The point I have tried to establish in the first part of this essay is that the preponderance of Igbo army officers among the plotters of the January 15, 1966 coup is not enough evidence to sustain the charge that it was an Igbo plot. In other words, other circumstances of the coup ought to be factored in to conclusively establish this – especially in the face of very big questions raised by the leading role played by Major Adewale Ademoyega, a Yoruba man, in the supposed Igbo plot.
Col. Hameed Ali, former military administrator of Kaduna State, former secretary general of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), and ex-Comptroller-General of Nigeria Customs Service, told the Oputa Panel that every soldier planning a coup knows exactly the risk he is taking when trying to recruit people into his plot. Hence, coup planners are very very cautious in choosing whom to speak to, often restricting this to their closest confidants. And, not unexpectedly, these confidants, most times, end up being from the same ethnic group or region as the planners. This, Col. Ali said, is the reason most coups in Nigeria are led by plotters who largely share the same ethnicity or region. We saw this with the Dimka coup, the Vatsa coup, the Orkar coup, and even the alleged Diya coup of 1997.
The fact that these coups, unlike the January 1966 putsch, have not been labelled ethnic or regional plots points to one reality – the sectional label being given to the 1966 event stems mainly from factors other than the ethnic composition of its plotters. The most prominent among these factors is the ethnicity of the victims of the coup, as all but one of them were non-Igbo.
For the records, those killed in the plot included two northern politicians; Tafawa Balewa and Ahmadu Bello, the prime minister and the northern premier, respectively; the western premier, Samuel Ladoke Akintola, and the minister of finance, Festus Okotie-Eboh, who hailed from the midwestern region. The military officers were Brig. Zakariya Maimalari, the commander 2nd Brigade Nigeria Army, Lagos; Col. Kur Mohammed, staff officer army headquarters; Lt. Col. James Yakubu Pam, the adjutant-general, Nigeria Army; and Lt. Col. Abogo Largema, commander, 4th Battalion, Ibadan – all from the north. Others were Brig. Samuel Adesoji Ademulegun, the commander, 1st Brigade, Kaduna; and Col. Ralph Shodeinde, the commandant, Nigeria Military Training College (NMTC), Kaduna – both from the western region. Also killed was Lt. Col. Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe, the quartermaster-general, Nigeria Army, who hailed from the east.
As can be seen from the above, the fact speaks for itself – the eastern region came out almost unhurt in terms of human casualties. Without doubt, this is enough to cast a cloud of ethnic bias over the coup. Also not helpful was the fact that some Igbo people living in the north celebrated the killing of Ahmadu Bello, mocking the northerners for the “triumph.”
However, as would be expected, the coup plotters have insisted that this pattern of killing was never a product of ethnic bias. For instance, the killing of Ademulegun and Shodeinde by Onwuatuegwu was, according to Gbulie, because they resisted arrest with the former alleged to have tried to reach for a pistol. It is difficult to establish how factual this account is, especially considering that we did not hear from any disinterested eyewitness or even Onwuatuegwu himself. However, it is also instructive that Onwuatuegwu arrested and brought to the Brigade Headquarters Sir Kashim Ibrahim, the governor of the northern region, and was quoted as saying that he didn’t shoot him because he cooperated with him. Would this, therefore, mean that if Ademulegun and Shodeinde had not, as alleged, resisted arrest, they would have also been spared? Again, sparing the life of Sir Ibrahim does not exactly align with the idea that the coup was meant to eliminate all political leaders of other regions in order to entench complete Igbo domination. After Ahmadu Bello and Balewa, Ibrahim was the most prominent and influential among northern politicians of the time, and so should not have been spared by the plotters when they had him in their hands. The same scenario is seen at Ibadan where Captain Emmanuel Nwora Nwobosi and his men killed Akintola but spared the governor, Chief Fani Kayode, whom they brought on handcuffs to the Federal Brigade of Guards barracks in Lagos. Akintola was said to have attacked Nwobosi and his men with a personal gun before he was overwhelmed and killed by a firing squad, but not without Nwobosi getting injured in the confrontation. (Till his death in 2020, Nwobosi still had a scare from the bullet wound he sustained that night.) Chief Kayode, who offered no resistance, was spared. Could Akintola have experienced the same fate if he had behaved otherwise? Again, the charge that the coup was meant to wipe out leaders of other ethnic groups labours here.
