Nigeria: July 29, 1966 In Retrospect: 52 Years After

By Dan Amor

"Life is terribly deficient in form.
Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way.
There is a grotesque horror about its comedies.
And its tragedies seem to culminate in farce."

– Oscar Wilde

The January 15, 1966 military coup and the concomitant tragic death, fifty-two years ago, of Major-General Johnson Thomas Ummunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi on July 29, 1966 in the hands of young Majors from Northern Nigeria extraction manifest the historical sense that creates a difference between mere politics and constructive statesmanship in Nigeria's turbulent history.

*Gen Aguiyi-Ironsi 

Aguiyi-Ironsi was a victim of our collective failure to appreciate the fact that, in any given society, personality is not a welter of primitive impulses but an achievement of the conscious will. Nigeria began its seemingly long and tenuous political walk towards self-rule and democracy in 1960. Vividly divided between the predominantly Muslim North and substantially Christian South, there is always a marked ethnic and religious tension in the polity with the Muslim in the North often hinting to their right to federal power. 

On January 15, 1966, Nigeria had its first military coup led by Major Patrick Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna. This coup which ended the life of the First Republic necessitated the military takeover of the reins of government; it resulted in the massacre of Easterners by the Muslim Hausa/Fulani in the North, the secession of the East and declaration of the Republic of Biafra. But before the ugly effects of the January 15, 1966 coup, there was the counter coup of July 29, 1966 masterminded by Northern middle level soldiers whose major focus was the vengeful elimination of their perceived targets – Igbo elements in the Army. Unfortunately, the January coup has been mischievously designated the "Igbo coup" by some authors and politicians (Ayandele, 1973 and Madiebo, 1980).

Whereas such perception has helped in ossifying ethnic cleavages, it has also fueled the feeling of marginalization of some sections of the Nigerian society, especially amongst the Igbo who feel they deserve from Nigeria "unreserved fraternal apology for visiting an unjust and sustained political capital punishment on the entire Igbo nation, via-a-vis their constitutional right to exercise executive power as president of our country." It is therefore imperative to question the validity of the "Igbo coup" hypothesis. Also, there is ample need to determine whether the coup was in any way justified, especially in juxtaposition with subsequent coups in Nigeria, considering the respective socio-political conditions used as justifications for the different military interventions in the thirty years the military held sway in the nation's post independence experience.

Indeed, a seemingly reasonable argument in favour of the "Igbo coup" hypothesis was the failure of the plotters to kill Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Nigerian Army and Dr. Michael Okpala, the Premier of the Eastern Region, who were both Igbo. Though these two were marked for assassination by the coup plotters (Ikeazor, 1997), the failure to kill them was seen to support the "Igbo coup" theory. The rationale for this theory, most probably, was that their killing would have balanced suspicion and assuaged anxiety amongst the three regions and would have left little or no grounds for doubting the nationalistic intention of the coup plotters who, some think, planned the coup for Igbo political ascendancy to power. Yet, in point of fact, there is a school of thought that holds the view that Nzeogwu who couldn't speak a modicum of Igbo and whose mother was a Tiv, led the coup as a retaliation of the Tiv pogrom of 1965.

Yet, indeed, a third hypothesis circulates in favour of the argument of those who contend that the January 15, 1966 coup had no ethnic motive but was rather necessitated by the political circumstances of the time. In fact, Ifeajuna (1966) explains that the burning issues in Nigeria during the regime of Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister were not just a question of North versus South, "but problems of incompetence produced by one of the most reactionary regimes in history" (:35). Even as it was only one out of the five Majors that led the coup that was Yoruba and the rest Igbo, the three cardinal issues that orchestrated the coup were: 

(a). High level corruption in government; 

(b). Unceasing violent political crisis in the Western Region as a result of the manipulation of the 1964 Western Regional elections, and, 

(c). The Tiv Riots-which, in comparison with the Yoruba crisis, was inconsequential.

Taken together, therefore, following the failure of the January 15, 1966 coup plotters to gain the sympathy and support of a broad spectrum of the country, including the military high command, the structure of the military only naturally favoured the emergence of General Aguiyi-Ironsi, as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces as Head of State. At first, the military government was accepted with varying degrees of goodwill in all parts of the country. Hope turned into disillusionment and anger when the Ironsi regime threatened to impose a unitary form of government by decree. There followed an anti-Igbo army mutiny, the mass killings of Easterners resident in the North and the assassination of the head of state, Gen. Ironsi and his host, Lt. Col. Francis Adekunle Fajuyi, the military governor of the Western Region in Ibadan.

As we remember these tragic incidents today, it is lamentable that those who killed Ironsi because he introduced the Unification Decree N0. 34 of 1966, are themselves beneficiaries of the unitary structure in a federal arrangement and are kicking against the restructuring of the lopsided federal structure. Nigerians should use this opportunity to commend Fajuyi for demonstrating exemplary loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief. It is to be regretted that those things that motivated the coups are reappearing with frightening possibilities. May the souls of the departed rest in peace. The Igbo and their brethren in the South South deserve apology for visiting raw hatred on them for what they did not know about, a purely military braggadocio.

*Dan Amor is a journalist and public affairs analyst