January 15, 1966 Was Not An Igbo Coup (2)

By Chuks Iloegbunam

(click here to read part one of this article)

The object of this second half of my article is to challenge Nigeria and Nigerians: Please make an honest effort at determining the truth of Nigeria’s contempo­rary history! It is the sure way of exorcising the demons need­lessly thwarting every chance of Nigeria attaining nationhood. If Nigeria refuses to confront the truth of its history, it will con­tinue to tug at centrifugal forces guaranteed to eternally forestall any contingency of mastering the contradictions that dog every centimetre of the country’s path.

 

*Reuben Abati 

The 50th anniversary of the January 1966 coup d’etat afforded the country a golden opportu­nity to turn its back permanently against historical lies, especially lies of the variety that inflame passions and further entrench the existing divisions between the disparate peoples forged into one country by the sleight of British colonialism. Unfortunately, revi­sionists seized the public space, retold falsehoods previously dis­credited and, thus, blew the op­portunity.

Reuben Abati is one such revi­sionist. In the first half of this article, we exposed his lies in an article he entitled Armed Forces Day: January 15, Remembering Where We Came From. Abati had claimed in that article that “An Igbo man, Nwafor Orizu, the acting President, handed over power to another Igbo man, General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi.” We proved that this was blatantly untrue. He had also downplayed Aguiyi-Ironsi’s central role in putting down the coup, for which we pointed out that he was being disingenuous.

There are two other distor­tions in Abati’s article that must be discredited. He wrote that (1) Aguiyi-Ironsi treated the January coup plotters with kid gloves, and (2) Aguiyi-Ironsi imposed Igbo hegemony on Nigeria. Whether in scholarship or in journalism, whoever made claims such as these, would be expected to de­ploy empirical evidence in sup­port of his assertions. But not Abati. We must dismantle his fab­rications, of course. Before doing that, however, some background information is imperative. Fif­teen years ago, Abati wrote a two-part article entitled Obasanjo, Se­cession And The Secessionists (The Guardian on Sunday, December 16 and 23, 2001).

That article contained all the lies that he regurgitated in his lat­est piece. It elicited a lot of reac­tion from observers of the Nige­rian condition who believed that Abati should know better, and should wield his pen with some circumspection. We will return to this. Let’s first reexamine the facts. Abati said that Nzeogwu and his cohorts were treated with kid gloves? In Nzeogwu: An Inti­mate Portrait Of Major Chukwu­ma Kaduna Nzeogwu (Spectrum Books, Ibadan 1987) Olusegun Obasanjo reproduced copies of handwritten letters from his friend, Nzeogwu, which detailed the ill-treatment they suffered in detention. But far more impor­tant is the fact that Aguiyi-Iron­si’s Supreme Military Council (SMC) took a decision to subject the coup plotters to public trial.