What If We Wake Up Tomorrow To Experience A Military Coup In Nigeria? – Festus Adeday

Advertisement

By Festus Adedayo Ph.D

“Narratives of corruption today under Muhammadu Buhari are worse than what was in place that pushed Chukwuma Nzeogwu to plan the January, 1966 coup. Gowon and his triumvirates also claimed that killing of northerners was reason why he and the coupists of July, 1966 struck. Today, insecurity and killing of northerners and southerners are far worse under a man who was elected based on the belief that, as a retired General, his military bravura would stop genocidal insurgents.”

The New York Times report of March 13, 1976 put the story of Nigeria’s perennial human sacrifices by the bloodthirsty grove of coup-plotting most startlingly. The day before, newly appointed Chief of Defense Staff, Brigadier Musa Yar’Adua, had announced that former Defense Minister, Major General Iliya D. Bisalla and 29 others, had been executed by the seaside suburb of Victoria Island. The bar beach execution ground was jam-packed with thousands of onlookers who had come to watch the execution. The 30 persons were killed for their roles in the assassination of military Head of State, Murtala Ramat Mohammed, alongside his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Akintunde Akinsehinwa.

While announcing the execution, Yar’Adua also called on Britain to extradite ousted Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, then student of Political Science at Warwick University in England, to answer charges of co-plotting the coup. Gowon, by Col Buka Suka Dimka’s confession, had invited him to London when he (Dimka) traveled to Madrid, Spain on official assignment and asked him to contact Bisalla for execution of the coup. Of the 125 people arrested, 40 were released and 32, including Bisalla, were sentenced to death. This included Abdulkarim Zakari, a radio journalist, said to be a relative of Victoria, General Gowon’s wife. Dimka, who also participated in an earlier counter-coup of July, 1966 which toppled General Aguiyi Ironsi, was as at this time still being interrogated to further implicate Gowon. He was later publicly executed at the Lagos Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison on May 15, 1976.

Bisalla’s inclusion among the coup plotters had sent shock waves round the country. He was highly respected and distinguished as an ex- military commander of an infantry division during the civil war and who was also renowned for his postwar conciliation efforts. About the oldest General of the lot at the time, when he was arrested upon Dimka’s canary-like confession, Bisalla was reported to have soliloquized, (in my paraphrase) “how can these young boys end one’s military career like this!” Huge and tall, Bisalla was dressed in a cream-coloured safari dress as he walked down to the stakes. Not only was his military career ended. Bullets ended his life as well. Till today, Bisalla’s conviction and execution are still being put to the impunity of military era court-martial as there was no single tissue of corroboration of the allegation of his involvement in the coup plot, aside Dimka’s evidence.