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In the exclusive lagoon-front district of Lagos, the commander of the presidential guard led a handful of troops to the homes of Prime Minister Balewa and his Finance Minister. Sir Abubakar, summoned from prayers, told his servant that "this means there is trouble," but submitted with dignity. He appeared fully dressed, arms above his head, wrists together, ready for handcuffs. Not so Okotie-Eboh, known throughout Nigeria as the king of "dash"—the word used throughout West Africa for the ever-present bribery. Producing a thick wad of bills, he tried to buy off his captors, then, dressed in pajamas, ran outside, screaming "Don't kill me!" until two soldiers knocked him down and jumped on him. His body was found three days later in a ditch 30 miles from Lagos. Not far away lay Sir Abubakar, also dead.
All in all, it was the bloodiest military coup any black African nation has yet suffered. At least 40 civilians and 24 army officers were killed, and throughout the week bullet-stitched bodies kept turning up in such unlikely places as the 13th tee of a Lagos golf course. It was all the more shocking because Nigeria in its five years of independence has been held up as a showcase of stable African democracy. Unfortunately, the showcase was badly cracked long before the coup that shattered it.
Shoes & Paychecks. Like most African nations that inherited their boundaries from their former colonialist masters, Nigeria is not really one country at all. It has 250 tribes speaking 250 languages. Its vast Northern Region, in which live more than half its 55 million people, is predominantly Moslem; its three southern regions are Christian or pagan. Because of its size, the north has been able to dominate national politics from the start, a fact that the more advanced south actively resents.
The result in recent months has been organized anarchy. Corruption of all kinds was rampant on all levels of government. Congressmen saw their mandates as springboards to instant wealth. Ministers wheeled and dealed: Okotie Eboh almost openly accepted dash from large corporations in return for favored treatment, and used his position as Finance Minister to drive through prohibitive tariffs to protect his own private shoe factory. In the Western Region, all but one of the government party's 54 regional assemblymen drew fat extra paychecks for doubling as Ministers or parliamentary officials—a feat that President Nnamdi Azikiwe (who sat out the revolt in England, recuperating from a recent illness) once described in disgust as "a world record."
Sir Abubakar himself was widely respected as a man who sought to bring the feuding regions together. He was also one of the continent's leading moderate statesmen, opposed equally to colonialism and to Kwame Nkrumah's brash brand of African nationalism. But many of the men in his government, especially the northerners, ran roughshod. The government was widely suspected of tampering with the 1963 census figures to ensure northern control in the federal parliament. In 1962, it jailed Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the anti-north Premier of the Western Region, and installed its own man, Chief Akintola, in his place. So blatantly did it rig the 1964 national elections that the leading Western Region party boycotted them and the Eastern Region threatened to secede.