Gowon’s Book Of Barefaced Lies

 By Chuks Iloegbunam

This is General Yakubu Gowon, PhD, (91), on page 201 of his autobiography titled My Life of Duty & Allegiance: “On impulse, I called the airport at Ikeja to instruct Major Paul Dickson who oversaw the airport to send a helicopter to Ibadan to evacuate the Supreme Commander.” This was hours after the countercoup of July 29, 1966, was underway. According to this storyteller, “My immediate worry was that General Ironsi’s life might be in danger if I did not make effort to reach him as quickly as possible to give him a situation report.” The striking thing about Gowon’s fable is not this lie per se, but the artlessness of the man’s mendacity.

As of July 29, 1966, there was no Major Paul Dickson anywhere in the Nigerian Armed Forces. The only Paul Dickson in existence on that date was an Air Force staff sergeant whose official assignment at the Ikeja Airport pertained only to controlling other ranks on sentry duty within the facility’s perimetres. This was the man Gowon claimed to have instructed to carry out the evacuation of a besieged General Aguiyi-Ironsi from Ibadan, a city 113 kilometres away from Lagos as the crow flies! Once Nigerians behold a Sandhurst-trained officer, they automatically ascribe omniscience to them. General Gowon was, of course, Sandhurst-trained. But he knows that, placed on the crucibles of logicality and credulity, his Dickson story is impudent fiction.

Nigeria: Victory For The Vanquished

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

It Is A Goal! No! – The Necessity of Biafra by Hanum Mary Chioke (ISBN: 978-978-977-670-2; 2018; 259 pp)

 

Man’s existence on earth can be understood like a football match in which a goal must be scored for victory to be achieved. Hanum Mary Chioke in his book It Is A Goal! No! – The Necessity of Biafra understands that a radio or television commentator almost always enthusiastically screams “It is a goal!” only to reverse himself when the ball does not eventually hit the back of the net. The players must then keep on trying until the goal of victory is scored.

Hanum Mary Chioke has lived through the gamut of the early promise of Nigeria at independence in 1960, the horrors of the Igbo genocide after the coups of 1966, and saw action as a Biafran soldier in the civil war. He now stands strong as a witness to the denial of justice and equity in post-war Nigeria, and thus bears testimony that the clear and present necessity is to let the oppressed people go.

 

It is remarkable that Hanum Mary Chioke in It Is A Goal! No! – The Necessity of Biafra goes way back to the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria by Britain. His discussion of the country’s early politics is foregrounded by an unpublished paper entitled “A Quick Review of the Development of Nigerian Politics 1945-1966” written by one of the permanent secretaries of the era. The author adds gravitas to his thesis with Philip Asiodu’s “The Formal Structure of British Colonial Government in Nigeria.”