40 Years Down, the Memory Lingers On
The journey took just two hundred days. But in the estimation of many, it was like two hundred years. Save Ernest Adegunle Shonekan, Murtala Ramat Mohammed, spent the shortest period as head of state. But as short as it was, memories were made. Epochs were recorded. Marks were made and when he fell to bullets of coupists on Friday February 13, 1976, Mohammed had conquered adversity and he had succeeded in writing his name in gold. An appreciative nation made memory of his name. When the N20 note was introduced a couple of years after his death, it bore its portrait. The nation’s premier airport in Lagos was also named after him.
Mohammed came when the nation was drifting. Money was lavishly available to spend. Indiscipline became a wayward nation’s second name. As the then head of state, Yakubu Gowon, declared, money was not the nation’s headache but the way to dispense it. And as a result of this, the nation became not just a dumping ground, the nation’s port could not cope with a flotilla of ships waiting to berth and discharge their cargo; often containing goods an otherwise serious nation could have produced be herself.
Murtala, as many of his compatriots still affectionately call him till today, and some of his colleagues like Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Theo Danjuma decided to effect a change. While attending the now rested Organisation of African Unity, OAU, summit in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Gowon was shown the way out. Then started a race to clean the Augean stable. It was an era of very powerful civil servants. They were rich. Well connected and they wielded a lot of power over affairs of state. Murtala dared them and sacked over 10,000 of them. Some of those sacked were very senior officials. They were not only sacked, like some former military governors, their properties were confiscated. They were left naked. Many have often argued that it was this purge in the civil service that killed morale in the system and started a race for personal survival amongst civil servants.
The late Kano-born soldier reordered the nation’s foreign policy. He came on board when liberation struggles were at their peak in the southern part of the African continent. In South Africa, Apartheid, a system of racial segregation, ensured that black South Africans, who were in the majority, could not exercise the civic rights. They could not vote and neither could they be voted for. Nigeria gave financial, logistic as well as educational support to the Africa National Congress, ANC. The leaders were granted exile by Nigeria while their families were also taken care of by the country. Same thing was applicable to Angola where Nigeria pitched its tent with the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola, MPLA, led by the country’s first president, Agostinho Neto, who was succeeded by the current president, Eduardo dos Santos. Nigerian under Murtala also spearheaded the Non-Aligned Movement to demonstrate that the nation was not ready to take side during the cold war between the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, and the United States of America. Nigeria was also supportive of the independence move- ment in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In Mozambique, Nigerian had earlier pitched its tent with FRELIMO which was led by the late Samora Machel. Machel was to become the president of independent Mozambique from June 25,1975. Machel later died in a place crash on Sunday October 19, 1986.
Murtala became so popular that his security became secondary to him. He was always moving in low profile without any convoy. On the day he was to be killed, he had prepared for office and called on his aide-de-camp, ADC, Lt. Colonel Akintunde Akinsenwa, to join him alongside his driver and an orderly who was the only person armed amongst the four men. His car was flagged down by the traffic warden and his killers, apparently expecting this, opened fire on the car and killed all the four occupants.
Immediately he was gunned down, leader of the coup, Lt. Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, went on air and announced that Murtala had been overthrown. He had started playing the copy of martial music he allegedly collected from one Abdulkarim Zakari, a staff of the then Nigerian Broadcasting Service, NBC. Zakari was to be the only civilian executed after the failure of the coup. Dimka’s words:
“Good morning fellow Nigerians, This is Lt. Col. B. Dimka of the Nigerian Army calling. I bring you good tidings. Murtala Muhammed’s deficiency has been detected. His government is now overthrown by the young revolutionaries. Any attempt to foil these plans from any quarters will be met with death. Everyone should be calm. Please stay by your radio for further announcements. All borders, air and sea ports are closed until further notice. Curfew is imposed from6am to 6pm. Thank you. We are all together.”
In Ilorin, Colonel Ibrahim Taiwo, the military governor of Kwara State, was killed fuelling the speculations that Dimka coup was actually a more or less counter coup by Middle Belt extraction who were aggrieved with the way Gowon was ousted and the prominent role played by Taiwo. Perhaps, this was one of the reasons the coup failed because it did not take long for Dimka to know that he was alone in his misadventure. And the roll-call of leaders of the coup also lent credence to the school of thought that it was a sectional putsch.
Officers like Major General Ilya Bisalla, Joseph Gomwalk, Dimka himself, Colonel A.D.S. Way, Colonel Isa Bukar, Lt. Colonel T.K. Adamu, Lt. Colonel A.B. Umoru, Lt. Colonel Ayuba Tense, Major C.D. Dabang, Major Ola Ogunmekan, Major J.W. Kasai, Major J.K. Afolabi, Major M.M. Mshelia, Major I.B. Rabo, Major K.K. Gagara, Captain M.R. Gotip, Captain M. Parvwang, Captain J.F. Idi, Captain A.A. Aliyu, Captain S. Wakian
Captain Austin Dawurang, Lt. A.R. Aliyu, Lt. William Seril, Lt. Mohammed, Lt. E.L.K. Shelleng, Lt. O. Zagmi, Lt. S. Wayah, Lt. S. Kwale, Lt. Peter Cigari, Lt. Lawrence Garba and seven non-commissioned officers were all rounded up and executed. Abdulakarim Zakari, the staff of the NBC was the only civilian executed. Ironically, Bisalla was the minister of defence under Murtala.
Mallam Ahmed Jaji, politician and current executive secretary of Ojodu Local Council Development Authority, LCDA, said Nigerians will continue to remember Murtala because of his approach to governance and his pan-African approach to the nation’s foreign policy. He, however, admitted the late Mohammed did make some mistakes from which the nation was yet to recover from, especially in the area of input of civil servants to policy formulation. But to him, Nigerians will always remember him.
“Murtala gave insight into governance and he laid template for good governance in Nigeria. He started so many new things. He pursued the liberation of our brothers in South Africa and Angola. He was able to re-energised the civil service. But in retrospect, he disorganised our national bureaucracy because people who were trained with our funds and at great cost to the country were yanked off the system. The likes of Phillip Asiodu and other super permanent secretaries were taken off the system and hence, no national development plan again because these were people who were doing the job behind the scene to give the country a sense of administrative direction. What Murtala did 40 years ago is what Buhari is doing now: instilling discipline in our system to ensuring that when you are given assignment to carry out, you carry it out diligently.”
Jaji said many people, however, might be right because the purge he carried out led many civil servants to think the sense of security they had as civil servants had been lost.
“People felt there was no job security which was what the civil service was all about then. Today, civil servants are the richest Nigerians today because they do not know tomorrow. He has many pluses but he equally his own negatives.”