The effects of the second coup

  The killing of the military Head of State, Major-General John Ironsi, left a power vacuum within the military junta and the army hierarchy. Indeed for some days following the second coup the country was without a government. The struggle for control of the country centred on the army barracks at Ikeja in Lagos; here the troops were in no mood to take orders from Northern officers, who had ostensibly instigated the second coup and the killing of Ironsi. Brigadier Ogundipe, the most senior surviving officer within the army hierarchy, finding he had no rank-and-file support, had gone into hiding, and Colonel Robert Adebayo, the next most senior officer, said:

  I realised, as a Yoruba, that my people only accounted for 600 men within the army of 10,000, and I accepted that I would not receive popular army support. Conditions were extremely volatile at the time and the army’s rank and file were in no mood to support a senior army officer who was a Westerner. I realised how serious it was for the Yoruba people that so few of our people had favoured making the army their career, so I set about making it my business to ensure that many more Westerners were encouraged to come forward and join the army. 78

  For several days it seemed that the country would be taken over by Captain Martin Adamu, who commanded the largest number of troops in Lagos. 79 However, the struggle for power centred not only on this man, who had some popular rank-and-file support but also Major Murtala Mohammed, who sought de facto control with support from the Northern Emirs and their politicians, as well as some Northern soldiers. 80 Neither side could agree on a power-sharing formula, and consequently a compromise candidate was sought. Lt-Col. Jack Gowon was proposed because, although he was a Northerner, he was a Christian and a member of the minority Angas people. 81 He was proposed by Colonel Robert Adebayo as a compromise candidate. 82 However, during these eventful days in Lagos, the Military Governor of the Eastern Region, Lt-Col. Emeka Ojukwu, who had been appointed by General Ironsi, was in Enugu and took no part in the activities at Ikeja barracks, and significantly had no influence in choosing a successor to the murdered former military head of state, General Ironsi, once rank-and-file military support for Ogundipe proved to be nonexistent. Gowon, the most senior Northern army officer, received support from Lt-Col. Hassan Katsina, military governor of the North, and Lt-Col. David Ejoor, military governor of the Mid-West. Gowon’s support in the Western Region was precarious because the very popular military governor, Lt-Col. Fajuyi, it was assumed, had been killed accidentally in the second coup. As Kaye Whitman commented: ‘At that stage nobody was admitting to Ironsi’s position; it was to take six months before the Gowon administration issued statements confirming the death of Ironsi.’ 83

  However, that changed when Colonel Adebayo took over that role, with the support of the Yoruba leader Chief Awolowo, who had recently been released from prison. 84

  The Gowon government hoped to benefit from Awolowo’s popularity in two ways, namely by legitimising its own policies in the Western Region and by consolidating the tentative unity of its Yoruba communities which had emerged after Awolowo’s imprisonment in order to prevent further political factionalisation and conflict. Colonel Adeyinka Adebayo, the Western Region’s military administrator, facilitated this process by inviting a large number of former politicians and other opinion leaders from Yoruba communities throughout the Western Region. Appealing to them to overcome past divisions, he suggested that it might be to the benefit of all if the Yoruba spoke with one voice and enjoined those present to elect a leader. 85

  It was from this point that Ojukwu’s own misgivings about the unity of Nigeria took shape; in his opinion Gowon may have become de facto head of the Nigerian State, but in law he had no legal basis for that position, there being other more senior people, including himself, who should have been elected to power. Not only, as he said, did he refute Gowon’s position from the legal point of view, but also the practical point of his inability to put a stop to the methodical killings of officers and men which were taking place at the Ikeja barracks three days after Gowon had been elected as supreme commander. Indeed at one point he managed to telephone Murtala Mohammed to ask him to put a stop to the killings. 86 ‘When people have been subjected to a degree of inhuman violation for which there is no other word but genocide, they have a right to seek an identity apart from their aggressors.’ 87

