1966 coup, Aburi, Biafra and Gowon

BY TONY ELUEMUNOR

I know that many would wish that the Biafran war tragedies should be swept into deep history and should no longer be discussed. My take on that is stoutly and lustily this: “I prefer to be accused of nastiness than to join in the national pastime of consigning events of a few years ago into prehistory.” Chinua Achebe wrote that in the preface of his book of essays, Morning Yet On Creation Day, published in 1975, to explain why he had to include essays on the Biafran war in that book instead of pretending that the war never took place. Here and now, I second that “motion”.

Tatalo Alamu, the respected columnist, in his offering titled ‘Ninety Bouquets For Jack Gowon’ published in the Nation newspaper on November 3, 2024, poured encomiums on General Yakubu Gowon, “as an exemplary Nigerian patriot, a soldier-statesman and shining moral exemplar for many of his compatriots”. Tatalo Alamu, whether in his first essayist incarnation as Prof Adebayo Williams or in this present one, is not just an engaging writer but a deep thinker. The reader is my witness that I have left all alone his other incarnation when he was Larrie Williams but he had to drop that name because of Larry Williams the dramatist.

Even when you disagree with Tatalo Alamu’s reasoning, you would still strike gold in his glittering renditions, and his energetic turn of phrase that appears to make his words hop off the essay to embrace the reader…like a lover. That reminds me of the incomparable respect Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike paid the poet, Christopher Okigbo, in Towards the Decolonization of African Literature: “The early Okigbo wrote nonsense…but captivating nonsense”. Then they raised a din that has refused to subside when in comparison, they added that Wole Soyinka (the poet as against the playwright) wrote “abject nonsense”.

May we please begin from the two concluding sentences of Tatalo Alamu’s 1, 200-word essay: “The rotund vultures are still hovering in the air. When are we going to get proper closure in this land?” Answer: A proper closure would never come “in this land” until those who defaced Nigeria’s history, harmed the lives and destinies of individuals and sections of the country, making it terribly difficult to unify Nigeria, have owned up to their evil roles, admit their mistakes, deliberate ills or iniquities to show that they recognise the sheer humanity of those harmed by their past actions.

But did General Gowon own up to any mistake in his 90th birthday interview? No!

Chuks Iloegbunam has spent over 30 years researching the two 1966 coups, the Nigerian-Biafran war and their aftermaths, so he is an authority on such matters. He pointed out the untruths in Gowon’s statements in his October 26, 2024, Vanguard article which Alamu referenced. Chuks went straight to the point: “Dear General Yakubu Gowon, you spoke to the Daily Trust on Saturday, October 19, 2024. You celebrated revisionism and claimed things that were not backed by evidence. This open letter is to point out and correct your horrendous amputations of contemporary Nigerian history.”

Alamu romped into the arena against Chuks Iloegbunam as though he was mounted on the chariot of Achilles, drawn by the Greek hero’s fleet-footed immortal horses, “Xanthos and Balios”, as his essay’s passionately runaway cadence bore witness. Unfortunately, instead of countering any point Chuks raised against Gowon, he began to manufacture excuses for Gowon. Chuks said that Gowon was no super-patriot because he had announced “on Monday, August 1, 1966, that there was no basis for Nigerian unity,” thus rendering his claim in 2024 that “my duty and profession at that time demanded to make sure that we kept the country together” baseless.

Alamu owned up that he listened to that broadcast, and “the initial push of the victorious coupists was the breakup of the country until they were cautioned by western concerns”.

That leads to the question; could Gowon have been among the July 1966 “victorious coupists?” Chuks had reminded readers of the strange 1966 telephone conversation between Captain TY Danjuma who informed Gowon that he was set to arrest Ajuiyi Ironsi, the supreme commander, as recounted in Danjuma’s biography and Gowon, Ironsi’s chief of staff asked him “can you do it”? Nothing more!

And Gowon, who could not hurt a fly did not even say, “please let there be no bloodshed”. Oh, elsewhere, the columnist had excoriated Aguiyi-Ironsi for surrounding himself with an “ethnic cabal”, though Danjuma, the northerner who arrested him also headed his personal security team, but he never used such words for Gowon and the north … but he asserted Gowon ran a northern show because the victorious coupists were northerners. Haba, Tatalo Alamu, haba!

Who quelled the January 1966 coup; easterners or northerners? If eastern officers did, then that coup would not have been an Igbo one.

Chuks Iloegbunam wrote: This is Colonel Njoku: “Having got the battalion in motion, I turned to the General Officer Commanding to spell out the task he had for us. The General Officer Commanding is not normally the person to give orders directly to a battalion. It should come through the proper channel, i.e. via Brigade Headquarters. In that emergency situation, the General Officer Commanding was acting in order. …The General Officer Commanding asked for paper and a pen.

“These, I provided. He wrote down the key points (KPs) and very important personalities (VIPs) to which troops were to be sent for protection. These included the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), the Parliament House, Post and Telecommunications (P&T), the Prime Minister, the Inspector General (IG), the Brigade Commander – No 11 Thompson Avenue, etc. In addition, he listed some of the officers he wanted apprehended. These included Major Ifeajuna, Captain Oji and Lieutenant Nwokocha…My Order Group (‘O Gp’) was ready in my room. I had moved apart to prepare my orders leaving him and Jack behind, although all of us were still in my office.

