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{1} It was on this fateful day in 1966, precisely 52 years ago that Major General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi made his maiden broadcast ushering in military rule in Nigeria.
[2] After the failure of the January 15 coup, Nigeria grappled with leadership for two days as the senate president Nwafor Orizu refused to swear-in Zana Bukar Dipcharima, the majority leader of the House of Representatives who had been democratically elected by the ruling NPC to replace Sir Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa as prime minister.
[3] The NCNC wanted Kingsley Mbadiwe to become prime minister but in his memoirs Beckoned to Serve, Alhaji Shehu Shagari pointed out that as the major party in the alliance the NPC found that totally unacceptable.
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| Samuel Ademulegun with his family |
[4] When the NCNC/NPC caucus met for what was supposed to be the swearing-in, Orizu and Ironsi went off into a corner to talk and came back to tell everyone that the deal was off for now. According to Shagari, they all left frustrated that day, biterly disappointed
[5] The next day, they met and Ironsi told the politicians to hand over to him. According to eyewitness accounts from Shagari and Richard Akinjide, when they refused to, Ironsi them told them: "I am not asking you. We either do this like gentlemen or we use force."
[6] With no option, the politicians signed an agreement handing over power to the military. Dipcharima signed it on behalf of the government and then Orizu went on TV to announce it. This is how military rule began in Nigeria .
CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD
On 14th January 1966, soldiers of mostly Igbo extraction led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, an Igbo from Okpanam near Asaba, present day Delta state, eradicated the uppermost echelon of politicians from the Northern and Western provinces. This and other factors effectively led to the fall of the Republican Government.
Though Ironsi, an Igbo, was purportedly slated for assassination, he effectively took control of Lagos, the Federal Capital Territory. With the President, Nnamdi Azikiwe, also an Igbo refusing to intervene and ensure the continuity of civilian rule, Ironsi effectively at gun point forced the remaining members of Balewa’s Government to resign. He then made the Senate President, Nwafor Orizu, another Igbo who was serving as acting president in Azikiwe’s absence, to officially surrender power to him, staging a coup of his own and ending the First Nigerian Republic.
Ironsi inherited a Nigeria deeply fractured by its ethnic and religious cleavages. The fact that none of the high-profile victims of the 1966 coup were of Igbo extraction, and also that the main beneficiaries of the coup were Igbo, led the Northern part of the country to believe that it was an Igbo conspiracy.
Though Ironsi tried to dispel this notion by courting the aggrieved ethnic groups through political appointments and patronage, his failure to punish the coup plotters and the promulgation of the now infamous “Decree No. 34”- which abrogated Nigeria’s federal structure in exchange for a unitary one-crystallized this conspiracy theory.
During his short regime, Aguiyi-Ironsi promulgated a raft of decrees. Among them were the Constitution Suspension and Amendment Decree No.1, which suspended most articles of the Constitution (though he left intact those sections of the constitution that dealt with fundamental human rights, freedom of expression and conscience were left intact). The Circulation of Newspaper Decree No.2 which removed the restrictions on press freedom put in place by the preceding civilian administration.
According to Ndayo Uko, the Decree no.2 was to serve “as a kind gesture to the press” to safeguard himself when he went on later to promulgate the Defamatory and Offensive Decree No.44 of 1966 which made it an “offense to display or pass on pictorial representation, sing songs, or play instruments the words of which are likely to provoke any section of the country.”
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