Yakubu Gowon was an officer but not a gentleman. He has been caught in many lies to label him pathologic. He lied about biology and dared his lover Edith Ike in court! DNA had the last laugh. The prodigal parent lives the shame (if any) of rejecting his lookalike first son for five decades.

He signed an accord, stalled, and then denied. He claimed that Ojukwu used “confederation”; Ojukwu did not. Lately, Gowon told AriseTV Aniagolu that he had malaria post-Aburi.

Wow!

Instead of renegotiating, the boy-scout dictator (apology to W. Soyinka) waged a war of colossal criminalities and unalived over three-million Biafran civilians, making him a global top-ten génocidaire with Leopold II, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.

Gowon serves a menu of mendacities to tarnish Ojukwu, who was never mentioned to have known about the Jan. ’66 coup, let alone being “complicit.”

Ojukwu was to be deleted. Luckily, he was staying at the guesthouse of his friend, Kano Emir Ado Bayero, when the putschists arrived. [Read “A Soldier’s Spouse” by Mrs. Regina Maduabum.]

Ojukwu crippled the coup in the North by daring Major Kaduna Nzeogwu to come get the cash for his troops! Looking for accomplices? Check Major Hassan Katsina, who later became governor, and some northern officers.

Pathetic pettiness prevents Gowon from accepting that Ojukwu, his military superior, was right about hierarchy. He found “altruistic” rumors to make himself a benevolent dictator. Revisionism has no shame.

Gowon has high-fived himself. After IBB’s successful memoir, he writes and milks the petrodollars of Danjuma, the officer he sent with William Walbe to kidnap and kill his boss, General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, and host, Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, on July 29, 1966. Thirty pieces of silver paid back in billio₦s!

To a man who has not said a word –just one word– about the continued killing of his Plateau people, one simple question: One Nigeria, how far?

Give me General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu any day, warts and all: He was a hero of his people. He stood strong. Gowon could not kill Ojukwu during the war; he must not now dent his blessed memory. Ojukwu lives larger than Gowon!

I hope the book gathers enough dust to cover the fibs from the dawn of days.

Ojukwu did not declare Biafra “over the reprisal killing of Igbos (sic) in the north….” Reprisal: Whom did the Igbo ever kill? Biafra was a result of Gowon’s unilateral abrogation of Aburi Accord. The scheming general who never held a gun in battle declared war on a people too traumatized to cause any harm. Yet, with the unholy Anglo-Arab-Soviet alliance and Niger-Chad mercenaries, he could not defeat Biafra. No surrender: No victor….

Ojukwu did not write his war memoir because Gowon had not written: “He started it; let him write first!” Sensing that Gowon would not write while he lived, Ojukwu promised to leave materials to counter eventual lies. Gowon has written about Ojukwu… living in his head; now he can rest. History will judge.

M. O. Ene

@OkaaMoe

5.20.26