* The evidence for the incidents at Ibadan and Ikeja barracks is in the Military Archives, National Defence HQ, Umuahia, Biafra.
* Schwarz, op. cit., p. 211.
CHAPTER 5
Two Colonels
The two men who now held effective power in the two so far unreconciled parts of Nigeria were utterly different. Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon was thirty-two, the son of a Methodist minister and mission-trained evangelist from one of the smallest tribes in the North, the Sho Sho. He came from near the town of Bauchi. In early youth he too had had a mission-school training, and later went to a grammar school. At the age of nineteen he joined the army, and was lucky to be sent soon after for officer training first at Eaton Hall, then Sandhurst. He returned to Nigeria to take up the career of a normal infantry officer, and later attended more courses in England, notably at Hythe and Warminster. On his return again he became the first Nigerian Adjutant and later served like General Ironsi in the Nigerian contingent in the Congo. During the January coup he had been on yet another course in England, this time at the Joint Services Staff College.
In appearance too he was utterly different from his fellow officer across the Niger. He is small, dapper and handsome, always beautifully groomed and with a dazzling, boyish smile. But probably in nothing are the two leaders as different as in their characters. Those who knew Gowon well, and who served with him, have described him as a mild, meek man who would not hurt a fly – personally. But they also describe him as having a strong streak of vanity and a strain of spite behind the instant charm which has endeared him to so many foreigners since he came to power. In political terms the greatest reproach made by the Biafrans of moderate views is that he is weak and vacillating when confro
nted by the necessity to make firm decisions, a man easily swayed by stronger and more forceful spirits, cowed by a bullying, hectoring approach, and certainly no match for many of the army officers who led the July coup or the shrewd civil servants who saw in his régime a path to power within the country.
For the Biafrans Gowon has never been the real ruler of Nigeria, but an internationally acceptable front-man, smooth with visiting correspondents and journalists, charming with diplomats, endearing on television.
Gowon’s weakness of character became noticeable shortly after he took power. One of his first acts was to order a stop to the killing of Eastern officers and men of the Nigerian Army. However, as has been shown, the killing went on with little check until late in the month of August. Two years later he apparently had no more control over his armed forces. Time and again he swore to correspondents and diplomats that he had ordered his air force to stop bombing civilian centres in Biafra; but the rocketing, bombing and strafing of markets, churches and hospitals continued relentlessly.
Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu is an entirely different person. He was born thirty-five years ago at Zungeru, a small town in the Northern Region where his father was staying on a short visit. The father, Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, who died in September 1966 with a knighthood and several million pounds in the bank, started life as a small businessman from Nnewi in the Eastern Region. He built up a nationwide road haulage business, had the foresight to sell out for a high price when the railways were coming into their own, and put his assets into property and high finance. Everything Sir Louis touched turned to gold. He invested in building land in Lagos at a time when prices were low; by the time he died the tracts of marshy ground on Victoria Island, Lagos City, were being snapped up at fancy prices as Victoria Island was earmarked for the new diplomatic and residential suburb of the expanding capital.
The story of his second, but favourite son, can hardly be described as a rags-to-riches tale. The family dwelling where the young Emeka Ojukwu played before going to school was a luxurious mansion. Like most wealthy businessmen, Sir Louis kept open house and his mansion was a meeting place for all the moneyed elite of the prosperous colony. In 1940 the young Ojukwu entered the Catholic Mission Grammar School, but soon moved to King’s College, the smart private academy modelled closely on the lines of one of Britain’s public schools. Here he remained until he was thirteen, when his father sent him to Epsom College, set amid the rolling green hills of Surrey. He recalled later that his first impression of Britain was a sense of being completely lost ‘amid this sea of white faces’. The isolation of a small African boy in such a totally strange environment caused the first moulding of the character that was to follow. Driven in on himself he developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others. Despite frequent clashes with established authority in the form of his housemaster, he did reasonably well, played a good game of Rugby and set a new junior discus record which still holds.
