Gowon clocks 80

OCTOBER 19, 2014 BY JIDE AKINBIYI 

   

 

 

General Yakubu Gowon

General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s second military ruler (1966-1975) had the singular distinction of being the country’s youngest ruler at 32. He had ruled the country for nine years and was yet to be 41 when he was overthrown by some of the officers who had put him in office. In spite of his relatively young age, he was blessed with wisdom that enabled him to successfully pilot the affairs of the nation at its most critical period.

Gowon’s place in Nigeria’s history can be seen and judged from three perspectives: the events preceding the advent of the military in 1966 up to the overthrow of the first military ruler, the nine years of his rule and the post-Gowon era up to the present day.

As a practising journalist and an interested observer of Nigerian politics since the colonial era, I have been an eyewitness to the country’s unfortunate drift in the direction of failure to the disappointment of its citizens and foreign friends.

From the very beginning at independence, Nigeria had shown signs of weakness and eventual failure. Besides its incompetence and abuse of power, the ruling party had a penchant for obstructing the democratic process and a peaceful change of government at elections. Within two years of independence, the government had become so unpopular that when on January 15, 1966, some young military officers staged a coup and killed the Prime Minister, two regional premiers, the Federal Minister of Finance and some senior military officers, the news was warmly received by jubilant crowds in all parts of the country, especially in the South.

Patently unprepared for the business of governing, Nigeria’s first military ruler, General Aguiyi Ironsi, 42, former Chief of General Staff made some costly mistakes in his approach to the governing of the country. As a military officer, he tried to bring the country under a unified command when he promulgated Decree 34 under which the administration of the country was centralised. It was a law capable of promoting dictatorship by putting so much power in the hands of the nation’s chief executive. The measure did not go down well with the country’s political class who had spent years during the colonial period negotiating for a federal system. Besides, the coup that brought Ironsi, an Igbo, to power had been described as one-sided affair carried out by Igbo officers in whose hands political leaders of the Hausa/Fulani North were killed. Unnoticed by Ironsi’s government, discontent and anger had been brewing among the ranks of northern soldiers and civilians. On July 29, 1966, Ironsi was overthrown in a bloody coup that claimed the lives of many military officers of Igbo extraction. It was a coup of vengeance that spread among civilians in the North where Igbos were killed in large numbers.

The young officers who staged the July coup were not prepared to accept any non-northerner to lead the army and the country. They refused to obey Ironsi’s next in command, Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, who on seeing the danger signals, cleverly eased himself   out of the country. For the next few days, the nation was without a government as the coupists did not agree to pick a leader from within their ranks. Their choice finally rested on Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon, the Chief of Army Staff who was neutral in all matters pertaining to the coup. Then only 32, Gowon is a Christian from a minority tribe in Plateau State.

Gowon was a stranger to politics and governance when he became the Head of State. How then could anyone expect him to succeed, more so at a time of grave national crisis when more experienced and elderly politicians and military officers had failed? But the humble military officer from a deeply religious family proved the sceptics wrong.

The bloody violence within the army and among civilians was still raging when he made his first broadcast to the nation on August 4, 1966. He appealed to the people to cooperate with his government by stopping the violence now that another northerner was heading the country. In an attempt to pacify the Yoruba of the Western Region who had nursed grievances against the northern leaders, he announced the immediate release of Chief Obafemi Awolowo who had been in jail for treasonable felony since 1963. The following day, he was at the Ikeja Airport to personally receive the chief from Calabar prisons. Welcoming Awolowo back into freedom, Gowon made a prophetic statement “Chief, the nation still needs you for your wealth of experience.”

Those words came alive within a few months when the prevailing crisis was getting out of control. As the nation went from one crisis to another following the July coup, Gowon, in a rare display of statesmanship took some critical decisions that enabled him navigate cleverly through each crisis. To douse the ethnic crisis that nearly tore the country apart, Gowon summoned an ad hoc conference of the country’s political leaders. He appealed to them to consider any framework that could guarantee the continued existence of Nigeria in peace and unity. Even as the conference was going on the violence in the country made it unsafe for Igbo leaders to attend further sittings and it came to an abrupt end.

Meanwhile, as more and more Igbos fled to the East for safety, the Military Governor of Eastern Region, Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, refused to recognise Gowon as the new Head of State. He demanded an official statement on the whereabouts of the Head of State, and insisted that in Ironsi’s absence, the next officer in rank, and not Gowon, should take his place. The crisis dragged on till January 1967 when the then Head of State of Ghana, General Ankrah, invited the opposing camps in the Nigerian military feud to Aburi, a provincial hill-side resort in Ghana for a settlement. Ojukwu and his aides attended the meeting with the mindset of an aggrieved people.

