The late Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria's first Prime Minister ...controversy trail his death THE sentence was seemingly as innocuous as a message sent some 44 years ago from Lagos to Kaduna, yet changed the course of Nigeria’s history for ever.
The seemingly harmless piece of information two weeks ago, that Nigeria’s first number one citizen actually died of an asthma while in the hands of coup plotters, rather than from gun shots in the course of the country’s first coup, may be unearthing a pandoras box.
The Nation can authoritatively now say the last has not been heard about what actually killed Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, between the night of January 14, 1966 and January 22, 1966 when his body was discovered along with those of others known to have been shot to death on in the wee hours of January 15, 1966.
The message sent 44 years ago, was so harmless that it went through the secured communications radio of a Nigerian Army formation in Apapa. It was also somewhat terse, from an Army Major in Lagos, to Major Kaduna Nzeogwu in Kaduna.
The message was about ‘days of a holiday to be spent in Lagos and Kaduna’. But it was actually to confirm, that a long-planned coup against a "corrupt" civilian regime headed by Sir Balewa, should be executed from the night of January 14 through January 15, 1966.
The night of January 14 came as expected and the morning of January 15, gave birth to Nigeria’s first coup. That was in 1966.
Two weeks ago in Ikoyi, Lagos, almost at the point of departure after a four hour video interview with The Nation Databank, Nigeria’s youngest Minister ever and one of just a handful of surviving members of Nigeria’s first Federal cabinet, Dr. Mathew Taiwo Mbu, said almost casually that he was reliably informed that soldiers did not shoot Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, Sir. Tafawa Balewa to death.
Mbu was merely giving an example of things he knows or had reliably been told and which he may want to die with to avoid possible misinterpretation. He was only reacting to a plea from the interviewer that he should please write and leave a comprehensive memoir of their memorable era.
But it was a bomb of a sort, although casually delivered. Yes, the information could not have been meant to destroy, the information had the potential of rewriting a part of Nigerian history books. It automatically meant Nigerian soldiers in all their years of coup-making, never killed a civilian head of the the Federal government before taking over the governance of the country.
Dr. Mbu, a British trained lawyer, would not normally give any information of doubtful authenticity. He was called to the same English bar as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and on the same day too.
He was Nigeria’s first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, immediately after independence from that country. He has held at least five ministerial appointments over Nigeria’s first 30 years as a nation.
He is also not known to be flippant. He must have a measure of trust in whatever information he was giving out. He had to be taken seriously.
But how come virtually nobody until now, and almost all accounts of Nigeria’s first coup, never hinted at the possibility of soldiers never actually shooting the first Prime Minister to death.
Instinctively one knew there would be more than one reaction to the new information on the January 15, 1966 coup and so it has been.
Barely 24 hour after the report in The Nation last Sunday, the reactions began. First to react was former Aviation Minister, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode. The younger generation Federal Minister was livid with rage when he reacted. No it could not have been he said. No one should rewrite history, Fani Kayode screamed.
Then came other reactions. From the Balewa family and friends of the late Prime Minister. A former Commissioner of Police who claimed he discovered the bodies was also reported to have spoken with Daily Trust in Abuja.
Of course, a better counterpoise it seemed for the ‘Mbu story’ when the retired Police Commissioner, said the Prime Minister must have been shot to death, going by what he saw one Friday afternoon in the forest off the Abeokuta road. He was an Inspector of Police then.
He said he discovered the decomposing bodies of the late Prime Minister and his Finance Minister Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh and two officers of the Nigerian Army in the forest just after Otta on the road to Abeokuta. It was late in the afternoon on Friday, January 21, 1966.
The Nation then began an investigation, starting from a natural port of first call- the first and only journalist who saw the Prime Minister’s body, Chief Segun Osoba, then a roving reporter with Nigeria’s number one newspaper then, Daily Times.
Chief Segun Osoba spoke with The Nation over the weekend and totally new questions, never asked in the last 44 years will now be asked and answered in the best possible way, in the report of a special investigation of a definetely cold trail coming out next week.
Claims of an autopsy on the body of the late Prime Minister could still not be substantiated as at the weekend, just as the exact number of bodies dumped at Otta, early in the morning of January 15, 1966.
Indications are that, seemingly contrary to claims by Chief Fani Kayode that autopsies were carried out on the body of the late Prime Minister, which confirmed the Prime Minister was shot, The Nation has confirmed that Sir Abubakar’s body was evacuated from the Otta forests straight to the Ikeja Airport and was on its way to Bauchi within eight hours of it been discovered.
In fact, a special military flight took off from the Ikeja Airport, with the body of the late Prime Minister at 30 minutes after midnight on Saturday, January 22, 1966. Only two civilians were on the flight, a British pilot and an Indian flight engineer. It was a very tight military operation at the Lagos Airport, with even the airport route, tightly secured against any civilian presence.
The Nation confirmed that the Prime Minister was buried in Bauchi on Saturday, January 22, 1966 at a ceremony that had large civilian attendance. At noon on that day, the Federal Military government, officially announced the death of the Prime Minister, giving no hint as to time or cause of death. Before then, the government had said the Prime Minister was missing, having been abducted in the early hours of January 15, 1966, from his official residence in Onikan, Lagos.
But using published facts and unpublished scrolls from close bystanders and some of the main participants of the January 15, 1966 coup, The Nation has been able to piece together some facts and some very likely possibilities of an incident that changed the history of Nigeria. No-holds-barred interviews with some of the few surviving witnesses of the events will shed some light on one of Nigeria’s darkest dawns. Full Report next Sunday.
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