However, not all the victims resisted arrest – even going by the accounts of plotters like Gbulie and Ademoyega. Sir Balewa and Okotie-Eboh were taken away alive from their respective houses, and so was Col. Unegbe. So, these men’s deaths cannot be explained by any claim of resistance of arrest, which would also mean that the plotters never agreed to kill or spare their targets based on whether they cooperated or resisted arrest.
It, therefore, appeared each team leader acted on his own initiative. This lack of uniformity further brings to scrutiny the allegation that the plot was intended to kill as many political and military leaders of other regions as possible. If that was the goal, then that should have also reflected on the briefing given to each plotter – to kill without sparing. Nwobosi and Onwuatuegwu did not act like soldiers with such briefing. This appears to lend credence to the claim by both Gbulie (in his book) and Major Humphrey Chukwuka (in a press interview) that there was never an agreement among the plotters as to whether to kill or not to kill their targets? Gbulie claimed that the coup plotters were, from the beginning, divided on whether to make the coup bloody or bloodless. He specifically mentioned Major Okafor and Captain Ihedigbo as one of those against shedding blood.
However, there is also the question of why high-ranking Igbo politicians seemed not to have been included among the targets – whether that would mean killing them or merely arresting them. Only the eastern premier, Dr. Michael Okpara, was placed under house arrest, and while Azikiwe was outside the country, there were other high-profile Igbo politicians that could have been targeted. The fact that things went differently would strengthen the argument of those alleging that the coup was an Igbo plot.
But then there is one question which most commentators appear not to have particularly paid attention to. Looking at the entire plot and its predictable results, can one confidently describe it as a strategy intended to achieve domination? Achieving domination through killing the political leaders of other ethnic groups would mean that Igbo politicians would occupy the positions left by their killed colleagues. But by the operation of our parliamentary constitution of the time, the death of Balewa and Ahmadu Bello would not take power away from the NPC and the north and give it to the NCNC and the east – simply because the NPC would still retain its parliamentary majority and would therefore still produce the next prime minister. Again, even if all northerners in the parliament were killed, a bye election would happen next, and of course, the dominant NPC would still produce most of the seats. So, in terms of strategy, the alleged domination plot was a no brainer, and the suggestion that the outstandingly cerebral Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe bought into such a silly idea is annoyingly inconceivable.
Another possible scenario is that the alleged Igbo domination was intended to be realized through military rule. But then the way the whole exercise eventually panned out totally failed to support this idea. Igbo officers like Ironsi, Njoku, Anwunah, and Ojukwu who fought the coup were part of the core of Igbo military elite, and so should be the leaders and primary beneficiaries of any Igbo military domination. By moving against the coup, were they fighting against their own interest? Or were Nzeogwu and his fellow junior officers under the illusion that they could lead Igbo domination of the military without getting these senior commanders into the plot or, alternatively, neutralizing them?
Secondly, Ironsi’s decisions after the coup – as the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces – did not support the idea of a military domination agenda. The transfers he approved across the army command weakened the Igbo’s grip on the military. As of the day of the coup, Igbo officers commanded four out of the five battalions that made up the army – in other words, they were in control of 80 percent of the infantry units of the Nigeria Army – but by the time he finished his transfers, Igbo officers were commanding only two (40 percent). These two were the 1st Battalion in Enugu and the 3rd Battalion in Kaduna headed by Lt. Col. David Ogunewe and Lt. Col. I. C. Okoro, respectively. Lt. Col. Mohammed Shuwa, a northerner, had replaced Ojukwu (who was made a military governor) as the commander of the 5th Battalion, Kano, while Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon had taken the place of Lt. Col. Njoku at the 2nd Battalion, Lagos. But most significantly, Ironsi was to eventually move Gowon from this role and made him the commander of the army – then designated as the Chief of Staff Army Headquarters (a role known today as Chief of Army Staff, CAS). This was the position held by Ironsi previously under the designation, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) – and going by the Igbo domination theory, he should have got another Igbo to replace him, rather than handing over the command of the army to a northerner. It was this office that positioned Gowon to become the major beneficiary of the July 29, 1966 revenge coup.
