By Anthony Akinwale
On Friday, January 14, 1966, there was a night party at 11 Thompson Avenue, residence of Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari. It was to celebrate because he had remarried, his first wife having been shot dead. Wining, dinning and dancing together were army officers who would stage Nigeria’s first military coup a few hours later. Among those killed in that coup was Maimalari, their host. Such was the illogicality of cruelty.
In the tragedy of January 15, 1966, it has been sixty years, young military officers below the age of 30, turned guns against each other and on some functionaries of Nigeria’s First Republic. Soldiers skillful in shooting and hitting targets reduced Nigeria’s complex problems to human targets, bullets and guns. Snipers lacking in sagacity left Nigeria with a gaping wound. And whenever we think it has healed, some people remind us it hasn’t.
Total disregard for sanctity of human life, in contempt of Nigeria’s ethnic and regional sensibilities, marked the beginning of the first bout of pestilential military rule in Nigeria. Prior to that needless bloodshed, Nigeria had a headache, caused by her politicians. On January 15, 1966, the headache became a brain tumour, caused by her soldiers. Sixty years later, the patient is neither dead nor alive.
Then came the so-called “revenge coup” on July 29, 1966, another instance of illogicality of cruelty. Those who rightly or wrongly perceived the January 15 coup as an ethnic coup chose to embark on their own mutiny. It was another round of bloodshed. Sandwiched between the bloodshed of January 15 and the bloodshed of July 29, 1966 was the killing of innocent easterners resident in northern Nigeria. Following July 29 was the Nigeria-Biafra War, a war in which both sides committed war crimes.
In Oil, Politics and Violence, Max Siollun wrote: “Many Northern soldiers that participated in the January coup also played prominent role in the July mutiny. Some of these Northern soldiers felt they had been duped in January into taking part in operations that led to the death of their military and civilian leaders….
“Plotting by the Northern officers was carried out almost openly. Their bitterness and hostility toward their Igbo colleagues (whom they felt had betrayed them) was such that they made little effort to conceal their intentions. The de facto leader and coordinator of the revenge coup was the Inspector of Signals Lt-Colonel Murtala Muhammed, ably assisted by Majors Martin Adamu and Theophilus Danjuma. All three were under thirty years old.”
During the Nigeria-Biafra War, Murtala’s 2 division of the Nigerian Army, having recaptured the Mid-West from invading Biafrans, carried out the infamous Asaba massacre of October 1967 in which hundreds of defenceless civilians were massacred. It was a war crime, another instance of illogicality of cruelty.
Murtala became military head of state on July 29, 1975, ninth anniversary of the “revenge coup”, having overthrown Yakubu Gowon, principal beneficiary of the “revenge coup”. Nigerians forgive or forget easily. They fell in love with him and with his business-like approach to governance.
I was a Form 2 student of St Finbarr’s College, Akoka, Yaba on Friday, February 13, 1976. After the morning assembly, we matched to our classrooms for the first lesson of the day. But that was not to be. Recalled to the assembly ground, informed that there had been “a change of government”, we were to go home. My brother and I trekked from Akoka to Ikeja. Buses stopped running. Then came the announcement the following day: General Murtala Muhammed, and his Aide-de-Camp, Lieutenant Akintunde Akinsehinwa, had been killed in an abortive coup. Also killed was Colonel Ibrahim Taiwo, Military Governor of Kwara State. Nigerians mourned Murtala Muhammed as an only son.
Lieutenant-Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, leader of the abortive coup, and a number of military officers “implicated” in the coup, to use the word of the military government that succeeded Muhammed, were arrested, tried in secret, pronounced guilty and executed in two batches.
The history of military coups in Nigeria invites, encourages and challenges us to be conscious of the illogicality of cruelty of military rule. It is cruel, cynical, senseless and immoral that those who stage successful coups are proclaimed heroes, while those who stage abortive coups are labelled villains. In the dark days of military rule in Nigeria, dark days that featured the ethnically and regionally insensitive coups of January 15, 1966, and July 29, 1966, young men in army uniform, in utter disregard for the sanctity of human life, chose to shed blood.
After those first two coups, after the massacre of innocent easterners living in northern Nigeria, the senseless Nigeria-Biafra war in which both sides committed untold atrocities, the coups of July 29, 1975, February 13, 1966, December 31, 1983, August 27, 1985, April 22, 1990, November 17, 1993, Nigeria remains confronted with the illogicality of cruelty in which soldiers lived a life of kill-or-get-killed.
It is cruel to stage a coup. It is worse than cruel to shed blood during the coup, especially blood of those who offered no resistance to soldiers who went to arrest them. It is cruel to kill during a coup only to be killed years later by some of those who assisted you in staging a successful coup. It is inhuman to tie a human being to the stake and execute him for taking part in an aborted coup. It is worse than cruel to execute a man because he looked like someone who took part in a coup. It is cynically cruel to conduct elections manifestly lacking in transparency. It is worse than cynical cruelty to profile, persecute, malign, intimidate, and humiliate those whose political opinions and options are different from ours.
Nigeria’s history of civilian and military dispensations has been a history of illogicality of cruelty. To break this cycle of cruelty, we need to learn our lessons. But there is little or no evidence to show that we are willing to learn. Nigeria is a land where rhetoric is manipulative and divisive. Such rhetoric does not build. It destroys.
Building an edifice requires laying foundations. A nation is an edifice. If it is to stand, it must have its foundations. We have failed to build a nation in Nigeria because we have failed to lay strong intellectual, moral and constitutional foundations on which a nation must be built.
Instead of embarking on the tedious task of laying requisite foundations for nationhood, some consider it sufficient to use force to keep the geographical boundary of Nigeria, while some are ready to use force to adjust the same boundary. Those who would use force pontificate that Nigeria’s unity is non-negotiable. Their voice can be heard by reading Section 2 of the 1999 Constitution, a replica of the 1979 Constitution. But it is misleading to say Nigeria’s unity is non-negotiable. A non-negotiable union is a forced association. But a true and just nation is not.
It is an illusion to think that merely adjusting the boundary of Nigeria will engenderan exemplary nation. A nation is neither born by simply adjusting boundaries, nor by simply repartitioning what was partitioned in the 19th century by European colonizers. A nation is not a state held together at gun point but an association founded on intellectual, moral and constitutional foundations agreed upon, laid down, and protected by those who consent to belong to the association because they believe they would flourish by belonging to the association.
Father Akinwale is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.
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