•Sam Omatseye’s review of Ayo Opadokun’s Gun Hegemony
A context is necessary to review a book like Ayo Opadokun’s. First, the use of the phrase gun hegemony may be problematic. The word hegemony was popularized by the Italian activist and theorist Antonia Gramsci. He was not referring to things but humans. He was talking about how segments of society try to lord it over others.
Human societies have always been about hegemony, whether it is the hegemony of ethnic superiority, or the sway of certain set of ideas.
Opadokun, in this book also wants Nigeria’s contemporary history to be written by the gun. That is a large claim for any writer. On the fictional level, writers tend to give narrative voices to anyone to tell the yarn of a society. They give it to children as in Abiku or Ogbanje in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, to a long-gone ancestor like Mofolo’s Chaka. In fact, the Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma gave the honours to a chi, the private god in Igbo mythology. It was in his second novel and Booker Prize finalist, the Orchestra of Minorities.
On the nonfictional level, however, Opadokun seeks to raise the stakes. Is it a question of the gun or the man. The debate is hottest today in the United States. George Bernard Shaw suggests the conundrum in his play, Arms and the Man.
In the U.S, those who say it is not the gun that kills but man have argued that guns are not to blame. Guns are innocent. Guns are sinned against. Man is the sinner. You can have a thousand guns on street, and not a murderer and not a shot fired. The reason? Guns cannot shoot themselves.
Every year, the country laments a school massacre, a neighborhood bereavement, a church funeral, and old man fallen, or community leader pockmarked. But those who want their guns defend the guns. They do not accept any argument about a gun hegemony. We have to fix the people, not the guns.
It is a very important part of Opadokun’s argument, although he does not probe the interstices of this issue.
He does well to probe the origins of guns and how it changed forever the turn and tone of warfare over the ages. Man no longer had to refer to the great horse man of war wielding swords and slashing throats. No more the grand battle Caesar leading the troops against the Roman hordes trying to tear the empire apart. War became more clinic. Death was efficient.
But the concern of our author is how the gun has changed the Nigerian narrative forever. He laments how we missed an opportunity in January 1966. In doing so, he has excavated some facts that were known to a few, and even those who knew did not insist on the veracity of their witnesses.
It is a story of false heroes. January 1966 was the day we might have saved democracy for Nigeria. We might have demonstrated in the contagion of coups in the sub region that Nigeria’s democracy had a resilience of spirit, and the guns would not have dared any form of hegemony. Many have asked, when the coup failed, how come we had a military in charge? What happened to the parliament? According to records from men like Richard Akinjide and Shehu Shagari, after no one saw prime minister Tafawa Balewa, members of the parliament picked Dipcharima from the northeast to act as prime minister. It was the task of Nwafor Orizu to legalise it by swearing him in. He would not.
Even though he had all the powers to do so, he dithered. He said he was only acting on Zik’s behalf. But he was told he was going to formalize it since Zik was on the high seas. Zik has reportedly been tipped off by Emmanuel Ifeajuna about the coup and the coward was not in air or land.
If you read Opadokun’s earlier work, Aristocratic Rebel about M.D. Yusufu, Nigeria’s top spy and former inspector general of police, you would understand that all Nigeria’s coups were known ahead of time. The eminent powers did not act because they were like drones, fat and too bulky to roll. For instance, The Dimka coup was dismissed and they claimed they would not worry themselves about a drunkard.
It turned out, back to 1966, that Nwafor Orizu knew he had power to swear in an acting prime minister. His eyes were set on his kinsman K. O. Mbadiwe. The rumble within the parliament was that it seemed Orizu was confirming the fears that the coup was dictated by ethnic designs. This is a very serious allegation. He obviously could not pull it through.
That opened the window for a very cruel option. Individual ambition trumped national interest. General Ironsi, the man who moved about with a baby crocodile, had control of the army. He was even triumphal.
According to the eyewitnesses, Ironsi summoned the lawmakers in one room and read them the riot act. It was either they surrendered the power to him as gentlemen or he would take it by force. That was not the language of a democrat but a despot.
So the lawmakers wanted to make it clear that they did not give up power without resistance. The soldier had taken over with guns. Dialogue and constitution were out of the window. Some context is necessary for Ironsi. He was supposed to be one of the targets of the coupists. He was basking in the sun while his colleagues had expired like Maimalari and Sodeinde.
Ifeajuna, who should have eliminated the general according to their plan, left him. Ifeajuna fled to Ghana. He and his rival colleague Kaduna Nzeogwu would eventually die in the civil war. Many believe that Ironsi was grateful to the young men for sparing his life. Was it to spare his own life that he took over power? Was he feeling guilty? Was he anticipating a sort of institutional revenge from the army because he was breathing why they, his soldier colleagues, lay dead, some as yet undiscovered in bushes?
