January 14, 2009
Today is January 15, 2009. On this very date, 43 years ago, precisely on January 15, 1966, the first military coup in the history of Nigeria spearheaded by these nine Majors; Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna, Ademoyega, Okafor, Anuforo, Chukwuka, Obienu, Onwuatuegwu, and Chude-Sokei claimed the lives of: Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, the first Prime Minister; Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sarduana of Sokoto and Premier of the Northern Region; Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region and Festus Okotie-Eboh among others.
However, what happened on this very day was merely a culmination of the political unrest and chaos that engulfed the country in the first Republic. This in turn is the natural consequence of the political macabre dance that resulted from the inequities inherent in the political infrastructure bequeathed by the British colonial masters. In Nzeogwu’s puritanical reasoning:
“We wanted to get rid of rotten and corrupt ministers, political parties, trade unions and the whole clumsy apparatus of the federal system. We wanted to gun down all the bigwigs on our way. This was the only way. We could not afford to let them live if this was to work. We got some but not all. General Ironsi was to have been shot, but we were not ruthless enough. As a result he and the other compromisers were able to supplant us.”
Tragically for Nigeria, that marked the beginning of what Shehu Shagari, the first executive president of the country, and one of the principal actors right from the beginning, aptly captured in his theory of musical chairs.
As my contribution to the anniversary of the epoch making event of 1965, I have chosen to reproduce this theory by Shehu Shagari unedited, verbatim et literatim –word for word, in the hope that ‘fellow Nigerians’ would gain insight into the political gerrymandering that passes for governance in Nigeria; happy reading:
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The Fulani jihadists who established the Sokoto Caliphate took advantage of the fact of many dissidents within the kingdoms of the western Sudan at the time of the Jihad. They made good use of the dissidents by recruiting them to fight in the formation of the Caliphate. Later, when the power of the Caliphate began to decline, some recusants went into exile outside the Caliphate. When the British colonialists arrived in West Africa, they too used some of those dissenters to help conquer the Fulani and the Caliphate. In fact, it was the agitators who formed the expeditionary force that conquered Sokoto itself in 1903. Now that the power of the British Empire seemed to be on the decline and had produced some dissidents from among its local associates, the traditional rulers (the real heirs of the defunct Caliphate) felt it was now their turn to recruit the rebels against the British in order to capture their erstwhile power. But since the impending battle would mainly be one of words, said my friend, people like us seemed eminently suitable for recruitment. This was Marafa’s theory of musical chairs, intended to explain the involvement of our traditional rulers in the pre-independence politics of Northern region, and of Sokoto in particular.
I rejected the theory by pointing out that the chiefs were deceiving themselves if they thought that power would be wrested from the British and handed over to them to mess up again. Besides, I maintained that they were making a big mistake if they thought that Shehu Shagari would be anybody’s puppet! Marafa then interrupted: “Hold it my friend! This people are intelligent and experienced. They are not so naïve as to imagine that, somehow, power would be handed over to them; they simply want to ensure that whoever takes over from the British does not, in the end throw them overboard! You have not so far been identified as one of those who, if given the chance, would undermine our traditional power structures and values”.
As to the issue of ruling the country, Marafa pointed out that the chiefs only wanted to ensure that whoever governs in the future would involve them and respect their positions. “As for your fear of their ‘messing up’, they would do nothing of the sort; they would rather concede that prerogative to the new rulers”! With regard to your fears of being used as someone else’s puppet, Marafa concluded: “I am afraid that under the new system of democracy which you cherish so much, you are already a puppet of your party and there is no guarantee that the party cannot be manipulated by a clever interests group”!
It was already getting dark and my friend drove me home, leaving me to ponder over the issue. Nearly 40 years on, one can now see clearly what Marafa tried to convey by his theory of musical chairs. Independence from the British came in 1960. But within five years we got ourselves into an awkward position and some dissident officers propelled the armed officers to power. The soldiers in turns messed things up so much that dissidents from among their ranks intervened repeatedly. And the game of musical chairs continued, with the ubiquitous traditional rulers being ‘involved’ and ‘respected’ by successive regimes!
