the Biafra Story (1969) (6 page)

The General was being over-optimistic. The South would undoubtedly have welcomed such a break. In fact it did. But the North was a different entity all together. It was their representatives - the Northern House and the Emirs - who years before had seen in regionalism under the Richards Constitution an undying protection of their own society, with all its lethargy and inertia, from incursions by more vigorous and educated Southerners.

Unification was particularly popular among the Ibos of the East. They were the most travelled and best qualified of the major ethnic groups, and amply confident of their ability to compete on equal terms with anybody. For them regionalism had always meant treatment as second class citizens in the North, and a double system in the making of public appointments outside the Eastern Region.

Thus what was for the South a glorious opportunity was for the North an almost deadly threat. Nearly two years later in Enugu the American'Consul James Barnard nicely surnmed up the innate conflict of interests that has bedevilled Nigeria all these years. He said: 'It's no good ducking under or hedging round the single immutable political reality of this country, which is: in any race for the material benefits of life, starting from the same point and on the basis of equal opportunity, the Easterners are going to win by a mile. This is intolerable to the North. The only way to prevent it happening is to impose artificial shackles to progress on the East. This is intolerable to the Easterners.'

Discontent in the North started to seethe shortly after the commissions inquiring into various aspects of unification went to work. This discontent was later to be portrayed as entirely spontaneous and to involve the supposedly widespread grief over the death of the beloved Sardauna of Sokoto at the hands of an Ibo in January. That is a false picture.

Firstly the Sardauna, to judge from the immediate reaction of his subjects after his death, was regarded not as a benevolent father but an unscrupulous old despot, which he was. Secondly the violence that broke out in the North in May 1966 was not spontaneous. It took a lot of hard work.

When the politicians fell, it was not just the downfall of a small handful of men. Thousands more lost an easy mealticket when the politicians were separated from access to public funds. Enormous families found themselves without support and the prospect of work loomed before them; hangjers-on, party hirelings, agents, canvassers, contractors who had made plump profits through their connexions in high places, administrators who could not have held down their jobs without political protection, found themselves on the breadline. When a few souls started to agitate against the Ironsi regime the accoutrements were easily to hand: an army of willing voices to spread the rumours, inflame the passions and fire the hearts; the spectre of the all-dominating Ibo; the apparent stripping from the North of its traditional protective isolationism; lastly the revenge motive could be easily played upon, and it was. Thus the dead Sardauna was built up again into a saint, and the jailed officers who had led the January coup into devils.

Colonel Fajuyi in the West, an able and energetic man, had rigorously purged public life of its former parasites, dismissing all local government officials appointed by the hated Akintola regime and eleven ministers of his party. In the Midwest, and East similar measures went through. These were, however, less draconian because the NCNC, which controlled both regions prior to January 1966, had been voted into office (latterly under the UPGA banner) by the great majority of the electors without any jiggery-pokery.

In the North it was different. Here political power and the emirate aristocracy had been almost synonymous from time immemorial. Colonel Hassan, the new Military Governor, was the son of the Emir of Katsina. There was not exactly a choice of competent men to run the Native Administration, and those in power were in any case often the appointees of the Emirs. Thus the aristocratic and the administrative Establishments stayed in power. The politicians, although not in power, were not in detention either, nor even for long out of favour. It was from these that the whispering campaign started, and it soon flowered in fertile soil.

Particular exception was taken at once to Mr. Nwokedi, whose inquiry into the possibility of unifying the civil service took him on a tour of the North. Though he listened to the Northerners' views, his final report to General Ironsi contained conclusions that did not coincide with those views.

