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Murtala Ramat Muhammed meant different things to different people. For many Nigerians, he paid the ultimate price for a nation he fought for, and is considered a national hero. To others, the late General represented one of the greatest tragedies of Nigeira, a measure of the extent to which the nation has been unlucky with leaders much of its history.
He was assassinated on Friday, February 13, 1976, the eve of a Valentine’s Day, when lovers were perfecting plans on how to surprise their mates. Muhammed’s sudden death left many Nigerians groping for explanations. The nation would not recover – not even 40 years after the tragedy.
Before that incident, Nigerians very rarely shed tears for their leaders, but all that changed in Muhammed’s episode as he evoked so much emotion and pity. His loyal and devoted ADC, Lt. Akintunde Akinsehinwa, died with him.
He defended his boss to the very last and remained the first in Nigeria’s history to die while protecting a Head of State. He hailed from Ondo town in Ondo State. His orderly, Staff Sergeant Otuwe was lucky. Not so for driver, Sergeant Adamu Minchika, who was also killed. Otuwe continued in the army until the late 1980s and rose to the rank of Warrant Officer.
His last known unit in the 1980s was said to be the Second Mechanised Division Garrison headquarters. Also killed during the period was the then Governor of Kwara State, Col. Ibrahim Taiwo, and a number of other officers.
Taiwo was abducted, shot dead and his body found much later in a shallow grave outside Ilorin. Many held the opinion that Muhammed had certain attributes, which distinguished him from many young men of his age both within and outside the Armed Forces. He was seen to be tough, dogged, and fearless.
He was said to be frank to a fault and like all those who are cut out for greatness, Muhammed was, according to informed opinions, constant and unchangeable in his resolves. Whenever there was contradiction in his dictates, he readily acknowledged his faults with dignity and without any show of fawning regret.
He became the first Nigerian ruler to dispense with the colonial “madness” of long convoy of escort vehicles with armed escorts who often caused traffic nuisance on the roads. He left his defence in the ‘army’ of people he ruled and continued to move around without armed escorts.
It was during one of those unguarded movements that he was ambushed and killed. It happened at Obalende, Ikoyi in Lagos. It was the fourth coup in the country. While some said he gave himself away to the conspirators by opening his flanks in an unnecessary show of patriotism, others are of the opinion that his style of governance was a practical demonstration of how leaders should be close to the people.
Colonel Bukar Sukar Dimka of the Nigerian Army Physical Training Corps was the leader of the plotters. His major grouse was the way he was left in the cold when some of his colleagues were promoted. He found a soul mate in the then Minister of Defence, Major-General Illiya D. Bisalla. Bisalla was Muhammed’s course mate and the then Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Theophilus Danjuma, was his (Bisalla’s) junior officer when he was a General Officer Commanding (G.O.C.).
In the promotion which was previously done by the Army high command after General Yakubu Gowon was overthrown, Muhammed was promoted a full General, Danjuma, a Lieutenant-General and Bisalla, a Major-General. Bisalla was livid.
Even if Bisalla was going to accept the leadership of Muhammed, he was not ready to answer ‘sir’ to Danjuma, who was hitherto, his junior in rank. So, the machinery was set in motion and Dimka was chosen as the arrowhead. In fact, his house was allegedly used as the meeting point by the coup plotters.
Their first target was well known; it was Muhammed. They knew they were going to succeed in killing the Kano-born General, given his low-profile status. There was pandemonium after the assassination as drivers left their vehicles to escape from the scene. Vehicles were all over with no drivers.
In a few minutes, the whole area was deserted. Dimka’s plan was to go to the NBC in his SUV to make the broadcast but there was no way for his vehicle to move. Since the radio station was only 300 yards away, he simply ran the distance with his two bodyguards.
However, Muhammed became Head of State and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces on July 29, 1975. As soon as he assumed office, all the 12 military governors under Gowon were sacked and retired, and a probe ordered into their conduct in office. 10 of the 12 governors were found to have illegally enriched themselves while in government, prompting Muhammed to declare that they had “betrayed the trust and confidence reposed in them by the nation, and betrayed the ethics of their profession.”
Muhammed did not stop there. He excluded the new military governors from the Supreme Military Council (SMC) as a way of curbing their excessive powers. This action, in itself, achieved greater separation of powers, which the people applauded.