But then, those propagating the conspiracy theory that Zik and other Igbo political leaders of the time were part of – or at least knew about – the plot should explain how replacement of a civilian government with a military junta could have benefitted these civilian leaders whose position and power were snatched away by the soldiers. Pointedly, did a politician like Azikiwe actually support a military putsch that would end his privileged status as the nation’s number two man and vanish his entire political legacy and base as embodied by the NCNC and its political strongholds of the eastern and midwestern regions? Did Igbo politicians senselessly dig their political grave by supporting a plot that would overthrow the government they were part of? This question is ever pertinent given that the said coup ended abruptly many sterling political careers with none of the high-flying politicians being able to attain the same height thereafter. And for people like Nwafor Orizu (the Senate President at the time of the coup), Dr. Michael Okpara (eastern premier), and Mbazulike Amaechi (aviation minister), the putsch marked the beginning of their political retirement.
In view of all this, it is not difficult to see why it has not been a very straightforward thing to sell the January 1966 coup as an Igbo plot – unlike the July coup of the same year which its regional and ethnic colouration has never been in dispute. I haven’t seen anyone – including the plotters – come out to say that the July coup was not ethnic. On the contrary, several commentators – including non-Igbo former military officers that witnessed the January putsch such as Generals Babangida and Alabi Isama – have sought to debunk the Igbo coup idea. This, if anything, points to the fact that there is no sufficient evidence to support that the coup was an Igbo plot.
Revealingly, those who are bent on pushing the Igbo plot narrative – including the federal government of Gowon – have struggled to reconcile the idea with the leading role played by a Yoruba man, Ademoyega, in the plot. This, as stated in the first part of this essay, was the reason the government tried to play down the role of Ademoyega in its 1970 publication titled, NIGERIA 1966, where it unexplainably failed to include his name among the major plotters. Similarly, that publication contained one unsupportable lie that Col. Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe, the only Igbo killed in the coup, was shot because he refused to hand over the key of the armoury to the plotters. The goal of this narrative obviously was to give the impression that the plotters did not set out to confront or harm any Igbo officer, meaning that Unegbe’s fate was down to his stubbornness. Surprisingly, the Nigerian military establishment that authored this publication “forgot” that Unegbe, as the quartermaster, was not an armourer – he had no key to any armoury. Captain Gbulie, while testifying before the Oputa Panel, challenged General IBM Haruna (retired) to dispute the fact that a quartermaster does not and could not have been in possession of the key to an armoury. The general did not dispute this. If the plotters had needed the key to the armoury, they wouldn’t need to go too far as it was in possession of one of them, Captain Ihedigbo (who, alongside Major Okafor was detailed to go and arrest Ironsi but failed). A quartermaster, a position common in the militaries of Commonwealth countries, is only in charge of provision and distribution of non-combatant logistics like accomodation, food, water, fuel, uniforms etc. That the military establishment was “ignorant” of this is a strong pointer to how it struggled to push the Igbo plot idea in the face of contradictions.
In all, I am strongly of the view that the idea of an Igbo agenda as far as the January 1966 coup is concerned is a largely unfounded one, which, however, can be excused by certain circumstances that strongly portrayed the coup as such. These include, most significantly, the ethnic imbalance in the plotters’ selection of their victims, the unwarranted reaction of some Igbo residents of the north who provocatively celebrated the killing of Ahmadu Bello as an Igbo triumph, and the Unification Decree No. 30 promulgated by the Ironsi regime. Of course, reinforcing this belief was state propaganda by the Gowon government.
CONCLUDED
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.
As far as I am concerned, this is a very thorough and intelligent analysis. It is an important legacy.