  In September 1966, after Gowon had abolished Ironsi’s unification decree and reinstated the federal system which had existed before May 1966, Ojukwu made plain to the Consultative Committee of the Eastern Region his conclusion that the basis of unity no longer existed and the East should manage its own resources and its affairs, including foreign policy. Indeed the Consultative Committee gave Ojukwu the authority and the necessary measures to protect the integrity of Eastern Nigeria. 88 As Ojukwu commented:

  It was the uncertainty of Ironsi’s fate that gave weight to my thoughts that the North through Gowon’s concurrence was simply re-establishing its ascendency over the country and this was simply uacceptable for the people of the East, especially in view of the unabated killings of Igbo people taking place in the North at the time. 89

  Even Danjuma, the officer heavily implicated in the second coup, throws doubt on Ironsi’s fate. He claims that he took no part in the killing of Ironsi and Fajuyi:

  I was detailed to go to the governor’s house where Ironsi was staying and to take him into protective custody. When I reached the residence with my troops, both Ironsi and Fajuyi refused to come out of the building. My Northern troops were very agitated and were nearly out of control. They wanted to enter the building and shoot Ironsi. With the aid of a primed hand grenade I persuaded them against this, but they still manged to get inside the building and man-handled Ironsi and Fajuyi out of the building. Fajuyi was very protective of Ironsi and refused to leave him. My soldiers then insisted on stripping both men of their clothes, because they wanted to ensure that no hidden ‘Ju Ju’ would protect them. I then ordered my men to put Ironsi and Fajuyi into one of our trucks and take them to a nearby jail for their safety and protection. While this was happening I could hear a ‘phone ringing in the guest quarters, and I went and answered it. I am convinced that the man on the ‘phone was Gowon. I think Gowon thought I was somebody else because he said that he did not want to hear about any more killings. My men then took Ironsi and Fajuyi out of the compound. I can confirm to you something I have never told anybody, that I had no hand in their killing, indeed it was my order and wish that these men should be protected.

  At this point in the interview Danjuma became very emotional and it took him some time to compose himself. 90 It was to take six months after Ironsi’s disappearance for the Gowon administration to confirm his death. 91

  Once Gowon had been chosen, and deemed acceptable to the majority of the army with Northern and Western affiliations, he sought help in restoring a semblance of government and control over the state. The one man he felt he could trust and to whom he could lay bare his misgivings over his momentous task was the British High Commissioner, Cumming-Bruce. 92 Appealing to him for help, he admitted that he was ‘only a simple soldier’ and had no experience of affairs of state, let alone taking charge of a country as diverse and fragmented as Nigeria. 93 The immediate problem facing Gowon was the total disintegration of Nigeria, initiated by the North. The North was intent on secession. It was only through the support of Cumming-Bruce and his close friendship with the Northern Emirs that Gowon was able to exert authority over the North. Cumming-Bruce was able to persuade the Emirs that secession would have been an economic disaster. As Cumming-Bruce stated:

  But it wasn’t on the face of it easy to get them to change, but I managed to do it overnight. I drafted letters to the (British) Prime Minister, to send to Gowon as Nigerian Head of State, and for my Secretary of State (Michael Stewart) to send letters to each of the Emirs. I wrote an accompanying letter to each of them because I knew them personally. I drafted all these and they all came back to me duly authorised to push on at once. The whole thing was done overnight and it did the trick of stopping them dividing Nigeria up. 94

  He continued:

  Britain had no formulated policy in view of the events of the second coup and that as Britain’s representative I should decide on policy as I saw fit, being the man on the spot; hence my action with the emirs. I had particularly cordial relations with the emirs because we all shared a love of polo and of course because of that we met socially and my position also meant that we met on more formal occasions. However, I had been totally unaware of an impending coup, my security people had heard of no rumours to unseat the Ironsi regime. However my relationshuip with Ironsi had always been somewhat distant, I always felt that he didn’t entirely trust me, perhaps because of my personal relationship with the emirs and sultans of the North, so that was probably the reason the second coup caught me by surprise.

