the Biafra Story (1969) Read Online Free PDF Page B

were heavily salted with Tivs.
    For the same reason that they could not be used in Tiv-land, they were not much use in the West either. Their sympathies lay not with the Akintola r@gime, for was not Akint6la the ally and vassal of the Sardauna of Sokoto, persecutor of their own homeland? They tended to sympathize more with the rioters, being themselves in much the same position vis-6-vis the Sokoto/ Akintola power group.
    By the second week of January 1966 it had become clear that something had got to give. Subsequent painting by the present Nigerian military regime of what followed as an allIbo affair fails to take into account the inevitability of either a d9marche from the army or complete anarchy.
    On the night of 14 January, in the North, the West and the Federal capital of Lagos, a group of young officers struck. Within a few hours Sokoto, Akintola and Balewa were dead, and with them the First Republic.
    At the time of Nigeria's independence, Britain was pleased to claim much of the credit for the seeming early success of the experiment; Britain cannot now avoid much of the responsibility for the failure, for Nigeria was essentially a British and not a Nigerian experiment. For years Whitehall's political thinking on Nigeria had been based on a resolute refusal to face the realities, an obstinate conviction that with enough and pulling and shoving the facts can be made to fit the theory, and a determination to brush under the carpet all those manifestations which tend to discredit the dream. It is an attitude that continues to this day.
    Chapter 2. The Coup that Failed.
    Two coups were probably brewing during the first fortnight of 1966. The evidence for the one that did not occur is largely circumstantial; but subsequent assertions that the coup of 15 January baulked another coup scheduled for 17 January are certainly very plausible.
    The other coup which was planned would have begun with a brief reign of terror in the Niger Delta of the Eastern Region, headed by a student at Nsukka University, Isaac Boro, who was supplied with funds for the purpose. This would have offered Prime Minister Balewa the chance of declaring a state of emergency in the East. Simultaneously, according to the charges later made in the West, units officered by Northerners were to carry out a 'ruthless blitz' against opposition (that is, UPGA) elements in that region, The two-pronged action would have broken the UPGA opposition party, again reinforced Akintola in the premiership of a region which by now, hated him, and left the Sardauna of Sokoto's NNA party in supreme control of Nigeria.
    A number of moves were made which seem to give credence to this. On 13 January Sir Ahmadu Bello, who had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca, returned to his Northern capital Kaduna. The following day there was a secret meeting between him, Akintola who flew north for the day, and the Commanding Officer of the First Brigade, a. pro-Akintola Western officer, Brigadier Ademolegun. Previously the Federal Defence Minister, a NPC Northerner, had ordered the Army Commander Major-General Ironsi to take his accumulated leave; the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Louis Edet, another Easterner, Was also ordered on leave; the Deputy Inspector General, Mr. M. Roberts, a Westerner, was sent into premature retirement to be replaced by the Hausa Alhaji Kam Salem, who would thus have been in control of the Federal Police by 17 January. The President, Dr. Azikiwe, was in England on a health cure. If that was the plot, it failed because it was preceded by the other coup, plotted in equal secrecy by a small group of junior officers, led mainly though certainly not exclusively by men of Eastern origin.
    In Kaduna the group leader was the left-leaning and highly idealistic Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, An Ibo from the Midwest Region who had lived all his life in the North and spoke Hausa better than Ibo. On the evening of the 14th this brilliant but erratic chief instructor at the Nigerian