After describing his government as a “corrective regime” that would tackle the corruption that was increasingly infecting government institutions, Muhammed began the reforms that made him perhaps,the most popular, people-oriented leader ever in the history of Nigeria.
To restore public confidence in the federal government, he unleashed an onslaught against public sector corruption and inefficiency on a scale, perhaps, never seen before in Africa. This led to a wave of dismissals and retirement of over 10,000 public officials who were summarily dismissed or retired on grounds of either inefficiency or corruption. They were dismissed without benefits. The purge affected the civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces, diplomatic service, public corporations, and universities.
Some officials were brought to trial on charges of gross misconduct in office. Muhammed also began the demobilisation of 10,000 troops from the swollen ranks of the armed forces. Twelve of the 25 ministerial posts on the new Federal Executive Council went to civilians, but the cabinet was secondary to the SMC.
He initiated a comprehensive review of the Third National Development Plan, singling out inflation as the greatest danger to the economy. He was determined to reduce the money supply that had been swollen by government expenditures on public works. He also announced that his government would encourage the rapid expansion of the private sector into areas dominated by public corporations.
His regime reappraised foreign policy, stressing a ‘Nigeria First’ orientation in line with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) price guidelines that were to the disadvantage of other African countries.” By that Nigeria became “neutral” rather than “nonaligned” in international affairs.
The shift in orientation became apparent with respect to Angola. The country had worked with the OAU to bring about a negotiated reconciliation of the warring factions in the former Portuguese colony. But late in 1975, Muhammed announced Nigeria’s support for the Soviet- backed popular Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA). He cited South Africa’s armed intervention on the side of the rival National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) as reason for that action.
The realignment strained relations with the United States, which argued for the withdrawal of Cuban troops and Soviet advisers from Angola. In response to national debate on the military’s continued hold on governance, Muhammed announced plans for the military to disengage from politics. Some officers were also genuinely concerned that military rule had a corrosive effect on professionalism.
He, therefore, laid out the framework for the return of Nigeria to democratic rule on October 1, 1979. Although, several “new” political parties emerged as clones of the parties of the 1960s in the end, he also stressed that the military did not intend to stay in office “a day longer than necessary.”
He created more states, bringing the number from 12 to 19, and announced government’s plan to develop a new federal capital city. The plan was to move from the crowded and crime-ridden Lagos to a location within the Abuja territory, seen as central to other components of the nation.
He held office for only 200 days. But opinions on the short period he ruled hold that he did more for Nigeria than his predecessors, in those 200 famous days of dynamism. In that short period, he and his colleagues were seen to have been decisive and courageous.
He had literally electrified the mood of the nation, and sacked the empire-building governors and their commissioners, forced them to refund their ill-gotten wealth, and virtually cleared the Apapa Wharf, which was choked by uncleared goods. The gross inefficiency of the ports authorities was given as the reason.
But while some believe a few of his de-cisions were wrong and ill-considered, many saw them as sound, patriotic and reasonable. He was believed to have given the country a government that kept promises; one with a disciplined team that tried to listen to public opinion and exposed and punished abuse of office.
Those who believe that Muhammed was completely wrong, even rash in some of the decisions he took, often point to the allegation that he was the mastermind of the coup-d’état that overthrew General Johnson Thomas Umunakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi’s regime and brought General Yakubu Gowon to power in July 1966.
It was a bloody affair. He was also said to have liberated a large part of Midwest State and Onitsha in the then East Central State during the Nigeria/ Biafra Civil War and caused the massacre of defenseless citizens. Muhammed was the General Officer Commanding the 2nd Infantry Division and led federal troops to victory in the area under his command.
He was, however, criticised for being “unnecessarily brutal” in that campaign. Some account said too many lives were needlessly lost. But, in all wars, criticisms of this nature are common. However, Asaba became the legendary centre where Muhammed was said to have set a record of war crimes.
In a rain of blood, tens of thousands of innocent youths, some of them just six-year-old were allegedly lined up on the streets of Asaba and executed in cold blood on his orders. The Asaba massacre was the first of its kind in Africa and remains one of the bloodiest to date in the history of the continent.
As a further testimony to the bloodlust and depravity allegedly demonstrated by Muhammed and his forces, a few kilometres away in Onitsha, another barbaric massacre was said to have been unleashed in the Apostolic Church. In that episode, over 300 civilians, devout Christians, including women and children, who had stayed back and continued in their prayers after the fall of Onitsha, were brutally allegedly murdered in cold blood.
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