By Olakunle Abimbola
The cake for Ripples, aside the thrill at 90 for General Yakubu Gowon, quintessential officer and gentleman if ever there was one, is former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s remarks at the special lecture marking the epoch.
Gen. Gowon turned 90 on October 19. Obasanjo spoke on October 18. Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, President, African Development Bank (AfDB), was the guest lecturer.
“This is a national celebration, and you’re worthy to be nationally celebrated while you’re still alive …” Obasanjo gushed, “I will just thank God on your behalf.”
Wow! But was it not this same Gowon, on whom Obasanjo poured concentrated scorn, in his Not My Will — Obasanjo’s post-Head of State memoirs? Wow!
The subject — highly emotive, to be sure — was the Bukar Sukar Dimka coup. That coup failed. But it took the life of Gen. Murtala Ramat Muhammed.
In that venom-in-print, Obasanjo’s petulance knew no bounds. “Mr. Gowon”, he thundered down at his former commander-in-chief; and growled he would, pronto, be nabbed anytime he set foot on Nigeria — for alleged coup involvement not yet proven!
Why, the Obasanjo junta would, in the passion of the moment, pass a draconian coup decree which — had the British government fallen for the regime’s rabid extradition howling — would posthaste have despatched the General to premature death!
But irony of ironies: Gen. Sani Abacha, symbol of the starkest and most degenerate era of military rule in Nigeria, would dust up that same decree to can Obasanjo — and his No. 2: Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua — in own harsh gulag, for a phantom coup!
Obasanjo made it out of that harsh odyssey to become a two-term elected president. Not so lucky, Yar’Adua: he died in prison in controversial circumstances. So long for the savagery of military rule, to which we must all say: never again!
But thank God — now on Obasanjo’s behalf! — for keeping him alive to recant, live, the anti-Gowon fulminations he wrote in Not My Will, which he released In 1990!
By the way, Gowon and Obasanjo epitomize the two strands of military rule in Nigeria — the one mild, the other harsh. That unfortunate epoch had own bright spots. But on the balance, it was clearly ruinous.
Nevertheless, a civilizing flash into that dark era would remain Gen. Gowon, though he made own mistakes too.
Post-Gowon monstrosity peaked with Abacha. So, did the political military’s exit after decades of huffing-and-puffing in the wrong direction — brash and haughty messiahs.
Which is why the First Lady, Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu’s toast, at the Gowon thanksgiving at 90, was apt.
“Your life of simplicity, humility, grace, dignity and patriotism to our nation gives us hope that Nigeria is all we have,” she said, “and we have to do everything in our power to make it work.”
Simplicity. Humility. Grace. Dignity. These four words weave the Gowon essence — that noble penchant to have power, yet not lose your head over it. These words fused in him sublime lessons in untrammelled, yet humane patriotism.
If that was not glaring on the hill of his nine power years, it was clear in the dale of his power fall, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when an aide whispered to his ear his overthrow.
“Don’t you worry,” the smiling ex-Head of State told a world press conference — did anyone ever see merrier stoicism in anyone? — “just take care of Nigeria for me. I’m a professional soldier and I’m ready to serve my country in any future capacity.”
The one they fondly called “Jack” has lived that self-imposed covenant — which makes his 90th birthday a clear national treasure.
Ripples never met General Gowon, one-on-one. But among hundreds of other Lagos Island public primary school kids, arrayed on both sides of the old Lagos — now the Inner — Marina, we all waved, screaming “Gowon! Gowon!”, as the newly wed General drove out of Christ’s Cathedral with his beautiful bride, Victoria.
It was a slow-moving, show-stopping, jaw-dropping motorcade, back in 1969. Magical!
The kids’ zest was not altogether happenstance. Their teachers had put them up to it, to honour the young, dashing and lovable Head of State.
But that Gowon love oozed — at least from my own personal experience — from the felt love of a caring state. The Gowon government in Lagos, then the federal capital, with the Mobolaji Johnson Lagos State government, had put in place a highly subsidized mid-day meal regime, complete with fruits and chilled milk. It was the kids’ — mostly from poor homes — earliest feel of Nigeria’s emerging oil wealth.
Many of us had such exciting meals first at school — and even kept a part of it for our waiting siblings at home! Such early state care builds patriotism in young hearts.
But the Gowon-era felt benevolence wasn’t limited to feeding Lagos primary school kids alone. To access university education, all you needed was an acute mind, a few pair of jean trousers and shirts, and you were game!
The high fees of yore were gone! Again, but for the Gowon state benevolence, Ripples, who passed out of a Lafiaji-Lagos public primary school, wouldn’t have accessed two universities — Universities of Ibadan and Lagos — and joined the commentariat in a national newspaper. There simply would have been no family cash to attain all that!
Now, Gen. Gowon didn’t get it all right — no. His government was the first to expel striking academics from their campus cloisters — the mother of all humiliations!
He also went after the likes Prof. Wole Soyinka (for his Civil War “Third Force”), the great Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, and sundry campaigners for human rights against creeping military despotism.
Some eternally raze his rather infamous quip that cash wasn’t Nigeria’s problems but how to spend it. Bitter Biafra survivors sneer at his twin post-Civil War rally: “No Victor, No Vanquished” and the 3-Rs: “Reconciliation-Reconstruction Rehabilitation”, calling both a ruse.
But had Biafra won, it’s a moot point if Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu would have been capable of Gowon’s rare magnanimity and grace.
Others say Gowon was so “soft” the so-called “super-permanent secretaries” became too powerful. But the Murtala-Obasanjo regime, with their “immediate effect” purges, smashed a once secure and vibrant civil service into today’s loose and venal “evil servants” always on illicit hustle! We know now which is better!
The successive “corrective” regimes, of Gowon-era corruption, emerged as worse state captors — except Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, whose integrity fetched him two terms as elected president. Gowon, by the way, didn’t own a house after his overthrow. Compare and contrast that to the illicit wealth his successors swam in!
That’s the Gowon mystique — keeping your head while others lost theirs. Again, his only peer, in that lonely chamber, is Gen. Buhari.
Which is why, Gowon’s noble deeds earn him quiet awe. He needn’t — like Obasanjo — drone for the rest of his life, rustling up others’ faults to bury own glaring ones, just to corral suspect respect.