Was he paranoid? If he survived, was that any reason for any parliament to come after him? to come after him would be to legitimize the coup. No lawmaker was going to do that. Opadokun is a writer with an attitude, and that gives him punk. What he has asserted are the facts . That is, that Ironsi and Orizu destroyed the First Republic. We must understand that it was not politicians that killed the republic. The coupists had failed. They were scrambling for their own lives. They had been arrested. What was the next step? Of course try them. Ironsi would not. The issue was raised in parts of the country, especially in the north and west that Ironsi’s reluctance to do the logical thing was because these men were his kinsmen and the “kinsman in trouble,” as Chinua Achebe asserts in No Longer At Ease, “must be saved, not blamed. Anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone. He is a fool who treats a brother worse than a stranger.”
The claim that some of us took over from our classrooms in the 1980’s was that civilians were responsible for the demise of the republic. That politicians failed democracy. Politicians can always be bumbling. Yet, as we have seen, they might have been running a flawed system. Yet they kept the faith. Part of the illusion was resonance of a speech. That was because of the soaring and self-serving rhetoric of the Nzeogwu coup speech about 10 percenters, etc.
Ironsi swaggered to power as a messiah. He was just a soldier but suddenly, he was going to govern the country. There was a sore thumb in the tale. Obafemi Awolowo. According to Nzeogwu, he was being released from Calabar Prison to lead the country. The bars of Calabar did not rattle. Some of the coupists moved to eastern and midwestern regions at the time and probably had tea with the premiers while the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello and Samuel Ladoke Akintola were slaughtered in the presence of their families.
We have to keep returning to January 15. Shall we say the foolhardiness of Orizu and Ironsi led to the eventual slaughter of the Igbos in the pogrom that smeared parts of the north from Sokoto to Makurdi? If Dipcharima became acting prime minister, there might have been no Ironsi. We might not have heard of pogrom, Gowon or Murtala or some of the bloody chapters of the civil war.
The promulgation of Decree 34 has become one of the contentious laws in our history. Some historians have tried to excuse Ironsi with the explanation that it might have been naïve. It was called unification degree, but it was a clarion call for ethnic domination. As Opadokun noted in his Aristocratic Rebel, Ojukwu had exploited the decree to ask all prefects to take charge across the civil service. The decree was bad enough, but Ojukwu’s cry poisoned the pool. The civil servants in the north were the first to feel alienated.
If it was naïve, the resistance in the north should have restrained Ironsi. Yet he did not. Middle ranking officers in the north had written letters saying they would act if it was not reversed. Ironsi was deaf. The Igbo streets across the country became self-righteous. They burnt the Sardauna in effigy, and were singing triumphantly. In the barracks, the Igbo officers’ wives were mocking their northern counterparts. The tension was in the air. The Ironsi men knew a plot was afoot. He could not do anything to stop them. If he tried, it would be an open sesame of civil war. Yet, he would not reverse course. Historians do not say anything is inevitable. But something was going to happen. It was like King Oedipus of Sophocles’ play who saw tragedy and was careening towards it as though there no other course. A literary critic known as Killam described it as insistent fatality, and we see this in Okonkwo’s Things Fall Apart. And it happened in what is known as the revenge coup of July 1966.
The issue of death and destruction was all the January 15 night brought us. The revenge coup in July was blood roll. It might not have happened if Nzeogwu and his colleagues were tried. It is a story about how we must not allow our heroes to destroy our societies. Orizu has been memorialized today, but what of the millions of Igbo that were slaughtered in cold blood because he was trying to pursue the same ethnic agenda? It brings to mind the poem by Claude Mckay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
Another crucial part of this book is the person of Adekunle Fajuyi. He has been mythicise as a hero as a host. In July 1966, he and Ironsi were picked up, and the widespread belief was that the soldiers wanted to spare him, but he insisted on being shot. The eyewitness, including Theophilus Danjuma, say otherwise.
Here are the words of Lieutenant Colonel William Walbe (rtd):
“We arrested him as we arrested Aguiyi-Ironsi. We suspected him for being party to the January coup. You remember the Battle Group Course which was held in Abeokuta…Fajuyi was the commander of the Battle Group Course…All those who took part in the January coup were those who had taken part in the course… he had to suffer too. I am sorry about that but that is the nature of the life of a military man…”
Danjuma said it was under Fajuyi the training on the raid of the Sardauna took place. After Fajuyi’s arrest, he said, “The chaps could not stomach Fajuyi such that if there was anybody who should die first, as far as they were concerned , it was Fajuyi, not even Aguiyi-Ironsi.”
Opadokun’s Gun Hegemony is meditation on a nation’s dark moment, and he nudges to look back again on that day, this day, to understand how to treasure the beauty of democracy.
