This is the sixtieth year – to the week – of the July 1966 coup that has been infamously regarded as a counter-coup. A coup thatunfortunately marked the degeneration of a Nigeria that our fore fathers strove for and tried to build.A coup that subsequently led to a thirty- month Civil War which still leaves a lingering bitter taste in many mouths today. It is called a counter-coup because there had been a coup six months earlier which turned out to be lopsided in its execution if not design.
It has been argued severally, that this was not the plan but the grim reality turned out to be that this original coup wiped out a generation of Northern leaders and many South-western leaders in a gruesome and humiliating manner while sparing the counterpart leaders in the South-east. It also, perhaps inadvertently, upset the country’s delicate balance of power as people of South-eastern descent, subsequently occupied commanding heights across various sectors of the country.
That this coup was largely led by young, indignant – some say ‘nationalistic’- Igbo Officers did not help matters. It was thereafter infamously labelled an Igbo Officers’ coup. The counter-coup could have been called a reprisal coup. Or a Northern Officers’ coup as it was powered by officers of Northern descent who had waited six months for a decisive action from their Commander-In- Chief – who happened to be Igbo – towards holding the executors of the January coup accountable for their actions. Instead, they were met with what seemed like vacillation and foot-dragging.
