Tag: Yakubu Gowon

A few weeks past, General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s most respected and arguably most admired former military ruler, turned ninety. The entire nation rose as one to pay homage to one of its most illustrious sons ever. The cascades of tributes and encomiums were truly overwhelming. In a nation in which the political elite rarely agree on anything and in which elite consensus on most things remains a mirage, Gowon has emerged over the years and more so after he was eased out of office by junior colleagues as an exemplary Nigerian patriot, a soldier-statesman and shinning moral exemplar for many of his compatriots.

  For a man who has risen from humble and lowly origins to the acme of fame and professional fortune, this is as giddy as it can get. It is a fairy tale of outlandish accomplishment. But it is also an allegorical fable of how far faith, determination and unassuming humility combined with good luck and providential fortune could carry a person of unfabled and unfancied origins even in the postcolonial quicksand. It is a tribute to Gowon’s humble nature and decency that he has remained unspoilt and unsullied by success unlike others whose palm kernels have been equally cracked for them by benevolent gods but who have become a national byword for abominable conduct and aggravating impertinence. The late Brigadier General Benjamin Maja Adekunle, gifted war commander and combustible military gadfly, noted that General Gowon, his former supreme commander, ought to have been a pastor rather than an officer.

   Yet despite all the accolades and unstinting acclamations, the clapping and ululations for General Gowon have not been universal. There have been some faint murmurs of disapproval and even the odd tremor of disapprobation.  In explosive putdown, Chuks Iloegbunam, author and notable journalist, tore into General Gowon accusing him of exaggerating his role in the suppression of the majors’ mutiny that led to the termination of the First Republic and of perfidy and complicity in the opaque intrigues surrounding the revenge coup of July, 1966 and the pogrom that was to follow. As a young boy, yours sincerely actually listened to the maiden broadcast of the then Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon in which he asserted that the basis for Nigeria’s unity was no longer there.

 That was two full days after the nation was without a valid national government. This was because the initial push of the victorious coupists was the breakup of the country until they were cautioned by western concerns. Perusing the literature of the murky and murderous interlude, one cannot but come to the same conclusion with Brigadier Hilary Njoku that it was a tragedy without heroes. The revelations of double-dealing and ambush within ambuscade contained in Chief Theophilus Akindele’s memoirs which chronicled the events of that terrible eclipse are even more explosive and bone-chilling. It was from his house that the embattled Brigadier Olufemi Ogundipe left in tracksuits to board a British frigate mysteriously moored off the Marina.

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   It will, however, be stretching it too far to insinuate that Gowon did not contribute anything significant to quelling the majors’ uprising on that night of murder and mayhem. Although he had no troops under his direct command having only arrived in the country the night before, he was a figure of calm authority behind the scene as he rallied the troops and made sure that the idea of military disruption of the political process was a professional abomination. It is obvious that the youthful and untested colonel was caught in a double bind or more appropriately a double jeopardy. He had been appointed to the position of Chief of Army Staff by Ironsi over the head of a few of his seniors. It was the right thing to do based on the exigencies of the moment. The northern military aristocracy had been liquidated by the mutinous majors. But there was no political rapport or professional synergy between the two men. Gowon was not and could not have been part of the ethnic cabal Ironsi surrounded himself with and who led him into a tragic misapprehension of the true state of the nation, particularly a northern region convulsing and seething with rage over the decapitation of its political and military leaders.

   But on the other side of the divide, the northern coupists did not trust Gowon and they viewed him with sullen suspicion based on the fact that he was a Christian and a member of a minority ethnic group. The putative leader of the military uprising, the tempestuous and irascible Major Mohammed, treated Gowon with such open rudeness and shrill discourtesy that it took Gowon’s calm and stoic forbearance to save the day. Even then, according to documented sources, it took a parade ground show of strength in Ikeja to convince the Kano-born Fulani aristocrat that Gowon was far more acceptable to the military rank and file. Thereafter, Mohammed embarked on a campaign of serial insubordination and disregard of stated military instructions which culminated in the Asaba pogrom and the military disasters of Onitsha and Abagana.