“As soon as I was ready, I moved to my conference room. They both followed me. The adjutant called all to attention. I stood them at ease and went straight into my orders. At the end, the General Officer Commanding said nothing but Jack said a few words emphasising what I had already told the officers. “B” Company under the command of Captain Hans Anagho, the Cameroonian, was ordered to move to the Parliament building, Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) and Police Headquarters. Jack (Gowon) decided to accompany them… (See Hilary M. Njoku, A Tragedy Without Heroes: The Nigeria-Biafra War. Fourth Dimension Publishers, Enugu, 1987, page 19”.

Tatalo’s non-reply: “It will, however, be stretching it too far to insinuate that Gowon did not contribute anything significant to quelling the majors’ uprising on that night of murder and mayhem. Although he had no troops under his direct command having only arrived in the country the night before, he was a figure of calm authority behind the scene as he rallied the troops and made sure that the idea of military disruption of the political process was a professional abomination.”

Pray, how did Tatalo Alamu arrive at this conclusion? When did undocumented personal whims become the basis of history?

Chuks showed that Gowon reneged on the Aburi Accord, and ensured that Nigeria would not backtrack from the war precipice. He detailed war crimes the Nigerian Air Force committed against Biafra, including deliberate church, school and market bombings and over 50 years later, the Gowon with the storied heart of a church minister still claimed that he obeyed the Geneva Convention. Surprisingly, Chuks didn’t dwell on the Asaba massacre, the worst act of genocide committed in that war, and I hold it against him. Tatalo did, but he only added insult to injury; he had dined with two Asaba people who remembered “with eerie graphicness about the indignities visited on young women (read mass rape), the man’s attention was focused on the actual pogrom which he survived as a boy by lying still amidst the huge pile of the dead and dying. Later, he had helped sympathizers carry the body of Chief Okongwu to his adjoining homestead for proper dressing before interment. That incidentally was the father of a former First Lady of Nigeria”.

Gowon, Tatalo Alamu’s hero, remained Nigeria’s head of state for seven years after that Asaba massacre but questioned/punished no one for it. Okogwu, whose murder and burial the Asaba man remembered vividly decades later, had actually just finished reading the welcome address to the federal troops…and he was savagely executed. The lady recounted the mass rape and sex slavery Asaba women suffered under Angel Gowon but that elicited no condemnation from Tatalo Alamu.

All he could ask was “When are we going to get proper closure in this land?” If that showed his impatience with the injured former Biafrans and/or Asaba people for failing to FORGET their injuries, then Tatalo Alamu has just committed the second Asaba massacre by his startling insensitivity. The Omu whose burial he so memorably attended suffered anguish during the Asaba massacre. Actually, her spirit may have died during the pogrom but she kept breathing like a person in coma…for she could never have forgotten how her “children” were massacred with careless abandon.

Chinua Achebe was right after all when he wrote that “wisdom does not come from what happened but the lessons people learn from events because much could happen to a stone without making the stone any wiser”. Even Gen Gowon and Tatalo Alamu have refused to learn the right lessons from the Biafran War, Africa’s nastiest and most brutal civil war. The brutality and irrational killings of that Civil War visited all the towns and villages in the Anioma area of Delta state, steeped in an orgy of wanton savagery. Apart from Asaba, Oko Anara suffered a massive attack from the federal troops who also killed over 400 people one night at Ishiagu.

In my home town of Ubulu-Uku, Lt. Nwajei (Ngozi Nwajei’s father) and Captain Ugbechie (the journalist Kenneth Ugbechie’s uncle) and two other officers of the Nigerian Army were shot at point-blank range by their former colleagues. Paul Okocha (Nkem Okocha’s father) was murdered when the federal troops chanced upon him at Onicha-Ugbo and his Peugeot car was seized; he had gone to drop off a brother or sister-in-law. Many civilians died from the senseless shelling which heralded the federal troops’ entrance into the town. Tony Chiejine of the Dangote Group’s media office was being led to safety when a shell exploded and shredded his loving sister who was holding his hand. What nightmare!

Actually, the two coups of 1966, the Aburi Accord, the Nigerian Civil War and the subsequent tragedies that took place in Biafra have not been fully discussed. The roles played by all the commanders in the American Civil War or the two World Wars have been detailed out by both the key actors and respectable historians. All the battles have been looked into, and the key players’ roles have been detailed. The mistakes made as well as the strategic schemes of the outstanding commanders have been documented. The criminal killings are not hidden.

So, it is not only infuriating that the Nigerian head of state during that sad war in which the federal troops committed the sort of atrocities that devastated Asaba, and who punished no single actor in that sordid scene from hell would be telling us over fifty years later that he even knew about the Geneva Convention. Then why didn’t he enforce real obedience on his soldiers?

The white colonialists doubted our sheer humanity and treated us as subhuman. So, too, do ethnic champions who pretend to be national leaders doubt the sheer humanity of certain sections of the country. Equally guilty are the columnists who applaud them as inspired statesmen offer insipid excuses for their inexcusable failures.

Leaders must be made to account for their actions or Nigeria will never advance. That university professors and respected newspaper columnists would wave side the failing Iloegbunam recorded against Gowon is one reason Nigeria remains totally disunited and steeped deep in the dark ages. And oh, thank you Chuks Iloegbunam; damn the heretical revisionists or cretins who would dare argue that your historic service to Nigeria on the Biafran tragedy is not noble.