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. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, neither of the two groups could have imagined the effect of these earliest of coups on the nation’s economic development, ethnic alignment and cultural cohesion. A friend recently sent me a report which stated that any country with a high Ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF), will never achieve its full potentials no matter highly endowed the country is.
Broken down in plain English, it means a country that is not homogenous in language, religion, culture and ethos will never amount to much irrespective of its latent potentials. The task before our founding fathers was to see how to work with those differences to achieve a great nation. The potentials have always been there.
But because of our high ELF, we are fully engaged in pulling ourselves in different directions be…
Summary from source