This piece recounts the events of the 1966 Nigerian coup d'etat through the personal lens of Chief Remilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode's son. It details the brutality inflicted upon his father and other prominent figures, including the abduction, torture, and murder of those targeted by the mutineers. The author provides a firsthand account of the chaos and terror that engulfed the nation that morning, highlighting the traumatic impact of the coup on both individual lives and the course of Nigerian history.
In the early hours of the morning of January 15th 1966, a coup d’etat took place in Nigeria which resulted in the murder of a number of leading political figures and senior army officers.
In order to reflect the callousness of the mutineers, permit me to share under what circumstances some of their victims were murdered and abducted. Chief S. L. Akintola was gunned down as he stepped out of his house in the presence of his family and Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh was beaten, brutalised, abducted from his home, maimed and murdered and his body was dumped in a bush.
The mutineers came to our home as well which at that time was the official residence of the Deputy Premier of the Old Western Region and which remains there till today. After storming our house and almost killing my brother, sister and me, they beat, brutalised and abducted my father Chief Remi Fani-Kayode.
The official residence of the deputy premier had a very long drive so it took the vehicles a while to reach us. We saw four sets of headlights and heard the engines of four lorries drive up the driveway. I think this annoyed them and made them brutalise him even more. They tied him up, threw him in the back of the lorry and then stormed the house. When they got into the house they ransacked every nook and cranny, shooting into the ceiling and wardrobes. They were very brutal and frightful and we were terrified.
Then out of the blue something extraordinary happened. All of a sudden one of the soldiers came up to me, put his hand on my head and said: “Don’t worry, we won’t kill your father, stop crying.” He said this to me three times. After he said it the third time I looked in his eyes and I stopped crying.
Four years ago when he was still alive I made contact with and spoke to Captain Nwobosi, the mutineer who led the team to our house and that led the Ibadan operation that night about these events. She was screaming down the phone asking where her husband had been taken and by this time she was quite hysterical. Chief Akintola tried to calm her down assuring her that all would be well. When they got to Akintola’s house he already knew that they were coming and he was prepared for them. Instead of coming out to meet them, he had stationed some of his policemen inside the house and they started shooting. A gun battle ensued and consequently, the mutineers were delayed by at least one hour.
The soldiers were apparently enraged by the fact that two of their men had been wounded and that Akintola resisted and delayed them. After they killed him, they moved on to Lagos with my father. This was clearly the Finger of God and once again divine providence as under normal circumstances few could have escaped or survived such an encounter without being killed either by direct fire or a stray bullet. For this, I give God the glory.
From there we were taken to the home of Justice Adenekan Ademola, another high court judge at the time, who was a very close friend of my father and who later became a judge of the Court of Appeal. Whoever he was, the man spoke with confidence and authority and this constrains me to believe that he was a commissioned officer or a man in authority. These mutineers who carried out this mutiny and coup were not alone: they got some backing from elements in the political class who identified with them.
Others believe that those young men did the right thing and claim that those killings were necessary and heroic. This is a sentiment which I not only despise but which I also find unacceptable and appalling. There is nothing heroic about rebellion and the cold-blooded murder of innocent and defenceless men and women.
For some curious reason after the coup was successfully crushed, General Aguiyi-Ironsi just locked these young mutineers up and he refused to prosecute them. This bred suspicion from the ranks of the northern officers given the fact that Aguiyi-Ironsi himself was an Igbo. The revenge coup was planned and led by Major Murtala Ramat Mohammed and it was supported and executed by other young northern officers like Major TY Danjuma , Major Martins Adamu and many others.
What happened on the night of January 15, 1966 was indefensible, unjustifiable, unacceptable, unnecessary, unprovoked and utterly and completely barbaric. I repeat with greater detail, this included the Northern ‘Revenge’ coup of July 29, 1966 in which 300 Igbo officers and an Igbo Head of State were killed, the pogroms in the north in which over 30,000 Igbo civilians were killed and a civil war in which a reported 3 million Igbos and hundreds of thousands of Nigerians were cut short.Coups may have happened in other countries in Africa but that did not mean that it had to happen here.
NIGERIA COUP D'etat HISTORY 1966 BRUTALITY TERROR POLITICAL ASSASSINATION
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