The military exercise was codenamed
Exercise Damisa, a word drawn from the Hausa word for tiger, the
largest animal in the cat family. The leader of the operation in the
north was Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu whose middle name means
crocodile, the aquatic foe of many tigers.
Remarkably, when Exercise Damisa fully unfolded into its real
intentions in the wee hours of January 15, 1966, it left in its trail
the flow of blood that can be imagined when a hungry crocodile grasps
the tail of the tiger.
Hungry crocodile
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| Major C.K Nzeogwu…”One of the three commanders nominated for the execution of the plan” |
Exercise Damisa was the cover in the North for the first military
coup staged in Nigeria. While the coup in the north with epicentre in
Kaduna was largely successful despite the aversions of one Lt. Col.
Chukwuemeka Ojukwu who held sway as commanding officer of the brigade in
Kano, the operation failed in the rest of the country.
The instigators were ideologically minded army officers who were
fuelled by a revolutionary zeal to upturn what they saw as the social
and political malaise in the land.
Foreshadowing the January 15, 1966 coup were crises in some sections
of the country, particularly in the Southwest and the Middle-Belt
sections of the country.
Though essentially localised, the political
alliances between the active players in those crisis-ridden sections of
the country and the men at the federal level inevitably translated the
crisis into a national crisis. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, one of the
nation’s founding fathers who had seemingly lost out in the political
battle with his erstwhile deputy in the Action Group, Chief Samuel
Akintola was as at January 15, 1966, under incarceration in Calabar
Prison serving out a sentence for alleged treasonable felony. Some of
his lieutenants were either in other prisons under the same yoke or had
simply relocated from the country.
Dictating the pace and pattern of political policy was Sir Ahmadu
Bello, the Premier of the Northern Region who held sway in Kaduna as
leader of the Northern Peoples Congress, NPC, the party that with its
allies formed the largest bloc in the federal parliament.
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Major Ifeajuna
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Sir Bello, was also the Sardauna of Sokoto and a great-great-grandson
of the conquering Fulani warrior, Sheikh Othman Dan Fodio who founded
the Fulani hegemony over most of Northern Nigeria.
Though the economy was throttling at a relatively modest pace,
economic prospects at the time of the coup were already becoming clouded
by the political shenanigans of the period. In the North, opposition
elements were being denied economic access and licences to
state-controlled economic facilities.
In the West, political disciples of Awolowo who were not in prison
were forced to keep a low profile. Indeed, in the whole country, the
malady of corruption was assuming what was at that time described as
monstrous proportions with government business being facilitated by the
ten percent factor.
It was under this cloud that the idealistic army officers that led
the January 15 uprising surfaced. The officers were by several accounts
influenced by the university graduates in the army who at that time were
less than ten. The most idealistic of them was the fiery Major Emmanuel
Ifeajuna, a Commonwealth Games medallist and one of the first graduates
to have enrolled into the army.
By several accounts, the plan for the operation commenced sometime in
1965 with Majors Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna, Wale Ademoyega, himself a graduate
of history among the ring leaders.
Flamboyant industrialist
Major Gbulie
The operation turned bloody in Kaduna and Lagos with the heads of the
regional governments in the North and Western regions, Bello and Chief
SLA Akintola eliminated. Also eliminated were the prime minister, Sir
Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa and the minister of finance, the flamboyant
industrialist turned politician, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh.
That the coup was propelled by revolutionary instincts was
underscored by the fact that Nzeogwu was followed by many northern
soldiers in the killing of the North’s premier, Sir Bello. However, the
casualties of the coup with the notable exception of one, Colonel Arthur
Unegbe were all non Igbo. That was against the fact that the majority
of the coup planners were also Igbo.
In days, the political permutations increasingly changed bringing sectional hues to the coup.
Fifty years on, the flacks from that coup attempt and the fractures generated from it continue to haunt the nation.
By Emmanuel Aziken,
Political Editor
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