In Lagos General Ironsi was being pulled both ways. He knew of the discontent of the North towards the idea of unification, but there were powerful advocates of it in his immediate entourage. On 24 May he came off the fence. In a radio broadcast he announced the Constitution (Suspension and Modification) Decree. The provisions involved the abolition of the Regions and their conversion into groups of provinces, although with the same boundaries, Governors and administrations. Nigeria would cease to be a federation, and become simply the Republic of Nigeria. The public services were to be united under a single Public Services Commission, but regional (or now provincial) commissions would continue To appoint all but the most senior staff. He then added that these measures were entirely transitional and should be seen as such, and that they were made 'without prejudice' to the findings of the Rotimi Williams Commission. Unhappily that commission was working precisely on the problem of the relative merits of the federal and unitary systems.

It may well be that General Ironsi was seeking to placate the radical firebrands of the South who wanted reform quickly, while at the same time trying not to provoke the North by going too far. An examination of the Unification Decree (as it became known) shows that in fact it changed virtually nothing but names. More cogently, this decree did no more than formalize the manner of government that had existed since the army took over and ruled through the Supreme Military Council, very much a unitary body.

The Unification Decree was then used as the excuse for a series of most violent massacres of Easterners across the Northern Region. It started with a student demonstration at Kano. Within hours it had turned into a bloodbath. Again, although as advocates of unification the Yorubas of the Western Region had been almost the equals of the Ibos of the East, it was exclusively the Ibos and their, fellow-Easterners that the Northern mobs sought out. Shortly after the start of the demonstration in Kano hundreds of armed thugs swept across the space between the city walls and the Sabon Garis where the Easterners lived, broke into the ghetto and started burning, raping, looting and killing as many men, women and children from the East as they could lay hands on.

Any idea of spontaneity was dispelled by the spread of the riots. In lorries and buses thoughtfully provided by unnamed donors, waves of former party thugs spread out through the North, to Zaria, Kaduna and elsewhere. By the time it was all over Nigeria was again on the verge of disintegration. Although no figures were ever published from either Federal or Northern Government sources, the Easterners later calculated they lost three thousand dead in those massacres.

It may well be that some thought they were just demonstrating their feelings - which they had every right to do. But the butchery that went with it, the degree of the organization, and the ease with which it could be accomplished should have given warning of a deep underlying danger which constituted a dark portent for the future. Again the warning was overlooked.

Many Northerners were probably quite convinced after several months of quiet indoctrination that the, Ibos really were trying to take over Nigeria, to colonize the backward North, and use their undoubted talents to run the country from end to end. Again the secessionist demand of the North became an open issue. Demonstrating civil servants in Kaduna carried banners proclaiming: 'Let there be secession.' In the same city Colonel Hassan called a meeting of all the Northern Emirs, and many arrived with clear mandates from their people at. home asking for secession of the North. In Zaria the Emir was mobbed by crowds begging for secession.

After the meeting the Emirs sent Ironsi a secret memorandum telling him, in effect, to abrogate the Unification Decree or they would secede. General Ironsi replied by going to great lengths to explain that the decree involved no changes of boundary, and that indeed it hardly changed the status quo at all; he pointed out that it was a temporary measure to enable the army, accustomed to a unified command, to rule; and that there would be no permanent changes made without the promised referendum. The Emirs declared themselves satisfied.

In June Colonel Ojukwu, welcoming the Emir of Kano, his contemporary and friend, with whose aid he had been able to keep Kano without bloodshed in January, as the new Chancellor of the University of Nsukka, publicly called on his people to return to their homes and jobs in the North. Many of these Easterners had fled after the May massacres to seek safety in the East. Colonel Ojukwu asked them to believe that these killings had been 'part of the price we have had to pay' for the ideal of One Nigeria.

Throughout June the Ironsi Government groped for a remedy to the problem of the rising tension in Nigeria. To none did it occur, and least of all to Colonel Ojukwu, that the Northerners might be permitted to fulfil their age-old wish, and set up their own state. Eventually General fronsi left for a tour of the country to sound out local opinion, on the broadest possible basis, as to the future form of Nigeria that its people wished to see. He never returned to Lagos.

Chapter 4.

