Senator Umeh, the lying general and a fallen house

Chuks Iloegbunam

Chief Victor Umeh, the Senator representing Anambra Central at the National Assembly, has instituted a lodestar that must henceforward be emulated by all legislators from the South East geopolitical zone, whether serving in their states of origin or Abuja. Last week, Senator Umeh called General Yakubu Gowon, Head of State of Nigeria, from August 1966 to July 1975 to order.

He told Gowon that he owed Ndigbo an unreserved apology, the absence of which is at the root of the nation’s enduring instability.

What had Gowon done wrong? For the third time since October, when he turned 90, the man has, in three public statements on the Nigerian condition, demonstrated that appropriating the truth was beyond his competence. Had he heard of and listened to Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), Gowon would have remembered the German philosopher’s warning that, “By a lie a man throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity as a man.” Just by the one lie, warned Kant. Of Gowon, however, the dreadful reality is his preponderance of concocting a legion of barefaced lies, a chronic incapability to face the truth, even for one millisecond.

General Gowon granted an interview to the Daily Trust on October 19, 2024. He spoke again on June 7, 2025, when he was honoured for, believe it or not, “Integrity and Achievement” by a Christian body of the Abuja Anglican Diocese. Finally, on June 18, he granted Arise TV an 80-minute interview. It raises eyebrows that a man central to Nigeria’s contemporary history, who had remained taciturn since his ejection from power half a century ago, has suddenly become enamoured of mass media profusion. It is astonishing that in all three of the cited interventions, he reiterated his proclivity to distort the truth to the imperatives of his sectional political agenda.

Among the living, the questions Gowon is best suited to answer are only a handful. What happened during the coup d’état of January 1966? What happened during the countercoup d’état of July 1966? How did he, as Nigeria’s commander-in-chief, prosecute the Biafran war? What is his scorecard as the country’s leader for nine years? What is the state of the country he bequeathed to posterity? Unfortunately, his answers to these inerasable questions fly in the face of logic and veracity.

Arise TV’s Charles Aniagolu asked Gowon about the current state of Nigeria. The General replied that the entity was surviving! His interviewer’s polite reminder that there was a distinction between surviving and thriving sounded to him like a rifle shot aimed at the moon. There are, however, more sensible opinions on the subject. In 1995, Jerome Udoji, a career public servant, published his memoirs titled Under Three Masters. (Spectrum Books Limited, Ibadan). Chief Udoji (CFR) became a household name when, in 1972, the Gowon regime appointed him the Chairman of the Public Service Review Commission, which recommended, among other things, hikes in civil service salaries that became known as the Udoji Awards.

With his boundless experience, Chief Udoji commented on the state of Nigeria on page 154 of his book: “It is a matter of regret that I have to conclude this account of my forty-five-year career with a feeling of disappointment and concern. Disappointment because Nigeria in 1992 and 1993 is not the Nigeria of my dreams when, in 1948, I decided to join the administrative service of Nigeria, nor is it the Nigeria I knew when we got our independence in 1960. Then everyone both in Nigeria and outside hoped that she would be the show case of democracy and stability in Africa. That expectation was borne out of her vast reservoir of human and natural resources. What does one find today? A country without national consciousness, loyalty or identity; a country torn by the cleavages of tribe and ethnicity; a country that was ravaged by a Civil War barely five years after independence; a country which during its thirty-three years of independence, has seen five military coups, four attempted ones, six military leaders and only nine years without soldiers in power; a country with frequent religious riots, election malpractices and widespread corruption; above all, a country where the governed have lost confidence and hope in government.”

Thirty years after the publication of Udoji’s memoirs, the evils he lamented have become compounded by out-of-gear corruption, the cowardly capitulation of two of the three main arms of governance – the Judiciary and the Legislature, a steep, upward spiral in violent crimes, including wide-ranging incidents of kidnapping, piracy, insurgency, and terrorism, as well as the decapitation of sense from the essence of elections. Yet Gowon claimed that Nigeria was thriving.

Incongruously, Gowon professed to Arise TV an undying love for Ndigbo. But he pointed to nothing in support of his fatuous claim. His aggression against Biafra in the name of keeping Nigeria one had not caused the large, excruciating movements of the Igbo population, he stated. Ndigbo, who fled advancing Federal forces, should have stayed put because his soldiers were firing, not at humans, but palm trees.

