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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Gowon at 80 Among his many virtues, perhaps the most endearing is his compassion. This could be attributed to his strict Christian upbringing in Wusasa where he was born eighty years ago, this month, to the highly respected Christian couple of Yohanna and Sanaya. The father was originally from Pankshin in Plateau State but settled in Wusasa, a sleepy suburb north-west of Zaria and the evangelical headquarters of Northern Christianity. Soon enough the suburb became the first home of the Gowons, as we shall soon see. The most obvious manifestation of the man’s compassion was the way he executed the country’s civil war between 1967 and 1970 as the officer and gentleman who came to power accidentally in July 1966. The war itself was triggered by the country’s first military coup in January, a coup in which virtually the entire Northern political and military leadership was wiped out by a group of officers that was almost entirely Igbo. The young Colonel Yakubu Gowon, then Adjutant-General of the army, was lucky to escape the massacre. Widespread resentment at the one-sidedness of the coup soon led to a revenge coup in which the Military Head of State, Major-General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, was killed along with many Igbo officers. The young Northern officers who carried out the coup drafted Gowon, as the most senior officer left standing from the region, to replace Aguiyi-Ironsi. A more senior Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, then military governor of Eastern Region, thought this breached military protocol and showed his reluctance to take orders from his junior. Ojukwu’s hands were soon strengthened by the mass killings of Igbos which followed the July counter-coup, killings which, in turn, led to the mass migration of Igbos and other Eastern minorities to the East for safety. Following the breakdown of a series of attempts at home and abroad to end the instability, insecurity and division that had resulted from the military’s incursion into politics, Ojukwu declared a rebellion. Gowon countered by ordering what he called police action. Invariably this turned into a full scale war which lasted three years. Gowon executed it with as much compassion as was possible in a war. True, millions of Nigerians, mostly Igbos, lost their lives in the war zone. However, the unprecedented speed with which the warring sides reconciled with each other after the war was only possible because Gowon did not behave like a general who took no prisoners. One glaring manifestation of his compassionate frame of mind revealed itself twelve years after the war in a lengthy interview I had with him as a New Nigerian reporter. This was at his London home where he lived in exile following his overthrow in 1975. “I thought honestly,” he said in an answer to criticisms that he’d allowed the war to drag on for too long, “it is bad to say you do not want somebody in your home and then he moves to his own home and you follow him there in order to hurt him again, et cetera. I think it is immoral.” (Sunday New Nigerian, May 9, 1982). For someone who was an accidental military head of state, nine years in office seemed to have made him reluctant to leave; in an Independence Day broadcast on October 1, 1974, he told a stunned nation that 1976, as the year he had promised to return power to civilians, was no longer realistic. He needed, he said, first to put the economy on a sound footing and second, it seemed the politicians had learnt no lesson from their ouster from power in 1966. His reasoning did not, apparently, wash even with the top military brass, much less with the public and from then on it looked like his overthrow was only a question of time. When it came he was away in Kampala, Uganda, attending the year’s annual Organisation of African Unity conference. He accepted the coup with equanimity but decided to stay away until things settled down. They never did; six month after he was overthrown, some disaffected officers struck. Their coup failed but they succeeded in assassinated the head of state, General Murtala Mohammed. The coup makers ring leader, Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, implicated Gowon in their attempt. Overnight the man became the nation’s chief villain regardless of his protestations of his innocence and his well-deserved image of someone who could not hurt a fly. His protestations were hardly helped by a statement the Federal Government issued on February 18, 1976, five days after General Mohammed was killed, that it had “ample evidence” that he “knew and by implication approved the coup plot.” If he was innocent as he claimed, he should, the government said, return home to answer his charges. It assured him that his trial would be fair. Wisely, he declined the invitation. Wisely, because it turned out that his younger brother, Moses, had remained in detention for three months after assurances from the government that he had been cleared of suspicions that he was part of the coup, and freed. Time, they say, heals. It may not have been a hero’s welcome but on December 6, 1983, the former head of state returned to Nigeria no longer a villain. This was two years after he had been cleared of having a hand in the February 13, 1976 coup attempt. His clearance came in a speech by President Shehu Shagari on October 1, 1981 in which he announced the declaration that Gowon was wanted for General Mohammed assassination had been “rescinded forthwith” and the general was “free to visit or return to Nigeria should he so wish.” Shagari had come to his conclusion, presidential sources said, after he had studied reports of the 1976 coup attempt and found no evidence that Gowon knew, much less approved, the coup attempt. The president was also said to have sounded out the military top brass and found no objection to granting Gowon a reprieve. In his first press interview upon his return, he said he was through with politics. Nearly ten years later he seemed to have changed his mind. In December 1992, he announced his intention to join General Ibrahim Babangida’s long transition programme as a presidential candidate, much to the surprise of many Nigerians, including some members of his family. Indeed, one of them, the younger and late Daniel who was Sarkin Wusasa, told the rested Citizen magazine that he was unequivocally against it. “They think Nigeria is at another cross-road,” he said, “and only the general with his patience and accommodation, can guide it aright. But I say it is all rubbish. Yaya mutum zaiyi amai ya dawo ya lashe?”, the Hausa for how can someone swallow his vomit? (Citizen, April 6, 1992) Probably the most celebrated criticism of Gowon’s bid to return to power was General Olusegun Obasanjo’s. Many a reader will, I am sure, recall how he had asked his former commander-in-chief what he had forgotten in the presidential villa that he wanted to return to pick. Such is the allure of power that the man apparently forgot his advice to his former boss when he returned in 1999 and even wanted to stay put. Gowon’s return bid eventually turned into a misadventure. He lost the primaries conducted under the controversial Option A4, where delegates physically lined up behind the ballot box of their preferred candidate, to a far less well known Dr Sarki Tafida, one time personal physician of President Shehu Shagari who went on to become a senator and is Nigeria’s current High Commissioner in the UK. Many attributed his loss partly to his choice of Wusasa as his constituency, instead of his native Pankshin. As a small part of Zaria which was overwhelmingly Muslim, he was naive, the critics said, to think he could prevail over a Muslim candidate, no matter how little known. It was a measure of the man’s outward looking nature that he never thought of Wusasa as a second home after Pankshin. Others said he was equally naive to think that his reputation as an honest man and former head of state was enough to give him victory. In spite of this misadventure and in spite of his going back on his promise shortly after the war to hand over power to civilians in 1974 , the general is today arguably the most respected former head of state in the country. This is mainly due to his compassion and apparent personal integrity. When the man took over power in 1966, federal revenue was in the region of 340 million Naira. By 1974, two years before he was ousted from power, it was 5.5 billion, a miserable sum by today’s standard but at that time a princely amount, so princely that at one time the general could boast that money was not an object but how to spend it. That may have accounted for so much corruption many in his regime, including those who now strut around as elderly tribal champions, were accused of, with good reason. It is a testimony to the man’s personal integrity that no one has ever accused him of personally benefitting for all that oil money. Here’s many more returns of October 19 to an honest and compassionate general. |