If Nigeria must disintegrate, then in the name of God, let the operation be short and painless. It is better that we disintegrate in peace and not in pieces.
—President Nnamdi Azikiwe, December 1964
Azikiwe was overthrown as President in last January's military coup, but Nigerians last week had ample cause to recall his warning. Another coup had just rocked the nation, and as the details began to emerge, they confirmed the fears that Nigeria, traditionally torn by regional rivalries (see map), had gone through another violent tribal uprising. As a nation, in fact, Nigeria seemed perilously near disintegration.
The latest uprising was the work of Northern Moslems, acting to avenge the Southern-led January coup that had thrown them out of power and killed many of their leaders. It was also designed to forestall another coup, which dissatisfied Southern Ibos had reportedly been plotting against the regime they had put in power. The Southern gripe was simple: Major General Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi, an Ibo himself, had proved too soft on the Northerners.
Panic in Lagos. The coup was a bloody affair. In the Western regional capital of Ibadan, where Ironsi had gone to plead for national unity before a meeting of tribal chiefs and emirs, Northern officers kidnaped him from the governor's palace and ordered him at gunpoint into a military Land Rover; his body was reportedly discovered last week outside a nearby village. At the army barracks at Ikeja, near the Lagos international airport, Northerners shot down every Ibo officer they could find, pursued others through Lagos itself, causing widespread panic in the capital; after one shooting incident, dozens of motorists abandoned their cars to flee on foot, and many foreign residents deserted their homes and took shelter in the swank Federal Palace Hotel.
In Enugu, capital of the Ibos' Eastern Region, Military Governor Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu barricaded himself inside police headquarters, declared his opposition to the new regime and called in Ibo political leaders to line up their support. "After these cruel and bloody atrocities," he charged, "can the people of Nigeria ever live together as members of the same nation?"
With victory in their grasp, the Northerners' first idea was to secede and form their own independent state. After a flurry of long-distance telephone conferences, however, and heavy diplomatic pressure from the West, they were persuaded that the backward, semiarid North would be hard put to go it alone without the natural resources of the South and the skills of the Southerners. Agreeing to one more try at nationhood, they named a 31-year-old lieutenant colonel, Yakubu Gowon, as Nigeria's new supreme commander.
Despite his youth, "Jack" Gowon was not a bad choice. A spartan, British-trained officer who neither smokes nor drinks (his hobby is bird watching), Gowon, although a Northerner, is not a member of the region's dominant Hausa and Fulani tribes. Nor is he a Moslem; his father, a member of the smaller Birom tribe, is a Methodist missionary. But his task is not easy.