In the case of those who refused to co-operate with the traditional rulers, the going was rather rough. I recall that when my friend Aminu Kano, of blessed memory, resigned his teaching job at Maru to join the NEPU in November 1950, there was hardly any alternative job for him except in politics. But traditional rulers used their influence with the masses to block Aminu’s attempt to win power. He had to rely on occasional gifts from the big brother of his party’s political ally, the NCNC. And after his ministerial career under General Gowon (1967-74), it was largely the generosity of his friends rather than his small farm holding that was to sustain him until he returned to his maker.
Unlike Aminu, I had no wish whatsoever to commit myself to the political wilderness, or to be part of an exciting but unfulfilling world of fringe politics. I had helped build our party from its infancy and to shape its ideology and policies. In the process, I realized that bargain and compromise were essential to forging democratic consensus. Hence, I hung on to the party in spite of occasional irritations and intrusions of vested interests. This paid off. The party nominated me from among other prospective candidates to contest the 1954 election into the Federal House of Representatives. – Shehu Shagari; Beckoned to Serve, April 2001
You heard it from the Horses own mouth; apart from the highlighted phrases, I changed nothing, neither a comma nor a full-stop. Today, the ranks of these behind the scenes manipulators of Nigeria political powerhouse have been swelled by the ranks of the retired northern Generals. These are the people that former President Olusegun Obasanjo battled to a standstill between 1999 and 2007 to the extent that they regretted making him president in 1999. He banished IPO’s and reduced their privileges. Therefore, when you witnessed the surprising unity of purpose between very unlikely friends; Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar united in a common cause in 2006 - to stop Obasanjo 3rd term, please understand the underlying current. Blinded by his own ambition and seeming invincibility, Obasanjos mistake was his regrettable failure to groom a worthy successor.
Today, under the UMYA do-nothing administration, they are back to their game, the ultimate power brokers calling the shots. In my article; The New EFCC: The Ribadu And El Rufai Factor, I implored Nigerians to look beyond the obvious and see the subterranean moves in the battle EFCC wages against Obasanjo cronies, but it appears that Nigerians are still looking at it merely as a Ribadu and El Rufai affair.
Gideon Orkar, remember him? He knows and understands the problem with Nigeria and sought to cure it by the roots, but he was naive. Please go back to his speech of April 1990. Political correctness would not allow me to say more.
[email protected]
However, what happened on this very day was merely a culmination of the political unrest and chaos that engulfed the country in the first Republic. This in turn is the natural consequence of the political macabre dance that resulted from the inequities inherent in the political infrastructure bequeathed by the British colonial masters. In Nzeogwu’s puritanical reasoning:
“We wanted to get rid of rotten and corrupt ministers, political parties, trade unions and the whole clumsy apparatus of the federal system. We wanted to gun down all the bigwigs on our way. This was the only way. We could not afford to let them live if this was to work. We got some but not all. General Ironsi was to have been shot, but we were not ruthless enough. As a result he and the other compromisers were able to supplant us.”
Tragically for Nigeria, that marked the beginning of what Shehu Shagari, the first executive president of the country, and one of the principal actors right from the beginning, aptly captured in his theory of musical chairs.
As my contribution to the anniversary of the epoch making event of 1965, I have chosen to reproduce this theory by Shehu Shagari unedited, verbatim et literatim –word for word, in the hope that ‘fellow Nigerians’ would gain insight into the political gerrymandering that passes for governance in Nigeria; happy reading:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Fulani jihadists who established the Sokoto Caliphate took advantage of the fact of many dissidents within the kingdoms of the western Sudan at the time of the Jihad. They made good use of the dissidents by recruiting them to fight in the formation of the Caliphate. Later, when the power of the Caliphate began to decline, some recusants went into exile outside the Caliphate. When the British colonialists arrived in West Africa, they too used some of those dissenters to help conquer the Fulani and the Caliphate. In fact, it was the agitators who formed the expeditionary force that conquered Sokoto itself in 1903. Now that the power of the British Empire seemed to be on the decline and had produced some dissidents from among its local associates, the traditional rulers (the real heirs of the defunct Caliphate) felt it was now their turn to recruit the rebels against the British in order to capture their erstwhile power. But since the impending battle would mainly be one of words, said my friend, people like us seemed eminently suitable for recruitment. This was Marafa’s theory of musical chairs, intended to explain the involvement of our traditional rulers in the pre-independence politics of Northern region, and of Sokoto in particular.