The Second Coup that Failed

SomE of those seeking to explain away the coup of the junior army officers of Northern origin on 29 July 1966, have suggested it was motivated by ideas of righteous revenge for the deaths in January of three senior army officers of Northern birth. Certainly, prior to the second coup there were growing cries in the North for the execution of the mutineers of January, not as retribution for the deaths of the politicians, whose passing remained largely unregretted, but for the shooting of Brigadier Mainialari and Colonels Pam and Largema.

This argument is not convincing. Apart from these three, two Yoruba colonels and two Ibo majors were also killed in January. It seems far more likely that the key to the motives of the officers who mutinied in July is to be found in the codeword that triggered the operation - ARABA. It is the Hausa word for 'Secession'; and although there was undoubtedly a strong element of revenge inside the movement and the subsequent activities of its perpetrators, their political aim was to fulfil the long-standing wish of the mass of the Northern people and quit Nigeria once and for all.

In this and in other points the two coups were utterly different. In the first coup there had been a fiery zeal to purge Nigeria of a host of undoubted ills; it was reformatory in motivation; bloodshed was minimal - four politicians and six officers. It was extrovert in nature and non-regional in orientation.

The July coup was wholly regional, introverted, revanchist and separatist in origins and unnecessarily bloody in execution.

A few years earlier it had been noted that although the great majority of the infantry were of Northern origin, and about eighty per cent of this majority were Tivs, almost seventy per cent of the commissioned ranks were from the East. This was no accident; but neither was it the design of the Easterners that this should be so, as has since been alleged. In its early days the Nigerian Army had emphasized the importance of education when granting commissions. As can be seen from the dispersion of primary schools (mentioned earlier) the North was chronically short of educated personnel.

In 1960, independence year, there had been only six commissioned officers from the North in the army. The new Defence Minister, Alhaji Ribadu, a Hausa, had decreed there should be fifty per cent Northerners in the commissioned ranks; but this could not be done overnight. By 1966 there were however far more junior officers of Northern origin in the army; and although the planning of the July coup was undoubtedly done by a small group of senior officers, the execution fell to these lieutenants.

Inside the army the dispersion of the officers reflected regional characteristics, again not deliberately, but on the basis of education and tendency. The great majority of the Northern officers were in infantry battalions, while the technical sections-stores, radio, engineering, maintenance, armoury, transport, medical, intelligence, training and ordnance - were the preserve of tile Easterners. When the July coup came the mutineers had only to take possession of the various garrison armouries and to arm their men to have the rest of the army and therefore the country at their mercy. This in fact was what they did.

General Ironsi was dining on the evening of 28 July with Lieutenant-Colonel Fajuyi, Military Governor of the West, at the latter's residence in lbadan. Ironsi had just completed his nation-wide tour. With them was Colonel Hilary Njoku, the Ibo commander of the Second Battalion based at Ikeja outside Lagos. The coup started with a mutiny at Abeokuta Barracks in the Western Region where a Hausa captain led a group of troops into the officers' mess at I I p. M. and shot three Eastern officers, a lieutenant-colonel, a major and a lieutenant. They then besieged the barracks, disarmed the Southern soldiers among the guard, seized the armoury and armed the Northerners. They also sounded the call to action, which brought the garrison from its sleep to line up on the parade ground. The Southern soldiers were singled out and locked up in the guardroom, while the Northerners made a house-tohouse search for those not present. By day-break most of the Southern officers and senior N. C. O. S had been rounded up. They were led out of the guardroom at dawn and shot.

Meanwhile the mutineers had apparently telephoned the adjutants (both Northerners) of the Second Battalion at Ikeja and the Fourth Battalion at Ibadan to inform them of the news. But at 3.30 am. an Ibo captain among the prisoners at Abeokuta escaped: he too telephoned, but to Army Headquarters in Lagos. He reported what he thought was a simple mutiny. At A. H. Q. the man in charge in the absence of Ironsi was his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon.