the Biafra Story (1969) (5 page)

the same troops stood guard of honour as a fearful Premier said good-bye at the airport to President Makarios of Cyprus who had been finishing a tour of Nigeria in Enugu. Later Dr. Okpara was allowed to leave for his hometown of Umuahia.

In the Midwest dissident troops arrived at the Premier's Lodge at 10 a. M., but were withdrawn on orders from General Ironsi at 2 p. M. The coup had failed. Ifeajuana and Okafor arrived in Enugu to find Ejoor in the saddle. They hid in the house of a local chemist, whence Okafor was arrested; Ifeajuana fled to Ghana, later to return and join the other plotters in prison.

It was not a bloodless coup, but it was far from a bloodbath. The Premiers of the North, the West and the Federation were dead, as was one Federal Minister. Among senior army officers three Northerners, two Wcsterners and two Easterners were dead. (Another Ibo major had been killed, this time by loyal troops who thought wrongly that he was among the plotters.) Apart from that a handful of civilians including the wife of one of the officers and some houseboys from Sir Ahmadu Bello's household, together with less than a dozen soldiers, had died. Nzeogwu maintained later that there should have been no deaths at all, but that some of his colleagues became over-enthusiastic.

In Lagos General Ironsi had taken command of the army and had restored order, but it was not that which put him later in power. It was the reaction of the population as much as anything else that made quite plain to all that the reign of the politicians was at an end. This public reaction, often forgotten today, gives the lie most firmly of all to the idea that the January coup was a factional affair.

In Kaduna a throng of cheering Hausas sacked the palace of the dead autocrat. A smiling Major Hassan Usman Katsina, son of the Fulani Emir of Katsina, sat beside Nzeogwu at a press conference prior to which the latter had named Hassan Military Governor of the North. Alhaji Ali Akilu, Head of the Northern Civil Service offered his support to Nzeogwu. But the Ibo major's star was falling.

In Lagos and the rest of the South, Ironsi held the reins and would have no truck with the"plotters. But he had the sense to realize that, although what the plotters had done went against all his own training and inclinations, they had still performed a popular service and had a lot of mass support. On Saturday afternoon, 15 January, he asked the Acting President to appoint a Deputy Premier from whom, according to the Constitation, Ironsi could take valid orders. But the politicians procrastinated through into the Sunday morning, and when the Cabinet finally met he had to tell them that he could not ensure the loyalty of his officers and prevent civil war unless he himself took over. In this he was almost certainly right, as numerous officers have made known since. Even those who had not taken part in the coup would not have accepted a return to the rule of the now thoroughly discredited politicians.

The situation had deteriorated, too. Nzeogwu, realizing his colleagues in the South had muffed their job, took a column of troops and drove south, and reached Jebba on the Niger River. If the garrisons of the South had split into warring factions for or against Nzeogwu, civil war could have been the only outcome. Fifteen minutes before midnight Ironsi broadcast from Lagos that since the Government had ceased to function, the armed forces had been asked to form an interim military government and that he, General Ironsi, had been invested with authority as head of the Federal Military Government.

The crisis swung in his favour. The army obeyed his orders. Nzeogwu withdrew to Kaduna Barracks whence he too later emerged to go into custody.

It may be that the Nigerian Cabinet (meeting under the chairmanship of Alhaji Dipcharima, Transport Minister, a Hausa, and senior NPC minister after Balewa) had no option but to accede to General Ironsi's request for authority to take over. But it is equally true that Ironsi had no choice but to make the request, if civil war was to be averted between rival units of the army.

This was important for three reasons; it explains why the accusation that the whole affair was an Ibo plot to overthrow constitutional rule and install Ibo domination of Nigeria was an invention adduced long after the coup and at variance with the facts; it belies the later suggestion that subsequent massacres of Easterners living in the North were excusable or at any rate explicable on the grounds that 'they started it all'; and it throws light on the conviction to this day of LieutenantColonel Ojukwu that Ironsi's accession to power was both constitutional and legal while that of Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon six months later after Ironsi's murder was illegal and therefore invalid.

Chapter 3.