I rejected the theory by pointing out that the chiefs were deceiving themselves if they thought that power would be wrested from the British and handed over to them to mess up again. Besides, I maintained that they were making a big mistake if they thought that Shehu Shagari would be anybody’s puppet! Marafa then interrupted: “Hold it my friend! This people are intelligent and experienced. They are not so naïve as to imagine that, somehow, power would be handed over to them; they simply want to ensure that whoever takes over from the British does not, in the end throw them overboard! You have not so far been identified as one of those who, if given the chance, would undermine our traditional power structures and values”.
As to the issue of ruling the country, Marafa pointed out that the chiefs only wanted to ensure that whoever governs in the future would involve them and respect their positions. “As for your fear of their ‘messing up’, they would do nothing of the sort; they would rather concede that prerogative to the new rulers”! With regard to your fears of being used as someone else’s puppet, Marafa concluded: “I am afraid that under the new system of democracy which you cherish so much, you are already a puppet of your party and there is no guarantee that the party cannot be manipulated by a clever interests group”!
It was already getting dark and my friend drove me home, leaving me to ponder over the issue. Nearly 40 years on, one can now see clearly what Marafa tried to convey by his theory of musical chairs. Independence from the British came in 1960. But within five years we got ourselves into an awkward position and some dissident officers propelled the armed officers to power. The soldiers in turns messed things up so much that dissidents from among their ranks intervened repeatedly. And the game of musical chairs continued, with the ubiquitous traditional rulers being ‘involved’ and ‘respected’ by successive regimes!
In the case of those who refused to co-operate with the traditional rulers, the going was rather rough. I recall that when my friend Aminu Kano, of blessed memory, resigned his teaching job at Maru to join the NEPU in November 1950, there was hardly any alternative job for him except in politics. But traditional rulers used their influence with the masses to block Aminu’s attempt to win power. He had to rely on occasional gifts from the big brother of his party’s political ally, the NCNC. And after his ministerial career under General Gowon (1967-74), it was largely the generosity of his friends rather than his small farm holding that was to sustain him until he returned to his maker.
Unlike Aminu, I had no wish whatsoever to commit myself to the political wilderness, or to be part of an exciting but unfulfilling world of fringe politics. I had helped build our party from its infancy and to shape its ideology and policies. In the process, I realized that bargain and compromise were essential to forging democratic consensus. Hence, I hung on to the party in spite of occasional irritations and intrusions of vested interests. This paid off. The party nominated me from among other prospective candidates to contest the 1954 election into the Federal House of Representatives. – Shehu Shagari; Beckoned to Serve, April 2001
You heard it from the Horses own mouth; apart from the highlighted phrases, I changed nothing, neither a comma nor a full-stop. Today, the ranks of these behind the scenes manipulators of Nigeria political powerhouse have been swelled by the ranks of the retired northern Generals. These are the people that former President Olusegun Obasanjo battled to a standstill between 1999 and 2007 to the extent that they regretted making him president in 1999. He banished IPO’s and reduced their privileges. Therefore, when you witnessed the surprising unity of purpose between very unlikely friends; Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar united in a common cause in 2006 - to stop Obasanjo 3rd term, please understand the underlying current. Blinded by his own ambition and seeming invincibility, Obasanjos mistake was his regrettable failure to groom a worthy successor.
Today, under the UMYA do-nothing administration, they are back to their game, the ultimate power brokers calling the shots. In my article; The New EFCC: The Ribadu And El Rufai Factor, I implored Nigerians to look beyond the obvious and see the subterranean moves in the battle EFCC wages against Obasanjo cronies, but it appears that Nigerians are still looking at it merely as a Ribadu and El Rufai affair.
Gideon Orkar, remember him? He knows and understands the problem with Nigeria and sought to cure it by the roots, but he was naive. Please go back to his speech of April 1990. Political correctness would not allow me to say more.
[email protected]
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