When the rain began to beat us (III)

It didn’t take many days for the generality of the Nigerian Army to see through the so-called nationalistic aims of the coup attempt and the resultant widespread killings of political leaders and the high command of the military establishment. It was all a smokescreen for one-sided murders. The killing of the political leaders was what attracted public attention and made headlines all over the world, but it was the treachery of the murder of the military commanders that really hurt the larger part of the army. It united them in grief and galvanised them into action.

Brigadiers Zakariya Maimalari and Samuel Ademulegun, Colonels Kur Mohammed and Ralph Shodeinde, Lt Cols Abogo Largema, James Yakubu Pam, and Arthur Unegbe were beloved of their troops. Maimalari was particularly adored to the point of adulation and hero worship. He was the first Nigerian soldier to graduate from the elite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He would have been the GOC, but for the Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa’s magnanimity in appointing General Aguiyi-Ironsi, the most senior officer, to the post. In the eyes of his admirers in the army, Brigadier Maimalari was the archetypal officer, smart, poised, courageous and knowledgeable.

Because he was the only Nigerian officer and the 2nd-in-command at the Nigerian Military School, Zaria, from 1957 to 1959, and later at the Nigerian Military Training College, Kaduna, in 1960, many of the officers were his mentees.  Many of those he mentored and who later went up the military ladder still shed tears at the mention of his name years after his demise. Haruna Yahaya Poloma, in his book The First Regular Combatant: Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari, reported on interviews he conducted in 1999 with many retired generals of the Nigerian Army regarding the subject of his book. Those interviewed included Generals Gowon, Obasanjo, Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and many of their peers.

Many of those interviewed recounted the sordid details of his murder as well as the sheer treachery of Lt. Col. Ifeajuna, the Brigade Major, for gunning down his boss in cold blood. Although the interviews took place many years after the event, the memories of the treachery lingered, as if it were a recent occurrence. As recorded, some interviewees, including General Emmanuel Abisoye (now deceased) and Roland Ogbonna (the late traditional Prime Minister of the Avu community in Owerri, Imo State), were overwhelmed by emotion and broke down in tears during the interviews.

The counter-July coup was inevitable, but the plotters should have foreseen the imminent violence coming to the barracks, given the prevailing emotions, and planned to contain its consequences. While on a visit to Ibadan, the Head of State, General Aguiyi-Ironsi, lost his life alongside his host, Lt. Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, Governor of the Western Region. In the various barracks, soldiers ran amok seeking those who participated in the killings of their officers in January. They were immediately put to death. Bizarrely, their associates and kinsmen were also not spared. In the North, the killings in the barracks did not just stop at the level of the January mutineers but also spilt over into the townships.

Civilians who largely had no connection to the January mutineers were set upon and killed in large numbers across the towns and villages of the Northern Region. It was mass madness at its worst. There were complete breakdown of ethnic harmony and the beginning of ethnic hostility. It led to the mass movement of the Eastern Nigerians back to their regions. All efforts towards reconciliation failed. When the Republic of Biafra was declared in May 1967, the Civil War ensued, which lasted four brutal years, ending in January 1970. The fact that the war was fought in the grounds of the Eastern Region meant destruction of unimaginable proportions on both the people and their land.

The January 1966 murders were the beginning of the breakdown in ethnic harmony, which, willy-nilly, led to the Civil War. The consequences of the murders snuffed out the life of the First Republic, leaving us the military at the helm of affairs for the last four decades of the 20th Century, with the brief intervals of 1979-83 and 1992-93. The Civil War left in its wake a destroyed Eastern Region and the people who survived severely traumatised. Despite the No Victor No Vanquished slogan by the General Gowon’s regime, it took many years of grim, hard work by those who lost the war to come up and integrate themselves into the fabric of the nation.

Meanwhile, the idea of the sovereign nation of Biafra has never left the minds of the people, becoming a recurring theme since the war ended. In 1999, Ralph Uwazuruike launched the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), a non-violent mass movement advocating for the independence of the Eastern Region. When this movement petered out, the advocacy took a more confrontational and violent turn with the advent of Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2012. He set up a pirate radio station to propagate Biafran separatism and established the Eastern Security Network (ESN) to engage in low-level conflict with the Nigerian authorities.

Nnamdi Kanu was recently convicted and jailed. Nevertheless, it doesn’t look like Biafra is an issue that will go away quickly.

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