  It can be seen from the foregoing that although far from being a saint, Jack Gowon is also far from the satanic, bloodthirsty Dracula that secessionist propaganda has made him out to be till this day. What all this means is that almost fifty five years after the official termination of the civil war, Nigeria is yet to achieve a proper closure. As it is, and if he puts his mind to it, President Tinubu is properly and providentially emplaced to effect this closure. This morning, we republish a tribute to General Gowon first published on this same page exactly seventeen years ago in 2007. Nothing has been removed or added.

By way of a postscript, a fortnight earlier yours sincerely settled down to dinner with two ancient friends, a lady who was a top official of the defunct Nigerian Airways and her brother in law visiting from Long Island, New York. Both are indigenes of Asaba town and had witnessed the horrors of the civil war “live” as they say. The lady whose mother was the immediate past Omu of Asaba was a fellow youth corper in the defunct East Central State in 1975. Yours sincerely had witnessed the funeral of the late Omu about a decade earlier and it was a grand carnival which shut down the storied city for three days.

  Inevitably, the conversation drifted to the pogrom. While the lady regaled us with eerie graphicness about the indignities visited on young women, the man’s attention was focused on the actual pogrom which he survived as a boy by lying still amidst the huge pile of the dead and dying. Later, he had helped sympathizers carry the body of Chief Okongwu to his adjoining homestead for proper dressing before interment. That incidentally was the father of a former First Lady of Nigeria.

The rotund vultures are still hovering in the air. When are we going to get proper closure in this land?

General Yakubu Gowon, a.k.a Jack Gowon, is an immensely likeable fellow, an officer in the finest tradition of the old colonial army when martial nobility carried its sacred obligation.

    Although neither the best nor the brightest in his generation, neither imbued with the radical pan Arabic nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser, nor the Ottoman revolutionary zeal of a Kemal Mustapha, fate, and perhaps his own utter decorum and modesty, have always conspired to thrust him into the highest echelon of power and responsibility.

      Gowon remains the classic example of the old principle of feudal preferment: those who actively seek the throne will never get it, except by murder and perfidy. So it is then that an interview with the old soldier should come at a period of subdued militarism, of a tense and fraught succession, and of intense and acute interrogation of the fate of the territorial space known as Nigeria.

      The interview itself is vintage Jack Gowon: honest, guileless and utterly bewitching in its political virginity. Gowon seems to be crying out to his traumatised compatriots that in the political and economic disembowelling of modern Nigeria that we have witnessed, he is not the famed ripper.

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    Yet in many ways unknown to him, Gowon touches on the problems that have made Nigeria’s history such a consuming nightmare. It is a mad and maddening history in which heroes quickly become villains but only to have their honour and respectability redeemed in the long historical run, and in which villains become heroes only for their villainy to catch up with them at the final post.

     Thirty one years after he was declared a wanted criminal for the murder of a turbulent subordinate he had treated with levity and guarded affection, three decades after he was stripped of his exalted rank by the government of General Obasanjo, Gowon has not only had his rank and privileges restored, he has also regained respect and respectability as a revered avatar in the gallery of pan-Nigerian heroes.

    In the event, it was Obasanjo himself that did time in prison, in addition to his rank being briefly withdrawn after having been found guilty of allegedly plotting to overthrow the government of a subordinate he once rescued from General Danjuma’s keen professional clipper. More interestingly, a controversial return to power appears to have ended in severe self-demystification with the Owu-born general much reviled and despised as a corrupt and cruel despot who botched the genuine democratic transformation of the country. It is a steep descent for the war hero and political liberator.

     Thus the whirligig of time has brought its sweet revenge, as Shakespeare once famously asserted. There is no question of who the villain is at the moment between Gowon and Obasanjo. Longevity and staying power have their historical advantages. All Gowon had to do was to simply refuse to die. Long after those who dismissed him as a national nuisance anti-democratic potentate have descended into infamy, Yakubu Gowon is still there, smiling his sweet cherubic smile. According to a Chinese proverb, if you stay long enough by the riverbed, the bodies of your enemies will wash by.