What about the heavy artillery concentration that presaged every Nigerian attack? Were those aimed at iroko trees? Gowon blamed Ojukwu for hunger-induced deaths, not his junta, which proclaimed to the world that starvation was a legitimate instrument of warfare. After the war, said Gowon, his junta implemented the policy of Three Rs: Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, and Reconciliation. Yet, there isn’t a single post-Biafra primary or secondary school that was rebuilt under his watch. He promulgated the Indigenisation Decree with undue haste, knowing that the people he so loved lacked the funds to buy shares.

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Of course, his greatest affection for the Igbo is in his fictionalised versions of concrete historical occurrences. He claimed to have quelled the January 1966 coup. He most definitely hadn’t because he had no command at the time. He appropriated the credit that belonged to General Aguiyi-Ironsi and Lieutenant Colonel Hilary Njoku, who put down the action.

He persists with his fairy tale long after the Cameroonian Colonel Hans Anagho had come forward to state that, as a Captain in the Nigerian Army, he had led the troops that chased out the rebellious forces. If Gowon had credited Ironsi and Njoku for their feat, it would have mitigated the charge that January 1966 was an Igbo coup. Gowon spread the fiction that January 1966 had cost no Igbo life.

He allowed Professor Jonah Isawa Elaigwu, his biographer, to lie that Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Chinyelu Unegbe, the Quartermaster of the Nigerian Army and a victim of the January 1966 coup, was from the Mid West. Yet he was the best man at Chinyelu’s wedding and knew that the fallen officer had hailed from Ozubulu in today’s Anambra State.

Still, Gowon’s unsurpassed affection for Ndigbo is in the political upheavals of 1966 and how he twisted them to suit his imagination. A near countrywide pogrom against Ndigbo lasted for months. Contrary to Gowon’s claims that he acted decisively to check the massacres, General Ibrahim Babangida said this: “Unfortunately, Gowon’s commitments to the Igbos that their lives were safe in northern Nigeria were unfulfilled. Almost simultaneously with the deliberations of the Leaders of Thought taking place in Lagos, perhaps the most horrific killings of Igbos occurred in different parts of northern Nigeria on September 29, 1966. The killings were frightening. A deluge of refugees swamped eastern Nigeria from practically all parts of Nigeria.” See page 63 of Babangida’s autobiography, A Journey In Service (Bookcraft, Ibadan, 2025).

Gowon reneged on the agreements he freely entered into with Ojukwu in Ghana, which was termed the Aburi Accord. Among other things, they had agreed on the creation of Area Commands for the Armed Forces, the decentralisation of the Police Force, and a new revenue formula. For failing to announce the Aburi Accord, he claimed to have been carpeted by a fever. When he eventually did, what came out was a document unrelated to what he had appended his signature to. The authentic text of the Aburi Accord is in existence. Its recorded version is available. Yet, Gowon continues with the fallacy that Ojukwu had released other than what they had agreed.

What about the coup that toppled Ironsi and took the General’s life? Like Nero fiddling while a conflagration reduced Rome to ashes, Gowon claimed to have slept through that night of bloody orgy! Victoria, the wife of General Ironsi, got wind of the coup the moment it commenced. Rose, the wife of Colonel Njoku, learnt about the coup as soon as it started. None of them could reach Gowon on the phone.

Not even Ironsi and Colonel Francis Fajuyi, who were trapped inside the Ibadan Government House, and Lieutenant Colonel Gabriel Okonweze, who was at the Ikeja Cantonment. But Gowon, who claimed to have been in a stupor, was able to hold a telephone conversation with Major T. Y. Danjuma, who received from him the command to do Ironsi in. No amount of lies will obliterate the fact that Gowon was the spearhead of the July 1966 countercoup, which is by far the bloodiest in African history.

Contextualised, the Gowon fabrications were grounds for Senator Umeh’s aggravation. His very words are apposite: “(Gowon) should be apologising to Ndigbo for the role he played in that coup instead of coming here to be insulting our sensibilities that the war was not against the Igbo. Who were the victims of the war? The countercoup was a cleansing of the Igbo officers in the Nigerian Army. He couldn’t say the people killed in the countercoup that were his own people. So, it was a reprisal coup against the Igbo, and the Igbo were not only killed as military officers, their businesses were destroyed across Nigeria.”

Nigeria lies comatose today because it refuses to confront its realities. Only the truth will reverse its ultimate collapse. That is why everyone with a conscience, not just South East legislators, must readily challenge falsehoods and self-serving narratives that harm rather than help the country.

As for General Gowon, it may well be that his media effluvia are a prelude to his much-anticipated but never-seen autobiography.

He must bear one thing in mind. The verdict on his time and actions will be passed by the inexorable and inevitable letters of history. Not by his deodorised and fanciful utterances. History invariably consigns political apostasy to the cesspit of infamy.