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 Lieutenant-Colonel 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.
* West Africa, 29 January 1966.
CHAPTER 3
The Man Called Ironside
Johnson Thomas Umunakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi was born near Umuahia, a pretty hill town in the centre of the Eastern Region, in March 1924. He was educated partly at Umuahia 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-yearold 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 ADC 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 Commander of the entire UN 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 GOC 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 régime 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 régime was pledged by the NPC of the North, the Action Group of the West and NCNC of the East and Midwest, even though the politicians of these parties were out of power and some were-detained. Support also came 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.’* 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 (ex-Major) 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 prison. All parties seemed to have enough confidence in the General to give his régime a try.
Despite his honesty, General Ironsi was not a politician; he 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 régime 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, Lieutenant-Colonel 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 Attorney-General, Mr Onyiuke, an Ibo, and the Inspector-General of Police, Mr Edet, an Efik. Both had held their 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 was 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 the 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 T. O. Elias, both Westerners, were asked to draw up outlines for the latter. Another commission, 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 régime 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.’
The General was being over-optimistic. The South would undoubtedly have welcomed such a break. In fact it did. But the North was a different entity altogether. It was their representatives – the Northern House and the Emirs – who years before had seen in regionalism under the Richards Constitution an undying protection of their own society, with all its lethargy and inertia, from incursions by more vigorous and educated Southerners.
Unification was particularly popular among the Ibos of the East. They were the most travelled and best qualified of the major ethnic groups, and amply confident of their ability to compete on equal terms with anybody. For them regionalism had always meant treatment as second class citizens in the North, and a double system in the making of public appointments outside the Eastern Region.
Thus what was for the South a glorious opportunity was for the North an almost deadly threat. Nearly two years later in Enugu the American Consul James Barnard nicely summed up the innate conflict of interests that has bedevilled Nigeria all these years. He said: ‘It’s no good ducking under or hedging round the single immutable political reality of this country, which is: in any race for the material benefits of life, starting from the same point and on the basis of equal opportunity, the Easterners are going to win by a mile. This is intolerable to the North. The only way to prevent it happening is to impose artificial shackles to progress on the East. This is intolerable to the Easterners.’*
Discontent in the North started to seethe shortly after the commissions inquiring into various aspects of unification went to work. This discontent was later to be portrayed as entirely spontaneous and to involve the supposedly widespread grief over the death of the beloved Sardauna of Sokoto at the hands of an Ibo in January. That is a false picture.
Firstly the Sardauna, to judge from the immediate reaction of his subjects after his death, was regarded not as a benevolent father but an unscrupulous old despot, which he was. Secondly the violence that broke out in the North in May 1966 was not spontaneous. It took a lot of hard work.
When the politicians fell, it was not just the downfall of a small handful of men. Thousands more lost an easy meal-ticket when the politicians were separated from access to public funds. Enormous families found themselves without support and the prospect of work loomed before them; hangers-on, party hirelings, agents, canvassers, contractors who had made plump profits through their connexions in high places, administrators who could not have held down their jobs without political protection, found themselves on the breadline. When a few souls started to agitate against the Ironsi régime the accoutrements were easily to hand: an army of willing voices to spread the rumours, inflame the passions and fire the hearts; the spectre of the all-dominating Ibo; the apparent stripping from the North of its traditional protective isolationism; lastly the revenge motive could be easily played upon, and it was. Thus the dead Sardauna was built up again into a saint, and the jailed officers who had led the January coup into devils.
Colonel Fajuyi in the West, an able and energetic man, had rigorously purged public life of its former parasites, dismissing all local government officials appointed by the hated Akintola régime and eleven ministers of his party. In the Midwest and East similar measures went through. These were, however, less draconian because the NCNC, which controlled both regions prior to January 1966, had been voted into office (latterly under the UPGA banner) by the great majority of the electors without any jiggery-pokery.
In the North it was different. Here political power and the emirate aristocracy had been almost synonymous from time immemorial. Colonel Hassan, the new Military Governor, was the son of the Emir of Katsina. There was not exactly a choice of competent men to run the Native Administration, and those in power were in any case often the appointees of the Emirs. Thus the aristocratic and the administrative Establishments stayed in power. The politicians, although not in power, were not in detention either, nor even for long out of favour. It was from these that the whispering campaign started, and it soon flowered in fertile soil.