       But history is still an open script, and anybody who believes that this is the end of the story is a historical neophyte. It was famously said of Stalin that he drove barbarism out of Russia by sheer barbarity. If by some strange luck the current democratic blunderbuss prevails, if by some quirk of history Umar Yar’Adua turns out moderately well despite the appalling and unpropitious circumstances of his ascendance, if official corruption henceforth is reduced in Nigeria, Obasanjo, despite his glaring personal failings, may yet be seen as the man who drove out corruption from Nigeria by corrupt means and who established some semblance of democracy by despotic fiat.

       It is perhaps with an unconscious eye to such history in all its grand whims and caprices that Gowon has opened his heart to his compatriots once again. For the umpteenth time, Gowon reminds us that he did not join the army as a short cut to fabulous wealth. Neither did he join to become Head of State. Even if he does not explicitly inform us, this was the twin-malaise that eventually undid the Nigerian military as a potent force for national restitution and redemption.

    But this is not the same as the biblical tale of their fathers having eaten sour grape. The Nigerian military old-guard were an apolitical, frugal and ascetic lot, until oil flowed and blood followed, that is. The bald and bland facts tend to support Gowon’s earnest asseverations. The story is touchingly told by those who know of how Gowon, after ruling Nigeria for nine years, was about to become a homeless pauper in London until help and rescue came his way. It is a redemptive tale of self-abnegating heroism and immaculate patriotism.

      The raw facts also attest to Gowon’s utter lack of political appetite. When the then Colonel Yakubu Gowon returned to Nigeria on the eve of the first coup, his burning ambition was to transform his battalion into a showcase of discipline and professionalism. Within the next seventy-two hours, he himself had been transformed into the army chief of staff, the ultimate military posting. In another eight months, he was to become the youthful leader of his country. From putative battalion commander to de facto Head of state all in eight months: no ascension could have been more dizzying.

    Yet if this space shuttle transformation is symbolic of the confusion and uncertainties of the post-colonial state, it also speaks to the fundamental paradox of the Nigeria nation: the utter and frightful lack of preparation for office of virtually its entire post-independence leaders. It is the problem that currently bedevils the Yar’Adua administration. No Nigerian leader has been deliberately groomed for office. They all seem to stumble into preferment with the self-assurance of a sleepwalker.

  Obasanjo himself is the classic example. If the old General Obasanjo was carried into office screaming and kicking in protest with the ferocious Danjuma directing, the later President Obasanjo wandered into office like a traumatised amnesiac fresh from solitary confinement. For a complex and complicated country aspiring to rapid modernity, this haphazard and feudal lottery mode of succession may well be the unkindest cut.

   In retrospect, anybody thinking that General Obasanjo was historically positioned to buck this trend does not appreciate the fact that the deep psychological wounds inflicted on him notwithstanding; Obasanjo has always been in paradoxical collusion and complicity with his tormentors.

    With this, we now come to the grandest paradox of the Nigerian postcolonial state. Despite their inability to further the lot of the nation, despite their inability to project the interest of their class formation in and as the national interest Nigeria has been ruled by the same set of people, the occasional violent internal collisions notwithstanding. The result has been a pool of leadership hobbled by incest and a vastly diminished possibility of genetic replenishment.

     It is the same set of officers who put Gowon there that eventually removed him in a patriotic vote for the subordination of the military to the democratic ethos. Despite the fact that they were historically constrained from casting their net wide, nobody can deny the patriotic and nationalist motivation behind the act. Yet it is the same group of people that would terminate civilian rule and inaugurate a new round of military tyranny. More intriguingly, three of them went ahead to commit the same crime they have accused Gowon of: Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo.

    Perhaps there is more to this feat of self-perjury that we know little about. Or may be we should have stuck with good old Jack. May be what a fledgling country wracked by internal contradictions needs is a temperate and even-handed leader who will stay long enough to oversee genuine national transformation. The jury is still out, and Jack is still smiling and smelling of rose.

                              First published in May, 2007