WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN ABURI THAT LED TO THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR?

After the first military coup that installed Major-General Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi (1924-1966) as the first military Head of State of the country on January 16, 1966, the Northern soldiers had started planning, by May 1966, the revenge of their leaders who had been murdered in January.

194 days after taking office, Aguiyi-Ironsi was murdered in a Northern counter-coup on July 29, 1966, and for three days, the nation had no leader until Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon (b.1934) was installed on August 1, 1966.

The immediate significance of the second coup was that it forced a return to an ethnic balance within the Army as neither the major ethnic groups, Hausa or Yoruba, was placed in power but a minor ethnic group from the Northern Region in present-day Plateau State.

In the confusion that followed the second coup d’état, the slender confidence that remained between the Igbo and the Northerners was shattered. Disturbances broke out in the East but even more so in the North after August 1, 1966.

September 24, 1966, was marked by serious disturbances in several Northern cities where thousands of Southern civilians, mostly of Igbo origin, were reportedly assaulted and many killed. Northern authorities imposed dawn-to-dusk curfews on the cities. Six days later on September 30, widespread violence again erupted after 25 Easterners were shot at the Kano Airport by Northern soldiers stationed there.

The mass killings of Igbo in the North were a deplorable act that was condemned by Nigerians, including the Military Governors.

With the counter-coup of July 29, 1966, the political development of Nigeria’s federal structure took a different turn. It was accentuated even more by the fact that the Eastern Region Government in Enugu immediately threatened secession if certain grievances and demands were not met.

The immediate concern of the Federal Government, therefore, was for it to find ways to appease the East so long as such concessions were within the framework of one Nigeria.

But the Eastern Military Governor, Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933-2011), refused to leave the East for any meeting anywhere in Nigeria because, he claimed, he was not safe outside the East.

The Federal Government too argued that the Nigerian leader should also not go to the East for a meeting. His life, they also claimed, was not safe there either. Tension mounted and Lieutenant-General Joseph Arthur Ankrah (1915-1992) of Ghana offered a neutral meeting place. The venue was Aburi, Ghana. #Mystoryarticles

Source: ABURI, Echoes of the Nigeria-Biafra War.

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