They wanted a review of the Nigerian Constitution that would allow any unit of the federation the rights of secession if it so desired. Gowon and his men went to the meeting strongly determined to preserve Nigeria’s territorial integrity at all costs even if it meant conceding more powers and autonomy to the regions. Though he expressed sympathy for the hardship the Igbo went through during the crisis, Gowon was not ready to yield ground on the issue of Nigerian unity. He demonstrated this spirit of unity even at a personal level when at lunch break during the Aburi meeting; he went over to Ojukwu to eat from his plate. The meeting ended with each side returning home with its own interpretation of what had transpired. The gathering cloud in the East moved in the direction of ultimate secession, while the Federal Government was still exploring other avenues for peace. But when it became clear that Ojukwu was going to declare his state of Biafra, Gowon pulled a fast one which at least in legal terms, demolished Ojukwu’s hold on the land that was to be declared the Independent State of Biafra. In a special broadcast at dawn on May 27, 1967 Gowon announced the restructuring of Nigeria into 12 states from the three of the existing regions while the Midwest remained intact. The Eastern Region was broken into three: the core Igbo land became the East Central State while the minorities in the region became Rivers and the Cross River states. He immediately appointed Military Governors to the new states. Those for the eastern minorities, Rivers and Cross River operated from Lagos pending the time the two would be liberated. Undeterred by that political master stroke, Ojukwu ignored Gowon’s declaration and went ahead on May 30 to declare the new independent nation of Biafra covering the entire territorial space of the Eastern Region of Nigeria.

The birth of Biafra was a signal for war to those who wanted to ‘Keep Nigeria One’ and also those who were bent on preserving the new nation of Biafra. The latter had spent the past 11 months preparing for secession and to defend its boundaries. On the contrary, Gowon whose army had been seriously depleted as a result of two coups in 1966 had not really mobilised for war. In reality, he did not expect that the crisis would degenerate to a state of war. At the worst, he had thought that if Ojukwu ever declared secession, it would be contained by what he termed ‘Police action.’

When war eventually broke out in July 1967, Gowon’s reaction was still that of ‘police action.’ But when Ojukwu’s planes were bombing places in Lagos, and his footmen were operating outside eastern borders, Gowon remobilised his men. He made fresh recruits who were given emergency training to reinforce the police action team. But he relied more on his political strategies in breaking the back bone of the opponent and winning the hearts of the people at home. In another master stroke, he decided to bring into his government some prominent political leaders, one from each of the 12 newly created states. Among them were Joseph Tarka a prominent minority leader from Benue, Dr. Okoi Arikpo a well-known scholar from Cross River in the yet to be liberated Eastern Region, Alhaji Aminu Kano a champion of the poor in the North, Chief Anthony Enahoro a prominent politician from the Midwest, Alhaji Shehu Shagari who was a Minister in the Tafawa Balewa-Government and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the jailed leader of opposition and former Premier of Western Nigeria who was made Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council and Federal Commissioner for Finance. With these appointments, Gowon received greater support from various sections of the country and benefitted immensely from the experience of those civilian leaders. The civil war went on for the next two years with Biafra gradually succumbing under Nigeria’s ‘federal might’ until January 1970 when it finally collapsed.

In victory, Gowon was again at his best as a statesman. In a statement that was published world-wide, he told Biafran officers who were brought to him in Lagos for the final act of surrender, that there was ‘no victor and no vanquished’, and immediately embarked on an elaborate programme of reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction in the war ravaged areas of the country. It is to his eternal credit that he won the war and the peace that followed, a feat truly deserving of a Nobel Prize.

With the war ended and the unification of the country achieved, Gowon’s duty to the nation would be deemed to have been over. But those around him who were benefitting from government’s huge expenditure on reconstruction would not allow him to leave while the ovation was still loud. Many among his advisers, political appointees, top civil servants as well as military officers were against an early return to civil rule. In his Independence Day broadcast that year, he promised the nation that his government would go in 1976, a long period of six years to enable the government set the country on a path of economic progress. But in 1974, he reneged and told the nation that in view of the situation in the country, 1976 was no longer feasible.

From that moment, Gowon’s government had started to drift like the Balewa Government of the First Republic. Its good days were over until it was overthrown in July 1975 by some of the officers who had put him in power nine years earlier. But Gowon remained Gowon, a humble and patriotic man with no political ambition.

Akinbiyi, a veteran journalist, sent this piece via eakinbiyi@yahoo.com