The Man Called Ironside

JOHNSON THOMAS UMUNAKWE AGulYI-IRONSI was born near Umuahia, a pretty hill town in the centre of the Eastern Region, in March 1924. He was educated partly at Urnuahia and partly at Kano in the North, enlisting in the army as a private at the age of eighteen. He spent the rest of the Second World War along the West African coast and returned in 1946 as a twenty-two-year-old Company Sergeant-Major. Two years later he went to Camberley Staff College for officer training and returned in 1949 as a Second Lieutenant to West Africa Command Headquarters, Accra, and thence to Ordnance Depot, Lagos. Here he transferred to an Infantry regiment. As a Lieutenant he was A. D. C. to the Governor, Sir John Macpherson, and, a newly promoted Captain, attended the Coronation in London in June 1953. Becoming a Major in 1955 he was named equerry to the Queen on her tour of Nigeria in 1956. In September 1960 he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and got his first command, the Fifth Battalion at Kano. The same year he commanded the Nigerian contingent of the United Nations force in the Congo against the Katangese and showed he was more than a staff officer. When the Austrian Medical team and the relieving Nigerian soldiers were besieged by the rebels, he flew in alone, in a light plane, and personally negotiated their release. The Austrian Government decorated him with the Ritter Kreuz First Class.

In 1961 and 1962 he was Military Adviser to the Nigerian High Commission in London and while there was promoted to the rank of Brigadier. He then did a course at the Imperial Defence College. In 1964 he returned to the Congo as Com- mander of the entire U. N. Peace-Keeping Force with the rank of Major-General, Africa's first officer to hold that command. During operations there he confronted single-handed an enraged mob in Leopoldville and persuaded them to disband. These and similar exploits earned him the affectionate nickname of 'Johnny Ironside'.

On his return to Nigeria he reverted to Brigadier and took over the First Brigade, but soon succeeded Major-General Welby-Everard, the last British G. O. C. of the Nigerian Army, and again became a Major-General. He was, said a British civil servant speaking later and choosing his words carefully, 'a very upright man'.

The new regime started well. It was backed by enormous popular support. All over Nigeria, including the North, people rejoiced at the end of the rule of the corrupt politicians and hoped for a new dawn. The last of the plotters of January had been brought peacefully out of their hiding places and were detained in their various regions of origin. Loyalty to the new regime was pledged by the NPC of the North, the Action Group of the West and the NCNC of the East and Midwest, even though the politicians of these parties were out of power and some were detained. Support also carne from the trade unions, the students'union and the Emirs of the North. Foreign correspondents noted the popularity. A columnist in the African World noted in March: 'The favourable reception accorded to these constitutional changes by different sections of the Nigerian population clearly shows that the army movement was in fact a popular revolt by the masses.' A month earlier the Nigeria correspondent for the Economist of London had visited Sokoto, the city in the far north of Nigeria from which Sir Ahmadu Bello had taken his title and reported: 'Sokoto was the spoilt darling of the Sardauna of Sokoto's regime, yet even here his passing was accepted quietly. If there are any misgivings about what has happened, the death of the Sardauna has left nobody to express them.'t It was later to prove a rather too sanguine view.

General Ironsi was an honest man and he tried to run an honest regime. Although an Ibo himself, he bent over backwards to show no favouritism towards his own people or his region of birth, and sometimes went far enough to excite criticisms from his own fellow-Easterners. Among his first acts was to appoint Military Governors to all four regions; for the North Lieutenant-Colonel (ex-Major) Hassan Katsina, who had actually been appointed to that post by the now imprisoned Nzeogwu; for the West Lieutenant-Colonel Fajuyi, formerly of Enugu garrison; for the Midwest Lieutenant-Colonel (exMajor) Ejoor, also of the Enugu garrison; and for the East Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, former commander of the Fifth Battalion at Kano, a convinced Federalist who had played no part in the January coup other than to join with local Hausa authorities in Kano in keeping that city peaceful and loyal to constituted authority.

Ironsi's advent to power also put an end to the warring in the Western Region, the violence in Tiv-land, and the insurrection of Isaac Boro in the Niger Delta. The latter was put in prisoA. All parties seemed to have enough confidence in the General to give his regime a try.