  Of course such unilateral action, with no consultation with the other interested parties, especially Ojukwu and the East, was to have dire consequences, especially after the Aburi meeting. Such action also encouraged Gowon and his administration to accept that a federal state with strong control from the centre was the way to keep Nigeria united. It was this mindset that persuaded Gowon’s senior civil servants to insist that the Aburi agreement was unworkable. Furthermore this unilateral action was to determine British, and by agreement, America’s policy towards Nigeria throughout the conflict and to lead the British Government into increasingly acrimonious difficulties with its own supporters and indeed with many members of the Western European and American public. Indeed it could be argued that Cumming-Bruce’s action, although laudable from where he stood at the time, in the light of future circumstances was, to say the least foolhardy, especially with regard to the longevity of the war. It could be argued that if Cumming-Bruce had not interfered, Nigeria would have fragmented into separate states, possibly as a confederation, in the style proposed by Ojukwu, and most importantly war would have been avoided. However, Cumming-Bruce was only extending British policy which had been formulated during the run-up to the country’s independence: that Britain’s investments 95 would be best protected if the country was left to run ‘in a safe pair of hands’, those of the Northern rulers. 96 The volte-face by the North confirmed for the Gowon administration that the only way of keeping Nigeria united was with strong control from the centre. By this time also, the North had appreciated that by seceding it would lose its political stranglehold over the country, a position which it had held since independence, and a position that, once secession had lost its appeal, it was determined to hold on to for the future. Such has been its determination that it still holds this position to the present day. 97 On a second meeting with Cumming-Bruce he greeted me with the comment: ‘I sometimes wonder whether I did the right thing in keeping Nigeria together.’ 98

  In the light of further riots in the North against the Igbo population living there, and the many killings and damage to property, which Gowon’s new regime seemed powerless to stop, relations between the North and the East deteriorated. This made the Eastern ruling elite champion secession. Indeed Dr Ukpabi Asika, an Igbo from Onitsha, who was to become the Federal Government’s administrator for one of Gowon’s promulgated twelve states, East Central, has claimed that as early as April 1966 his Igbo colleagues were planning secession, on the grounds that unity was non-existent. 99 ‘The nation teetered on the edge of disintegration …. At campus encounters, open-air bars and other informal gatherings, at which the secret service made no pretence at disguising their presence, we railed at the government’s lukewarm concern for the plight of the Igbo.’ 100

  Ojukwu also complained to Gowon about his inability to contain the pogroms in the North against the Igbo people living there. 101 The killings seemed systematic and organised:

  Then the killings began again, with renewed vigour, between 18 and 24 September, while the ad hoc constitutional conference was sitting in Lagos. The outbreaks began within days, sometimes hours of each other, at Makurdi, Minna, Gboko, Gombe, Jos, Sokoto and Kaduna. They quickly spread to Kano, Zaria, Oturkpo, Bauchi, Zungeru and elsewhere …. Again, rented buses were seen speeding across the North, bringing armed agitators to fresh towns and villages. In each case the message was the same; kill the Easterners …. In the main centres hideous massacres took place as mobs, sometimes led by army men and native police officers, raged through the Sabon Garis hacking, spearing, cutting, chopping and shooting any Easterners they came across. 102

  However, Gowon’s own position was extremely tenuous and he was forced to compromise in order to hold on to power. He admitted that at that stage he was unable to control the killings. 103 Indeed, in view of the disturbances, he suspended the conference, which had been set up to find a way forward to govern the country. It could be argued that the constitutional conference was adjourned because delegates from the East felt their lives were in danger, since Northern troops, contrary to agreement, were still stationed in the West, and were instituting random killings of Easterners. 104

  On the evening of September 11th all the Eastern delegates were united in Enugu, ready for the morning take-off for Lagos. During the afternoon reports began to come in of an outbreak of killings of Easterners in the North. The delegates with the events of May and July/August fresh in their minds [when there had been similar attacks on Igbos, in the North] promptly lost their nerve and refused to fly to Lagos the next day. Emeka … spent hours trying to persuade them to attend the conference …. They refused. Emeka … told his father, Sir Odumegwu, what had happened …. he went from house to house cajoling the men to change their minds. At midnight he returned to State House triumphant. He had persuaded them; they would fly the next morning. 105

  Sadly for Ojukwu, his father was to die that same night.

