After decades of foot dragging, General Yakubu Jack Gowon has opened a can of worms. Did Gowon intend to tell all?
Did he even try to tell all? The past 55years, fully illustrated by his well known reticence maps directly onto my entire postwar adulthood.
It was only quite recently that he started granting funny interviews with very deliberate memory gaps for which he was routinely challenged. And now this long awaited memoirs!
Granted that it is impossible to agree with Gowon over the many events from January 15, 1966, and January 10, 1970, I wonder if the University of Warwick graduate has quotable quotes, opinions on the trajectory of his One United Nigeria, under “another northerner,” and the thumb of his British handlers.
Has Nigeria progressed in any sense from January 1970 to date?
With the notorious Cement Armada on my mind, and his unforgettable statement about “money no longer being any problems but how to spend it” culminating in the ruinous Udoji Awards, with ill-advised inflationary arrears, does Gowon concede his earlier poor understanding and failures on the economic front?
Did he see more clearly out of office after exposure to some decent tutoring at Warwick? I hope so.
However, I doubt that he would have enough reservoir of humility to own up to this lack in this his memoirs.
The one good thing here is that the Ikemba, the People’s General, is not around with the potential to heckle him.
“According to the book, Northern military officers believed Chukwuemeka Ojukwu was complicit in the January 1966 coup d’etat and wanted to move against him, per The Cable report.”
“Joseph Wey, a commodore, and Adeyinka Adebayo, a colonel, were also senior to Gowon, and he was promoted to major-general and later full-star general within one year.
“The case of Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe was, however, not as straightforward because the course of the coup had made it obvious that he could no longer function effectively in the command-and-control structure of the Nigerian Army and the Armed Forces.
“With the concurrence of the UK government, he was appointed Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the UK,” Gowon wrote.
Laughable!
With the concurrence of the UK government? How else would a puppet on a string refer to the puppet master?
“Ojukwu refused my offer of friendship.” He did? Wow!
Gowon did not believe Ojukwu was supporting Ogundipe or defending the army hierarchy for altruistic reasons.
Gowon has been perfectly free to believe anything that he wants. No problem with that.
And now this clincher:
“Left unsaid at the time was Ojukwu’s strong view that I was junior to him in the hierarchy. He failed to appreciate that he had been under serious threat because the young Northern officers believed he was complicit in the January 15, 1966, coup.
“I pre-empted any attempt to move against him, in part, because of my respect for all the Regional Governors and, more importantly, because I saw him primarily as a colleague and officer with whom I thought I had worked to restore normalcy in those early days of uncertainty.
“I believed that, together, we could rebuild the army and allow the country to continue its course in history.”
It is obvious that after loving and protecting Ojukwu to the best of his ability, he then provided final PROOF by calling all those restless young northern officers, including General TY Danjuma Rtd, to commence the final three year long assault on Ala Igbo.
This is supposedly to consolidate his protection, hahaha!
Love so amazing, right?
Was Gowon and his boys bloodthirsty? I bet that they were.
Meanwhile I do not expect these controversies to be rested in my lifetime, no matter what Gowon, or his ghost writers put in that book.
Being an Ordinary Pesin, I imagine that our professional kinsmen like Chuks Iloegbunam are furiously taking notes in order to properly respond to the newly roused general.
Oduche Azih,
Lagos
