WE can still seeing reverberations of all those issues that were raised by that coup, even the consequences of the coup in the character of Nigerian government and policies.

You know that we are just dealing with the (Nnamdi) Kanu case, the IPOB. Its a throw back to some of the issues that were raised at that time and you also know that right now this issue is still being hotly debated with regard to the strategy of dealing with it and the throw back of this division relates to the national aspirations of Nigerians and how the government have been able to meet them.

Largely we have moved away from civil war, we have also moved away from the crisis of June 12, but we are still unable to beat our chest and say that we have achieved a major integration or that we have a reliable and working system in place. These are the issues that provoked the first coup. I remember in that famous speech by (Kaduna) Nzeogwu. He talked about the issue of corruption; the 10% and the profiteers that made the country look big for nothing before the international community. All of those issues are still on. You can see the kind of embarrassment we are having going from place to place saying that we want to return looted funds. That, in itself tends to create a kind of deja vu because in 1966, those young men, those young military officers were complaining about this kind of embarrassment, now its even worse and the whole problem of poor service delivery is also tied to the behavior. So we still have a lot of issues that each time we remember that coup, which you know we should address that we have not addressed very well.

Ineffectiveness of coups
The only thing we are lucky about is that we have been able to go over what I will call the pathology that came out of the wrong reaction to the problem, which is the persistence of military dictatorship with its negative effect on human rights, etc. At least we have been able to sustain democracy for the past 16 years and we hope that we would continue to consolidate on that.

In other words, issues that were used to justify the coup of 1966 and subsequent coups are still with us but we have the benefit of hindsight to know that the method of using coup to topple government would not necessarily lead to the solutions to those the problems. So we need more than military interventions in the polity to address these issues. We need to engage the society, engage the civil society and engage the government and interact more consistently and more reasonably to be able to reflect diverse perspectives and achieve innovative ideas in addressing some of these problems.

Rule of law
I believe that if we are able to enforce laws, if we are able to punish wrongdoing and we are able to reward go behavior this country is likely to move forward. That has been the major problem that we have had with the previous government. They were permissive of corruption, permissive of incompetence, promoting even nepotism and disunity, adopting divide and rule strategy. If we get out of these and promote competence, promote effective representation, promote equity and justice and then of course try as much as you can to manage the economy in such a way that the development would be inclusive and reduce inequality, then of course Nigeria will be able to find its place in the comity of nations as a major country on the African continent.

Without the rule of law in which everybody is subject to the law then we cannot talk about stability and justice. The way they have gone on for so long, those who are privilege, those who are in high places normally get away with crime and I am saying that that kind of attitude is not good for development in the sense that you see the kind of problem we have with corruption now. If all those who have been involved in corruption had been punished it would have been a deterrent to those who are in position that can be abused for corruption purposes.

Until we have a leadership that is committed to not tolerating all kinds of law-breaking behavior by those in authority then we would not be able to get a state of rule of law, and we would not be able to get justice and we would not be able to achieve the kind of stability that we want. Also it affects the efficiency and effectiveness of government. Until we are able to do this we are not likely to overcome the challenges visited by the coup plotters in 1966.

‘The coup was a tragic mistake’
Ambassador Joe Keshi, Former Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in an interview with Sunny Ogefere bared his mind on the Jan 15 coup. Excerpts:

WITH the benefit of hindsight and if we were to do a balanced historical analysis, of what has happened since then till today, my position is that the coup in the first instance was a tragic mistake because not only did it truncate a regime that was just getting itself straight from the ground in terms of a new African country. They were learning the democratic process, they were learning how to resolve problems, the civil service was strong, the Nigerian educational system was emerging as one of the best, and everything was just going gradually as a nation should develop.

But the coup did not only stop all that but, it led us to a war that we should not have fought because the new military rulers lacked the experience to draw back when they got to the edge of the cliff. Secondly, at the end of it all, it brought up a new generation of leaders that up till today apart from maybe the Gowon era … the Gowon era maintained virtually everything they inherited from the civilian regime. But subsequently after that, the whole years of military regime, its sad that our historians and intellectuals have not done a review of the harm military regime did to this country in so many ways. There is nothing that the military did not destroy, the military even destroyed itself, it destroyed education. Today, we cannot resurrect our education … and created new value systems, the country itself is completely divided.

Unity of the country
I was at a meeting today and a Muslim woman was asked to say the opening prayers and at the end of it all the chairman of the meeting said oh listening to this lady you would think that she is a Pentecostal Christian. And the woman said, remember I went to a missionary school. Then the chairman said that was the Nigerian we knew when we were growing up. That is not where we are today anymore. There is great division in this country, No leader in this country today talks more of the unity of Nigeria, we all seem to be more interested in defending, and if we are not defending our local entity we are defending our regional entity and the rest of it.
But we must also know that the unity of the country is at stake, there is so much division. Just take a little place like Abia, look at the way the Appeal Court judgment is being spurned upside down as if the Appeal court ruled against the Ngwa people. The court did not know who existed, the court only acted on the evidence of an election result before it. Now the whole people of Ngwa and the area are saying that there will be war if somebody from their village does not become the governor. This is absolute nonesence, while not wait to see what happens when the governor goes to the Supreme Court and make his case and hopefully he will win. But when they have already psyched themselves up that they are going to oppose the next governor because he is not from their village is dangerous.

Now this plays itself out almost all over this country. Look at what they did to Faleke in Kogi. Tomorrow, if the Yorubas and the Christians in Kogi start demanding for self-determination will you blame them?

Poor leadership
What the country suffers today particularly at the state level is poor leadership, low capacity and of course you know I don’t want to go into the issue of corruption that has characterized what the military left behind and what the political class inherited. So the lesson we should learn going forward is that with the new change we have effected, we have an opportunity to turn things around, that is if the regime has the capacity, the vision, the wisdom to actually turn things around and begin to move this country forward but if we do not learn from the mistakes not only from the coup but mistakes we have made over the years, if we do not learn from that, as we celebrate the 50 years anniversary, you will be sure that we will be making the same mistakes and so for me beyond the issue of corruption, we should also begin to address the issue of national unity.

When you take it sector by sector and analyse it you will see the opportunities that we have missed in this country. I can bet you that if oil was discovered under the democratic regime of the first republic, we probably would have managed it better, because these are self made men, they were not too grandeurs. I mean they were matured and they understood what politics was all about and they understood development because this was what they fought for, they fought for the independence of Nigeria. Today’s generation what are they fighting for.

The coup was a tragic mistake
So my position is that looking back unfortunately it was a tragic mistake that has cost the nation a lot. The lesson is that we can not cry so much about the past, we have to look at the future and see how do we learn from that mistake to ensure that whatever was responsible for those acts do not occur again in future.

One can only wish that the coup did not happen because it brought mostly the bad to the Nigerian nation. For example, the creation of states I believe would have been done more systematically and I am not sure we would have had up to 36 states. Probably we would have had regions in a way and manner that most people would be very satisfied.