  Gowon has conceded that it was over a year before he felt secure in his position as Military Head of State, when he felt he had the support of the majority of the Military Ruling Council. 106 The rioting and indiscriminate killing of innocent Igbo people living in the North reached its highest intensity between July and September 1966. These killings and maimings of innocent Igbos was to have a chronically emotive effect on Easterners themselves before and throughout the civil war. Ojukwu and his colleagues used it unashamedly as a propaganda tool, referring to it as genocide, and exaggerating the numbers of those killed, from a conservative 5,000 as noted by the British High Commission to 15,000. 107 Both figures are a matter of conjecture, but Hunt, as the British High Commissioner at the time, offers the following opinion:

  In January 1967, i.e. over three months after the massacre, Ojukwu gave an interview to the Italian Ambassador, who gave me a full account. Speaking in a manner which made it plain that he was consciously exaggerating Ojukwu said that the number killed, in September and the previous May, was as high as 7,000. Plainly, therefore, the man who was likely to know best and had an interest in putting the figure as high as possible, thought that about 5,000 had been killed (if the true figure had been ‘between 10,000 and 15,000’ he would have told the Italian Ambassador 25,000). Calculations made in the North, on adding up the figures from various different localities, also produce a figure of about 5,000. I quote this fact for what it is worth; the calculations were carefully made though the basic figures are a little shaky in many cases. But Ojukwu’s statement is sufficient evidence that the true figure cannot be higher. 108

  However the visual effects of attacks on Igbo people by Northerners were real enough. 109 Not only did the new military government seem powerless to stem the flow of violence in the North, but she offered very little support for the huge influx of refugees returning to the East from the North.

  In his report on the war Hunt, the British High Commissioner, makes the following comment with regard to the number of refugees returning from the North to the East:

  The Eastern Regional Government called on all refugees to register at special offices set up throughout the region; these offices were under the control of a British civil servant, a Mr. Savile, who told Mr Parker [the British Assistant High Commissioner based in Enugu] that the total registered was 150,000. This is the only solid and official figure in existence. According to Mr. Parker the Eastern Region authorities manipulated it in the following way. First they doubled it ‘because only about half the people who could have registered did so’ (though it could be argued that some people who were not refugees registered in the hope of benefit); then, finding 300,000 an insufficiently impressive figure, they assumed, falsely, that all those on the register were men, made the assumption that all these men were married and had an average of three children, multiplied by six and produced the figire of 1.8 million. This of course was always rounded upwards: I remember with amusement Ojukwu saying to me at our interview in March ‘and then we have two million refugees – no I must not exaggerate, 1.8 million.’ Two million became the classical figure, and then over two million …. You may find me inconsistent if I say that the official figure always struck me as probably rather low: I used to say a quarter of a million. 110

  Ojukwu in his propaganda speeches homed in on an arbitrary number of two million. Sadly this number seems to have been used in countless accounts of the disturbances during this period, and what were highly questionable figures seem now to have become fact.

  Aburi

  The Federal Government exacerbated the situation by subjecting the East to an economic blockade. 111 It was because of the ongoing racial conflict in the North, and the seeming helplessness of Gowon’s regime to bring this under control, as well as the blockade and the lack of help by Gowon’s regime for the returning refugees to the East, that a meeting between the four regional governors and members of the ruling Military Council was proposed. Cumming-Bruce states that it was Malcolm MacDonald’s idea, because of his close relationship with the military ruler of Ghana, Lt-General Ankrah: