THE NIGHT NIGERIA DIED

  Written by Alphonsus Eyinnaya

There was a cacophony of voices on that warm Summer evening in Ibadan. A flurry of movement by men in Military Khaki. The subjects of their activity were three men who had been stripped of every piece of clothing. Each had their hands tied behind their backs with telephone cables as well as their ankles.

Two of those men, Lt Andrew Nwankwo and Col Adekunle Fajuiyi were stripped completely naked while the third man, the huge and intimidatingly bulky Lt Gen JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi was spared such indignity. He was allowed to have just his trousers on. The trio had been badly beaten with horse-whips and the butts of guns that they could hardly stand.

Who was at the head of this execution squad? Lt Col TY Danjuma.

A mutiny, fueled by the to-this-day-disputed but erroneous belief that the 15 January 1966 coup was carried out by the Igbos, had been simmering over the last 3-4 months.

Danjuma had surrounded the Government House, Ibadan with a detachment of troops. The HOS was quartered there. He climbed upstairs and by subterfuge asked the ADC to the HOS to lead him to where his boss was so that he could pledge allegiance to him as there was a coup going on.

Once Danjuma saw the HOS, he was quick to dispossess the big man of what many believed was the source of his power; a crocodile-shaped staff.

Having disarmed him, he proceeded to question him about his role in the January putsch, one which the now subdued Ironsi denied involvement in. Unconvinced, Danjuma arrested his own boss and ordered him to be securely handcuffed. The three men were then thoroughly beaten before been bundled into vehicles to be executed.

10km outside Ibadan, the convoy of cars stopped and the 3 men were pushed out and leathered again with horse-whips by junior officers doped to the eye-balls with Indian Hemp.

As they were marched into the bush to be executed, Col Adekunle Fajuiyi, the kind and loyal host who insisted on dying with his boss, Aguiyi-Ironsi rather than give him up, stumbled and fell. He was exhausted from the torture that had been meted out to him.

Danjuma ordered his execution and a burst of gunfire ended his life. Among those who were in that execution squad that night was a certain Jeremiah Useni.

At that time, Lt Bello, ADC to the now late Fajuiyi signaled Lt Andrew Nwankwo, ADC to Ironsi to run. When that happened, he raised an alarm that one of their prisoners had escaped. He pointed to a direction opposite to where Nwankwo had run to.

Angered that their search for Nwankwo was fruitless, they returned to their only surviving captive; the Head of State and Commander in Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, Lt General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi.

With eyes reddened with hours of marijuana-smoking and hearts darkened by ethnocentric hate, they turned the nozzles of their Machine guns on to their boss and emptied a staccato of hot lead into him.

As his head hit the ground that night of July 29, 1966, there along Iwo Road, miles from Ibadan, Nigeria died.