February 13, 2016
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WHAT can you remember of the events of February 13, 1976?
It’s a very emotional point from where you have started now because many of my friends were involved. First, I took [Bukar Sukar] Dimka to a meeting in Madrid, Spain. And it was from there he planned the coup. I was lucky, because he lost my camera. My mother always wanted me to bring pictures of places I went, that is why I have 450 pictures in my book of the civil war, titled, ‘The Tragedy of Victory.’ But Dimka was playing with my camera and taking pictures in Madrid and forgot it in the taxi that we were in. I told him not to talk to me again because he boasted to me that he was going to buy me another one. He went all over the market and shops in Madrid but he could not get the 1.2 canon lens which was just the new camera in the market. When we got to Nigeria, for two weeks I did not get his report. He was my secretary to the meeting in Madrid. So I sent Sasaenia Oresanya, his deputy secretary who later became the governor of Oyo State, I said go and tell Dimka, if by Friday he failed to give me the report of the meeting, he should consider himself under house arrest. That Friday morning, Dimka was announcing a military coup, dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk and he was making his lousy mistake. We had to stop that coup. It was the second coup after the civil war, because Murtala had organised his own coup against Gowon and the Dimka one was the one against Murtala and we were just coming back from the civil war. We were ready to face any bullet. So, [General Alani] Akinrinade and I put in all the efforts to stop the coup.
There is a British intelligence report on this subject on how it went. Why it is emotional for me is because many of my friends were killed. Many of the boys who organised the coup were military students and I was their instructor at the military school. So when I got to Bonny camp, I ordered that they should put down their weapons, they obeyed me. The report of British Intelligence also proved that they obeyed my instructions and they did not obey Danjuma’s instructions, when Danjuma wanted to take over and they refused. But when I got there, I was able to take over. It is just like your principal in your secondary school, even if you were head of state, the day you see him, you will still say sir. They downed their weapons — all of them were shot because they took part in a coup. So people like Ibrahim Taiwo in Kwara state who was governor then was among those that were killed by the coup planners. But fortunately for us, in Kwara State, Taiwo left his mark on the sand of time. Within that short period, the golf course we have in Ilorin today was put there by Taiwo. And all these we had discussed when he became governor. He did not serve with me directly. Because he was of the Supply and Transport of the Army. He was in the logistics and I was in pure Infantry, supported by logistics. But I knew Taiwo very well and I mean very well. Very close. One thing about Taiwo as an officer was that he was more than an average officer. People who plan coups are usually not too intelligent. Many of them were just with exuberance, who wanted changes and things like that. You won’t credit them as an A time officer. Not many of them around the world. A coup of that February 13, 1976, was an unfortunate one and it was because we didn’t learn from our past mistakes. Anybody, any community, any state, any nation that fails to learn from past mistakes will repeat it. And when you repeat it, that’s when you are an idiot.
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