Duty & Allegiance: Gowon’s memoirs, an exercise in self-justification! By Olu Fasan

In the Acknowledgements section of his recently published memoirs My Life of Duty & Allegiance, General Yakubu Gowon, a former military head of state, writes: “Let me begin by saying that I was not anxious to document my memoirs, but the calls for me to do so kept coming.” Well, I am one of those who kept urging General Gowon to write his memoirs. I did so in three interventions in this column, the last of which, in March last year, was daringly titled “A plea to General Gowon: Sir, write your memoir before you die!” (Vanguard, March 13, 2025). So, when Gowon published his memoirs in May this year, I did not hesitate to spend £29.98 (about N54,000) to buy a copy from Amazon. I read the 760-page book with great interest! First, congratulations are in order! General Gowon truly deserves commendation for writing such a historically significant book. His was the last voice everyone wanted to hear on the most epochal events in the annals of this country: the 1966 coups and civil war, during which he was head of state. Gowon addresses those thorny issues in the memoirs, a masterpiece.

The book starts with General Gowon’s removal from power in July 1975. 

Chapter 1, titled “Our Boys Are Up To Something”, deals with the coup that toppled him while he was attending a summit of the then Organisation of African Union, OAU, in Kampala, Uganda. This is instructive because the memoirs, divided into 36 chapters, are almost entirely Gowon’s ripostes to various allegations and criticisms against him. He leaves virtually no allegation or criticism unaddressed. And on each, he admits no wrong, no fault, no error! It was entirely an exercise in self-justification, without a single mea culpa! It is impossible to discuss Gowon’s comprehensive memoirs in one column, and I won’t do so here. In other columns, I would address the quality of governance and the public service ethos under General Gowon’s regime, as well as the 1966 coups and the civil war. In the present intervention, however, my focus is on what I regard as the memoirs’ general flaws, one being its somewhat weak evidential base. Reading the book, it struck me that, in some places, much of what General Gowon says is based on conjectures, insinuations and assertions. Of course, unlike an autobiography, which requires research, dates and facts, a memoir is usually based on memory and subjective interpretation. Nevertheless, the recounting of significant events in Nigeria’s past by one of its key dramatis personae should not be devoid of historical accuracy.

To be fair, General Gowon explains the paucity of evidence, saying: “I want to emphasise that I am telling my story without access to my crucial personal records, since many important documents taken from my desk after my removal in July 1975 were discarded by those who succeeded me.” Of course, in doing so, those people denude Nigeria’s historical narrative of richness. The documents that survived, Gowon says, “were destroyed by two serial fire incidents.” So, it’s understandable why such a historically important book lacks good citations or references. Yet that’s no justification for some of Gowon’s assertions. For instance, General Gowon asserts that the Ghanaian government under President Kwame Nkrumah gave “support and some measure of assistance” to the January 15, 1966 coup plotters. Why? Because Nkrumah did not like Sir Tafawa Balewa, the prime minister! Gowon gloats at Nkrumah’s overthrow on February 24, 1966, barely a month after the Nigerian coup, saying: “Poetic justice took its course”! Making damaging allegations against another country’s leader without strong evidence is not the stuff of good memoirs. In another example, when General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, then head of state, approved a plan for Gowon to attend a course in the UK, shortly before the July 1966 coup, Gowon speculates: “Was this another plan to keep the only surviving senior Northern officer away from the scene?” He adds: “Again, I do not know.” He had earlier suspected Ironsi of being complicit in the January 1966 coup. Given the role speculations and rumours played in fuelling the events of 1966, it’s strange that General Gowon himself harboured them!

Then, there’s the naivety and hypocrisy. Gowon proclaims his “faith in democracy and belief in the subordination of the military to civil authority.” As a result, he found incredulous the story that Dr Nwafor Orizu, as acting president, had voluntarily invited General Ironsi to run the country after the January 15, 1966 coup. Gowon argues: “In my view, it would have been more appropriate to have allowed the Parliament to choose one of its members to act as Prime Minister and then to organise elections in about six months so that whichever party won the highest votes would appoint the substantive Prime Minister and other principal officers of State.” Recall that there had just been a brutally violent coup in which prominent politicians and military officers were killed. The genie was out of the bottle. But Gowon wanted the rump of Parliament to continue to sit and organise elections as if nothing had happened.

Yet, after eight years as military head of state, the same Gowon reneged on his promise to return Nigeria to democratic rule in 1976. In Chapter 23, titled “1976 Unrealistic”, Gowon explains why he broke the promise. “By 1974, we found ourselves in a situation that made it near impossible to keep to our promise to return to civil rule,” he says. But what “situation” could be worse than the bloody coup of January 15, 1966? If, despite the brutal murders of the prime minister, the premier of Northern Nigeria and several other prominent politicians and military officers, an event that severely ruptured the country, Gowon wanted Parliament to continue to sit and to organise elections, what made the “situation” in 1974 far worse as to warrant the breach of a promise to return to civil rule, and thus the continuation of military rule?

Well, General Gowon cites three reasons in his memoirs. First, “the politicians got too far ahead of themselves that they wantonly disregarded extant rules relating to the ban on political activities.” In other words, they committed the cardinal sin of being “too much in a hurry to get on the hustings”. Second, their behaviour showed they had learned nothing from the events of 1966. Third, Gowon says his government wanted to put Nigeria’s economy “on a sound footing” before handing power to the politicians. His reasoning was that once the economy had become robust and been “put on autopilot”, with “technocrats firmly in control of the levers of powers”, then, “the political orientation” of future civilian governments would not matter “because the economy would have continued to coast along on its own momentum.” How does an economy coast along on its own momentum? He obviously has not read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson!

Undoubtedly, Chapter 23 is the book’s worst part. It is intellectually shallow. The problem is not that General Gowon held those views in 1974. Rather, it’s that despite later earning a PhD in Politics from the prestigious Warwick University, he holds them today, instead of saying, “In hindsight, I was wrong”! Over 50 years on, Gowon remains convinced of his rightness, saying: “In the end, while I might have suffered a personal loss (by being overthrown), Nigeria, till date, has been the worse for it, missing out on the benefits of the highly futuristic 1975–80 Development Plan programme.”

But tell me, how could someone with a PhD in Politics argue that a military regime must first put an economy in an irreversible “autopilot” before returning power to civilians? In any case, did Gowon think that if Chief Obafemi Awolowo, about whom he writes glowingly in his memoirs, had become president after him, Awolowo would not have surpassed his economic dreams or so-called 3rd National Development Plan? So, why did he think that his military regime had to remain in power to achieve an economic nirvana before returning Nigeria to civil rule? Truth be told, General Gowon’s memoirs are monumentally epochal. But his excessive self-justification and unwillingness to admit any fault diminish the otherwise outstanding literary work!