He left at the age of eighteen and moved to Lincoln College, Oxford. It was here he had his first clash of will with his father, and won. Sir Louis was very much the Victorian father, a strongwilled head of the family who expected to have to brook little opposition to his wishes on the part of his offspring. In his second son he seemed to recognize something of himself, and he was probably right. Sir Louis wanted his son to study law, but after the statutory one year Emeka Ojukwu changed to Modern History which interested him much more. He still played Rugby, and almost got a Blue, and obtained a degree without excessive exertion. His three years at Oxford were the happiest of his life; he was coming up to twenty-one years of age, strong and goodlooking, wealthy and carefree.
When he returned to Nigeria he was noticeable in Lagos, he remarks now, ‘only for the impeccable cut of my English suits’. Then came the second clash with his father. The obvious thing would have been for Ojukwu to go into any one of the prosperous business concerns owned by his father, or one of his father’s friends, where promotion would be automatic and work minimal. It says much for his independence that he sought a job where he could do something on his own without the too influential pall of the Ojukwu name hanging over him. He opted for the civil service and asked to be sent to the Northern Region, hoping thus to escape his name and paternity.
But the built-in regionalism of the civil service prevented it. The North was for the Northerners and the young Ojukwu was sent instead to the East. Having his son enter the civil service in a humble grade was a blow to Sir Louis, but he put up with it. Going to the East was a blow to Ojukwu. He had hoped to escape his father’s name, influence and prestige. Instead he found it everywhere. Sir Louis was the local boy who had made good, his name was magic, and the new Assistant Divisional Officer soon realized that whatever his performance his annual reports were bound to be glowing. No superior would dare send in a bad report on the son of Sir Louis. This was the last thing the young man wanted.
In an attempt to prove himself, he threw himself into the work with a vengeance, choosing to get out of town as much as possible and help in building roads, ditches, culverts among the peasantry. Ironically it was a vital apprenticeship for his present position, and one on which he draws constantly. In those two years the favoured young man from Lagos learned to know his own people, the Ibo, at the level of the common man, to understand their problems, hopes and fears. Most important of all he is tolerant of their weaknesses and makes allowances for their failings, something that is often beyond the understanding of his other Western-educated colleagues and fellow officers. It is this bond with the people, a deep and two-way communication, that today provides the basis of his leadership of the Biafran people, and which still baffles his foreign opponents who wish he had been the victim of a coup long ago. The people know his understanding of them and their customs, and reply with an abiding loyalty to him.
But after two years in the civil service, working among Ibos and non-Ibos in the East, he decided to leave and join the army. The reason is an ironic one for the man now accused by some of ‘breaking up the Federation’. He was such a convinced Federalist that the narrow confines of regionalism that strait-jacketed the civil service got on his nerves. In the army he saw an institution where tribe, race and standing at birth counted for nothing. It was also a framework in which he could lose the cloying prestige of the Ojukwu name and earn his promotion on his own merits.
He was immediately sent for officer training at Eaton Hall, Chester, and emerged as a second lieutenant. (He is sometimes wrongly referred to as having been at Sandhurst.) After further courses at Hythe and Warminster, he returned home and got his first posting – to the Fifth Battalion based at Kano in Northern Nigeria. Two years later he was promoted Captain and sent to Army Headquarters at Ikeja Barracks, Lagos. This was in 1960, independence year.
For the wealthy bachelor officer of Nigeria’s darling army, life was very pleasant. In 1961 he was sent to the West African Frontier Force training school at Teshie in nearby Ghana as a lecturer in tactics and military law. Top of the class in tactics was Lieutenant Murtela Mohammed.
Later that year Captain Ojukwu returned to the Fifth Battalion at Kano, but was soon promoted Major and sent to the First Brigade Headquarters at Kaduna. The same year he served at Luluabourg, Kasai Province, Congo, with the Third Brigade of the United Nations peace-keeping force during the Katangese secession. From here he was selected for further military training and in 1962 attended the Joint Services Staff College in England. In January 1963 he was made a Lieutenant-Colonel and as such became the first indigenous Quartermaster General of the Nigerian Army.
