By Stephanie Shaakaa
On the morning of February 13, 1976, Nigeria did not simply lose a Head of State. It lost momentum.
The news moved quickly, but the silence that followed moved faster. Radios became altars. Conversations thinned. In that brief, stunned pause, something deeper than power shifted. A country that had just begun to move with unusual speed suddenly felt its stride broken.
General Murtala Ramat Muhammed had been in office for 200 days.
Two hundred days. That is not a tenure. That is a sentence fragment in the grammar of history. Yet within that fragment, decisions were taken that rearranged the architecture of Nigeria.
Files that had slept for years were forced awake. A civil service long cushioned by indifference was confronted head-on. Corruption was not described as culture,it was treated as deviation. The announcement that the Federal Capital would move to Abuja was not framed as spectacle but as strategy a deliberate attempt to pull the nation’s centre of gravity away from inherited imbalance. On the African continent, Nigeria spoke with a clarity that startled even its peers, affirming support for liberation movements without trimming its language to please foreign capitals.
There was an unmistakable urgency about him.
He did not govern for applause. He governed as if time were impatient.
Directives were brief. Decisions were swift. The tone was firm. To some, it felt unsettling. To others, it felt like a country finally standing upright.
Speed in leadership is not comfortable. It disrupts arrangements. It exposes networks that thrive on delay. It forces a bureaucracy to choose between service and survival. But speed also communicates seriousness. It tells citizens that drift is not policy.
That was the rhythm Nigeria had begun to learn in 1975.
Then came that Friday morning.
The assassination did more than end a life. It interrupted a tempo. It injected caution into a system that had briefly tasted decisiveness. Governments continued. Policies followed. Transitions came and went. But the velocity changed. The country became more negotiated, more layered, more careful.
Fifty years later, memory tempts us toward mythology. It is easy to polish the past until it gleams unrealistically. It is also easy to reduce it to military nostalgia. Both temptations miss the point.
Strip away sentiment and one fact remains stubborn. In less than a year, structural decisions were taken that outlived the man who made them.
The Abuja skyline rising from the savannah traces its political origin to that period. Nigeria’s once-assertive foreign posture found defining expression in those months. The message sent to public officials that service was a duty, not an inheritance was unmistakable.
He was not flawless. No leader is. But there was coherence between conviction and action. And coherence is rare.
What does it mean that five decades later, his name still surfaces whenever Nigerians debate decisive leadership? It means impact is not measured in years. It is measured in clarity. It means authority, when paired with moral certainty, can compress time and still expand consequence.
On this fiftieth anniversary, we remember the bullets because they were dramatic. But what truly endures is something quieter and more demanding, the memory of a government that moved.
As a student of history and of this restless country, I have learned that momentum is harder to restore than to destroy.
I was raised to admire leaders who choose action over applause, and that is why his memory still unsettles me.
Some nations forget quickly. Ours remembers but rarely with enough courage to act on what it remembers.
Nigeria once experienced leadership that did not ask for permission to be firm.
That memory is both comfort and indictment.
It comforts because it proves that urgency is possible.
It indicts because it shows how easily momentum can be broken.
History does not only preserve the fallen. It tests the living.
Fifty years after 13 February 1976, the echo is still audible. Not because his rule was long, but because it was concentrated. Not because it was romantic, but because it was deliberate.
Some lives are extended. Some are expanded.
His was expanded.
And a nation still measures itself against the speed it once knew.
You can reach Shaakaa though:
shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
