I had the rather poor luck of witnessing General Yakubu Gowon’s last days in office. I still remember what happened with pain. We were in Kampala, Uganda, for the OAU summit in late July, 1975. I and other journalists and technocrats flew with the general to Uganda a day before the summit formally kicked off. He was, as you would expect, head of the Nigerian delegation to the annual talk shop of African leaders.
By this time, Gowon was no longer just a Nigerian leader but also an African hero. He received a tumultuous welcome on his arrival at the Kampala airport. The Ugandan leader, the late Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, enlivened the colourful airport ceremony with comic dancing that drew cheers.
In nine years in power, Gowon had done titanic things for his country and the African continent. Everyone knew that. Nigeria was the big brother to all Africans on the continent and black people in the diaspora. The country’s prestige was built on Gowon’s integrity as an honest leader. He prosecuted, perhaps the most humane civil war in history. He was the face of Nigeria that everyone loved.
But unknown to the rest of us on the flight with him that Sunday morning, fate had decided his fate. This was to be his last jaw-jaw among his brother African leaders in their endless struggle to turn the Dark Continent into a continent of light and modern development.
The next day African leaders gathered in the purpose-built Africa Hall in Kampala. General Gowon, as usual, was resplendent in his ceremonial military uniform. On the second day of the summit and in the same Africa Hall, a mild drama played out. As the plenary session of the summit began, someone passed a piece of paper to General Siad Barre of Somalia, the outgoing chairman of the OAU. He read it and frowned and passed it on to him to General Gowon. Gowon took one look at it and left the hall.
His nine years in power had come to a sudden and embarrassing end. He had become a victim of military politics and power play back home. He had been reduced to the status of a former head of state and a private citizen. There is always a biting irony in the affairs of men – and women. Perhaps, those who plotted his ouster did not take into consideration the embarrassment of stripping him of power in a foreign country. Maybe, that was their aim.
Later in the early evening, we gathered in the general’s suite. There were no dry eyes. But Gowon was calm and dignified. He wrapped the fate that befell him in the philosophical appreciation that we are all puppets and fate is the tireless puppeteer. He quoted Shakespeare to remind us that all the world was a stage. He had played his part on the stage of his country, Africa and the world. Time to exit the stage and bring the curtain down on his act.
People tried to make small talk, to express sympathy for the former head of state but everyone choked up. There was a flood of emotions. After about an hour or so, we were requested to leave. We left.
The Nigerian high commissioner in Uganda asked us to assemble in his house the next day. We did. General Gowon turned up in a smart civilian dress. He was full of cheers, joking with the ambassador and other top civil servants and the military personnel who had accompanied him to Kampala. His personal physician could not control himself. He wept profusely. Gowon, smiling, took the doctor’s right arm and said to him: “Well today it is my turn to take your blood pressure.”
He addressed us briefly and wished us a safe trip back home. He then walked out of the residence as the evening sun faded. I did not see him again until 1986 when he returned from exile in Britain with BA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Warwick.
This week, Nigerian newspapers are awash in a flood of encomiums. The general turns 80. It is easy to loose the essence of a man and a leader like Gowon. He has been out of power for 39 years. A generation has come of age since then. The new generation may not know much about him, let alone what he stood for and what he did to take our country back from the forces bent on wiping it from the map of the world. In the 39 years since his overthrow, lesser men in khaki or agbada have strutted the stage but few have matched his sterling record of leadership and accommodation.
Gowon might not have run the best administration in the country but he certainly ran the most stable. He protected the civil service and made it, as it should be in the best practices of bureaucracy, the pillar of his administration. In his time, governance was bottom-up, not top-down. The smallest clerk in the ministry knew what his ministry did. Budgets were not the rituals on paper that they are today. They were properly treated as a means to some desirable ends for the public good.
Of course, when he was overthrown, he had mud thrown in his face. In the sentiments of the times, hitting him, even below the belt, seemed like a neo-patriotic indulgence. And yes, I did throw some mud at him too on the pages of my newspaper at the time, The Nigeria Standard.
What I find remarkable as he turns 80 is his capacity for weathering the storm and the bad press. He was said to be a weak leader but in his weakness was the strength and the iron cast determination to do his duty to his country. Some resented him for his common touch but it is an enviable quality honed on the anvil of Christian piety.
It is important to talk about his humility and his total lack of airs. He never allowed his high office to get into his head. He remained a charming leader with the rare common touch for a man in his position. This is what most people admire most about him. To such people these qualities define him. But Gowon is clearly more than the sum of his humility. Great men defy being pigeonholed. The essence of the man may escape all of us. Each one of us sees him through different personal lens.
Perhaps, one way to unravel the essence of the man is to wrestle with the what if question. General Gowon was only 32 years old and a middle-ranking lieutenant-colonel when fate thrust on his young shoulders the heavy burden of pulling the nation back from the brink of disintegration. What if he was an impulsive officer who arrogated to himself a know-it-all military wisdom not uncommon among dictators? What if he had prosecuted the civil war that he did everything to avoid differently? What if the end of the civil war produced victors and the vanquished? What if he treated the vanquished as the vanquished?
Say what you will, this man saved our country. If we now realise this and celebrate him, it is a tribute to what he stood for and the choices he made for the love our country.
I salute you, General Yakubu Gowon.