It was while in this position that he took the decision and gained the experience that was later to enable him to give the lie to British Government claims that arms shipments from London to Lagos were only a part of ‘traditional supplies’. While in office he operated a policy of ‘buy the best at the price from whatever the source’. Und
er this policy most of the old arms contracts with British firms were cancelled, and fresh ones placed with more price-competitive manufacturers in Holland, Belgium, Italy, West Germany and Israel. By the time the present war broke out the Nigerian Army remained dependent on Britain for the supply of ceremonial dress uniforms and armoured cars only.
A year later he went back to the Fifth Battalion, this time as Commanding Officer. It was while he was at Kano during 1965 that the young Major Nzeogwu at Kaduna was plotting the January 1966 coup. No one has ever bothered to suggest that Colonel Ojukwu was party to, or knew about, this coup. The plotters left him strictly alone. For one thing he was regarded as too much an ‘establishment’ figure; more important, however, was that it was known that his legalistic turn of mind would make the idea of rebellion against legally constituted authority repugnant to him.
When the coup of January 1966 exploded he was one of the few who did not lose his head. Gathering the Provincial Administrator and the Emir of Kano together in conclave he urged them both to join with him in keeping Kano and its province free from disturbance and bloodshed. They were successful; there was no rioting in Kano. Within hours he was on the telephone to General Ironsi pledging his support and that of the Fifth to the loyal side.
A few days later, when Ironsi needed an Eastern Region officer to become Military Governor of the East, he called on Colonel Ojukwu to take the job.
At the age of thirty-three Colonel Ojukwu was appointed to govern his own people and the five million non-Ibo people of the Eastern Region. The carefree days were over. Those who knew him in the old days say that a considerable change came over him. With the responsibilities of government and later of popular leadership the lively young army officer subsided and gave way to a more sober figure. He still takes the post, rather than himself, extremely seriously. Ahead, although he did not know it at the time, lay the massacres of May 1966 of his own people, another coup d’etat, more race slaughter, hatred, mistrust, broken pledges, the decision to follow the people’s wishes and pull out of Nigeria, war, starvation, the calumny of half the world, and possibly death.
But after taking over in January 1966 it did not look like that. Like Colonels Fajuyi and Ejoor, Colonel Ojukwu lost little time in tackling the corruption and venality he found in public life in the East. As elsewhere in the South, but not in the North, some of the top politicians of the old régime were detained while the spring-cleaning went ahead.
Even the massacres of May in Northern Nigeria did little to dim his hopes for One Nigeria. After General Ironsi had had an assurance from the Sultan of Sokoto that there would be no more killing, Colonel Ojukwu took the opportunity of the visit of his friend the Emir of Kano to Nsukka to ask his people who had fled the North to go back to their jobs. Later he was to regret this stand, and the sense of remorse when many of those who took the advice died in later massacres still pains him today.
In two things Colonel Ojukwu is almost unique in the present situation. For one thing he was not compromised by participation in the corrupt rule of the politicians; the present politicians of Lagos are largely those who wheeled and dealed in the old political circus where self-enrichment out of public funds was the order of the day. Again, he was not involved in either of the military coups; most of the present military musclemen behind the politicians in Nigeria today are the same group who put through the bloody coup of July 1966.
Secondly, he was a wealthy man in his own right. After his father died in 1966 he inherited large properties in Lagos and elsewhere. But the inheritance was not all in property. The old financier had large sums deposited in Swiss banks, and before he died he gave his second son the details and access to them. Had Colonel Ojukwu played things the way the Lagos clique wanted, following the July coup, he could have kept all that and still held office. By doing what he did he lost everything in Lagos and his entire fortune in Nigeria. As regards the money overseas, he insisted when the crunch came that the last penny of it should be spent on Biafra before any of the old Eastern Region’s funds abroad were touched. The total fortune has been estimated at £8,000,000.
CHAPTER 6