Gowon, Peter Obi And His Supporters, By Rotimi Fasan

When former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, marked his 90th birthday on October 19, he was celebrated far and wide by both friends and foes. He was a war-time dictator and could not be expected not to have those who love him and others who still have an axe to grind with him for his war-time activities. Gowon’s 90th birthday is happening 54 years after the war he led on the Federal side ended with the defeat of Biafra, the secessionist enclave that went to war with the rest of the country. He was a starry-eyed 31-year-old Lieutenant Colonel when both the January 15 coup and counter-coup of July 29, 1966 that culminated in the Civil War occurred. At the end of the war, Gowon declared it a draw. There was neither a winner nor a loser, he said.

“No victor, no vanquished” was the slogan promoted by the Federal Military Government. It was an attempt at being generous in victory. But that slogan was no more than a mere sound bite to the casualties of the war, especially those on the losing side that lost everything that could possibly be lost, from properties, limbs, millions of lives and ended up with life-altering traumas. That there was neither a victor nor a vanquished in the war couldn’t have had anything more than a rhetorical effect on the war-scarred.

By the time he was ousted from power nine years after fortune thrust him into the saddle of authority as the head of the junta that staged the counter-coup of ’66, Gowon was only 40. It was 1975, just a decade after he was commissioned into the Nigerian Army, but he had become a four-star general. Like him, the other key players in those uncertain years of the country’s existence, were quite young and very much wet behind the ears.

This was evident in the rather hot-headed and somewhat carefree way they responded to the challenges of the times they found themselves shaping. They used power the same way they acquired it, with neither the experience and preparation that comes with age. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the Biafran nation, was a Lieutenant Colonel like Gowon and by 1966 had had less than a decade’s experience in the military. He became a four-star general in the Biafran military in a matter of months.

Both Gowon and Ojukwu, though well-acquainted as colleagues in the Army, were the worst of enemies after the war started. It was the same story for many other Nigerians on both sides of the warring country suddenly split down the middle along ethnic cleavages. Both leaders went their separate ways after they lost power- Ojukwu to Ivory Coast and Gowon, five years later, to England. The rest of the country soldiered on in their absence, all quietly nursing their injuries.

While Ojukwu was, for the Nigerian authorities, the arch rebel on the run for many years, Gowon himself became a persona non grata after he was implicated in the abortive coup that took the life of his successor, Murtala Muhammed, in 1976. Both he and Ojukwu received presidential pardon and were fully re-integrated into the Nigerian society in the early 1980s. They met and reconciled on returning to Nigeria and there was no reported breach in their relationship by the time Ojukwu passed in 2011.

After his return from exile,  and but for a brief period he tried to dabble in politics, Gowon has remained a very laid-back, benign leader, perhaps even likeable to many. No more as influential as he had been as a military head of state, certainly far less prominent in the country’s political life than the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari, former subordinates that came to power many years after him, Gowon seems more invested in making amends for past mistakes as he promotes togetherness among Nigerians from different parts of the country.

Of those who starred in the trying years of military rule from 1966 through the civil war years; the Buhari and Ibrahim Babangida regimes through the Sani Abacha debacle, up to the Abdulsami Abubakar’s interregnum and beyond- indeed of all those former rulers and key state actors that could be held responsible for the morass Nigeria has fallen into today as the old generation of Nigerian leaders fades away, Gowon seems the most conciliatory, remorseful and disposed to make amends for past misdeeds. He needs not go around in ashes and sackcloth to register this fact before Nigerians who are aware of his activities can cut him a slack.

Five and a half decades should have been enough for one man to make penance. Which probably explains why many, from different parts of the country, rolled out the drums to celebrate him on his 90th birthday. Many also did, no doubt, because of the politics of it. But when it came to Peter Obi, his Obedient base hit the roof as they demanded explanation for his action. Ever ready to please the political rabble his politics has created, Obi was quick to come up with a winding explanation that would itself constitute grounds for future explaining. This made nonsense of his earlier birthday wishes for General Gowon and portrayed him even more as the divisive, sectional leader his so-called Obidients want him to be.

Always full of grievances, unnecessarily aggressive, prone to starting a fire they can’t put out, most of Obi’s Obidients were probably not born when the civil war occurred. While those who experienced the war have learned to move on without forgetting, it is these inheritors of single stories based probably on second-, third- and fourth-hand narratives that are aimlessly opening old wounds. For them, others must take the entire blame for the war. The Igbo are totally innocent. Wole Soyinka who has become a victim of many Obidients’ revisionist tales of the war wrote, perhaps, the most searing account of the Gowon years, based on his first-hand experience of the war. But he has since reconciled with Gowon as did Ojukwu. But Obi’s mostly Igbo followers pretending to be a national movement are falling over themselves in their finger-pointing game.

Obi remains hostage to their ways and for this needs no political enemies. Was it the Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, Ijaw or Ngas Obidients that didn’t like Obi’s birthday message to Gowon? Peter Obi himself is demonstrating more and more how much of the divisive Obedient philosophy he has imbibed. His latest homogenisation of the Yoruba electorate as Emilokan, including those who supported his 2023 presidential bid, during Nedu’s Honest Bunch Podcast,  his disingenuous critique of the brand of pentecostalism that turned violently political in order to support him, says a lot about his opportunistic brand of politics.