BY fixing the date of handover of instruments
of surrender from the humbled Republic of
Biafra to Nigeria after a 30-month civil war
that took thousands of lives on both sides on
January 15, 1970, perhaps the stakeholders
wanted to make a statement that whatever
damage was done to the polity exactly four
years earlier on January 15, 1966, which was
actually the major precursor of the crisis, could
be undone.
But 50 years after the putsch that killed many
major players in the country’s political field,
the gunshots still reverberate across Nigeria,
the effects of the coup are yet to wear off and
the issues raised by it are still unresolved even
as the country grapples with its fallouts.
The young middle-level officers who planned
the military take-over may have been driven by
their patriotism and inspiration drawn from
fallouts of revolutionary ideology sweeping the
globe at the time, making them to offer
themselves as the vehicles of change.
Blinded by radical enthusiasm and feeling of
despondency that the young nation was being
led on a path of destruction by its first crop of
leaders, the revolutionaries followed the
emerging trend in Africa signposted by military
putsch sweeping away early political leaders.
Three years earlier in the neigbouring West
African countries of Dahomey and Togo, there
had been change of governments and few days
earlier, the leaderships of David Dacko and
Maurice Yameogo were violently overthrown in
Central African Republic and Burkina Faso,
then known as Upper Volta.
But the Nigerian coupists certainly did not
envisage that their midnight operations during
which prominent political leaders and senior
military officers were killed, would continue to
define the course of nationhood, fifty years
after.
Because of the delicate ethnic balancing of the
country, which was not as pronounced as it is
today, what was planned, at least according to
the accounts of the coupists, to be a pan-
Nigeria affair, ended up being the major cause
of the cracks in national unity and hindrance
on the nation’s charted path to greatness.
In what was perceived by its opponents as
ethnic colouration, the Prime Minister, Tafawa
Balewa, Northern Premier, Ahmadu Bello,
Western Premier, Ladoke Akintola, an ally of
the North and senior military officers who were
almost limited to the North and the West, were
killed but some Igbo political and military
officers were allegedly left alive.
And instead of calming frayed nerves, the
major beneficiary of the putsch, General Aguiyi
Ironsi, either by omission or commission,
attempted through the contentious Unification
Decree, to centralize the country’s
administration even as he made no visible
attempt to prosecute the January mutineers, an
action that further deepened the anger of
northern officers.
Perhaps if they had applied the principle of
federal character in their composition and
execution of their plan, the country could have
been spared the agonizing consequences of
their action although, in some accounts, a more
nationalistic reason of freeing detained Chief
Obafemi Awolowo and installing him as the
leader of the country, was given.
What was planned to be a solution to the
perceived drift in the polity at the time
incidentally ended up being the very source of
acrimony that caused the dismemberment of
the country six months later when a counter-
coup was staged by Northern elements who
initially were said to be bent of drifting away
from Nigeria.
That the country is still grappling with the
issues raised by the January coupists as the
reasons for their action in even larger scales
today, showed their myopia about the politics
and consequences of their actions.
Leader of the coup, Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, in
his broadcast where he declared a state of
emergency and suspended the constitution,
justified the putsch by stating, “The aim of the
Revolutionary Council is to establish a strong
united and prosperous nation, free from
corruption and internal strife.”
But corruption has grown in such a scary scale
and has permeated every level of the society
that it is now described as the major clog in the
wheel of the country’s progress while the
“internal strives” of those days have become a
child’s play, first to the pogrom and the
resultant 30-month civil war and later to the
internecine communal clashes and political
distrusts that have come to be identified with
Nigeria today.
He said to Nigerians, “Our enemies are the
political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in
high and low places that seek bribes and
demand 10 percent; those that seek to keep the
country divided permanently so that they can
remain in office as ministers or VIPs at least,
the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the
country look big for nothing before
international circles, those that have corrupted
our society and put the Nigerian political
calendar back by their words and deeds.
“Like good soldiers we are not promising
anything miraculous or spectacular. But what
we do promise every law abiding citizen is
freedom from fear and all forms of oppression,
freedom from general inefficiency and freedom
to live and strive in every field of human
endeavour, both nationally and internationally.
We promise that you will no more be ashamed
to say that you are a Nigerian.”
But corruption has grown in such a scary scale
and has permeated every level of the society
that it is now described as the major clog in the
wheel of the country’s progress while the
“internal strives” of those days have become a
child’s play, first to the pogrom and the
resultant 30-month civil war and later to the
internecine communal clashes and political
distrusts that have come to be identified with
Nigeria today.
The “big men” have moved from taking ten
percent to the whole pie and more than ever,
they continue to engage in acts “to keep them
permanently in office” while freedom from
oppression has continued to elude Nigerians.
Every coup speech since Nzeogwu’s, has
addressed corruption and indiscipline in high
places as its major reason and several attempts
are still being made to pull back the country
from the edge of the precipice where it is
always dragged by circumstances that are
continually fuelled by the issues raised in the
first coup.
The replacement of the original centrifugal
system of federalism where the four federating
units of the time were developing, each at its
own pace with a measure of limited
independence, by the command structure of the
military and its centripetal administration,
destroyed the very foundation of the country’s
politics.
The federating units were balkanized, a
development that further exacerbated the
ethnic lines of a multi-national country that
was programmed to derive strength in its
diversity thereby stressing more on divisive
tendencies.
The current agitation for restructuring of the
polity, which latest attempt was the last 2014
National Conference convoked by the Goodluck
Jonathan administration, was one of the echoes
of the results of military take-over of
governance in Nigeria.
If the democratic journey had not been halted
by the January, 1966 intervention that foisted,
in the first instance, a 13-year military rule on
Nigeria, perhaps the country would have gotten
over the hiccups of a democracy that is still
being haunted by the ghost of military
dictatorship even after 16 years of unbroken
civilian rule.

www.ngrguardiannews.com/2016/01/january-15-1966-50-years-after/

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