogroms against the Igbos which helped its deniability. It was not merely that the Northern Nigerian government turned a blind eye on the atrocities, it was more that it counseled and abetted them. Worse, the Federal Government could do nothing about it.
What distinguished the July 29 coup, the revenge coup by Northern officers, was not that it led to another massive wave of pogroms against Igbos, which it did, but that it witnessed the wholesale slaughter of Igbo officers and men in the Army, including Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi, the Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Army. It was thus a complete ethnic-cleansing of the Nigerian Army, the one institution which was then truly national. It is partly for this reason that July 29 is regarded as the “night of the broken glass,” to borrow William Shirer’s phrase in the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, for, after that day, it became difficult to put Nigeria back.
Col. Chukwuemeka Ojukwu in one of his rare moments of regrets once noted that Biafra was declared too late, that July 29 was probably the most opportune time since the Northern officers were then already decided on secession and their independence flag was flying at the Ikeja Cantonment and they had commandeered Nigeria Airways planes to fly home their families. Again, Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon’s inaugural speech was explicit in celebrating the accession of “another Northerner” to power and to state that “the basis of (Nigerian) unity” did not exist. Thus, a “to-your-tents-O-Israel” situation existed on July 29 and after until the Northern oligarchy felt secure in its consolidation of power and control. It must have taken so much persuasion and arm-twisting by skillful Northern civil servants and British diplomats to change the minds of Northern officers to stay and later to claim how much they loved to keep Nigeria one.
Yet another wave of pogroms followed on August 29 and another on September 29. By then 1.5 million Easterners had become refugees fleeing the North. Then General Ankrah of Ghana put together a peace initiative inviting the regional governors and head of state Gowon to a quiet resort near Accra called Aburi. One of the most thoughtful moves by a far-sighted man. Nigerian officers, governors, formerly comrades, now too far estranged, got together and talked, man-to-man, with Ankrah moderating..
The Aburi proceedings are one of Nigeria’s best kept secrets. The Aburi Accords were the last bus stop. After all, Gowon had dismissed the Ad hoc Constitutional Conference peremptorily. But the memoranda of the regions in that conference spoke volumes and except for the Midwest, the North, the West, the East, all thought that a loose Federal arrangement was most advisable to let tempers cool.
At Aburi, similar sentiments prevailed. The Accords included the return of troops to their regions, the renouncement of violence, the reorganization of the military and the equitable sharing of weapons, the resettlement of refugees and payment of displaced civil servants, the formal announcement of the deaths of Ironsi, the head of state, and other senior officers murdered on July 29, the need for consensus in very senior appointments in the military and the civil service and in the decisions of the supreme military council. This was in the first week of January 1967.
When Gowon permitted civil servants who had their own professional interests to protect to second-guess the Aburi Accords, that’s when he lost the last opportunity to prevent the civil war.
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