Despite his honesty, General Ironsi was not a politician; fie was totally devoid of cunning and showed little aptitude for the intricacies of diplomacy necessary inside a highly complex society. He was also on occasion ill-advised, a common fate of military men in government. Nevertheless he did nothing to merit what happened to him.

In the South he ordered the detention of former politicians who might be likely to cause unrest and foment trouble. But the Northern politicians were permitted their liberty, and within a short time they were making use of it. Ironsi formed a Supreme Military Council and a Federal Executive Council to help him govern. In view of later suggestions that his regime was pro-Eastern, the composition of these bodies is interesting. Apart from himself there was in the nine-man Supreme Military Council one other Ibo, Colonel Ojukwu who had an ex officio membership as one of the four Regional Military Governors, and one non-Ibo Easterner, LieutenantColonel Kurubo, the head of the Air Force and a Rivers man. The Executive Council comprised the Military Council and six others, of which only two were from the East, the AttorneyGeneral, Mr. Onyiuke, an Ibo, and the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Edet, an Efik. Both had held th6ir respective offices before the January coup. When naming permanent secretaries in the Federal Public Service (the permanent secretaryships are powerful posts) Ironsi distributed the twenty-three jobs thus: Northerners, eight; Midwesterners, seven; 'Westerners, five; Easterners, three.

The political appointees in public corporations- were swept away and Tribunals of Inquiry were set up to examine the activities of the dismissed men while in office. The first three Tribunals - examining the Nigerian Railway Corporation, the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria, and the Lagos City Council - were headed respectively by a Westerner, a Northerner and an Englishman. Later the twenty-five General Managers, Chairmen and Secretaries of the Federal Corporations were appointed thus: Westerners, twelve; Northerners, six; Easterners, three; Midwesterners, one; Foreigners, three.

General Ironsi made several other appointments which give a clue to his attitude towards the concept of One Nigeria. He named Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon, a Sho-Sho from the North as his Army Chief of Staff and right-hand man; Mallam Hamsad Amadu, a young relative of the Sardauna of Sokoto, became his private secretary; his personal escort were composed mostly of Hausa soldiers commanded by another young Hausa, Lieutenant W. G. Walbe, a fact which may later have cost the General his life.

His brisk attitude towards corruption in high and public places had its effect, and within a short time international confidence in Nigeria had been largely restored. The Six-Year development plan was continued.

But the main problem had still to be solved. It concerned the future constitution of Nigeria, which was largely synonymous with the question of Nigerian unity. Once again the inherent disunity of Nigeria made itself manifest. Despite enormous support in the South and thb Army for the abolition of regionalism and the inauguration of a unitary state, the very mention of amalgamation with the South other than on the basis of Northern control was enough to send the North on the warpath, which was exactly what happened.

General Ironsi had promised in his earliest hours in power that a return to civilian rule would be preceded by a series of studies of outstanding problems, the establishment of a Constituent Assembly and a referendum on a new constitution. Chief Rotimi Williams and the former Attorney-General Dr.

T0. Elias, both Westerners, were asked to draw up outlines for the latter. Another corrunission, under Mr. Francis Nwokedi, an Ibo, was to inquire into the unification of the public services. After protests that such an important issue should be entrusted to one man, and an Ibo to boot - protests notably from the North where the separation of the civil service was venerated as their main safeguard against domination by the South - a Midwesterner was added to the Nwokedi Commission. Another commission was to explore ways of bringing unity to the judiciary. Yet another, on economic planning, was entrusted to Chief Simeon Adebo, a Yoruba, and Dr. Pius Okigbo, an Ibo. The commissions reported, and their reports all pointed one way - to unification.

Unification had been mooted from the earliest days of the Ironsi regime. At the end of January Colonel Ejoor in the Midwest called for 'a unitary form of government'. At a press conference in February General Ironsi said: 'It has become apparent to all Nigerians that rigid adherence to "regionalism" was the bane of the last regime and one of the main factors which contributed to its downfall. No doubt the country would welcome a clean break with the deficiencies of the system.'