Ejike Anyaduba

I once asked who David Muffet was. The answer as at the time was sketchy. Apart from being of British descent and the author of the highly partisan book: LET TRUTH BE TOLD(an account of the January 1966 coup) not much was revealed.
However, I have been able to find out that the stuffy old man was a colonial administrator in the North, hired by the Kaduna Maffia to write about the events of 1966. And he did a lazy job of it. Iyorchie Ayu was quoted on page 170 of the book IRONSI, NIGERIA, THE ARMY, POWER AND POLITICS written by Chuks Iloegbunam as saying: " David Muffet, a colonial administrative officer whom the "Kaduna Mafia" hired to write about the events of 1966 states unequivocally that this oligarchy turned against Ironsi's regime in May 1966 not because of any particular love for Sarduana or any "Northern outrage" against the January killings, but precisely because the civil servants stood to lose most in a unified civil service. They stood to gain most in a purely Northern polity".

Well meaning Nigerians have continued to wonder why history is no longer taught in schools. To this no information has been vouchsafed.

Perhaps Nigeria is content to leave its dark history permanently forgotten. That way possibly the wrongs of the past would be forgotten. But it does not seem likely that certain a whet appetite for knowledge would be slaked by disjointed information cobbled in such book as the one Muffet wrote.

I got attracted to the book initially because of its syntactical structure, but lost interest when it consistently repudiated facts and upheld fiction just to intone the sentiments of a particular people.
I know as does everybody else that Biafra was not beloved of the Harold Wilson government of the mid sixties.
High Commissioner Cummings Bruce and his successor David Hunt were not differently persuaded and it did seem that the likes of Muffet did everything possible to keep the order.

Muffet will go down in history as the worst of the British nationals who furthered the avoidable bloodshed in the summer of 1966 and bungled the story afterwards.

Ejike Anyaduba
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