COMBING THE DUST SERIES
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma,AI-KO
Acknowledgments
This essay, born from my personal memory and historical inquiry, owes its existence to the voices – seen and unseen – that refuse to let Nigeria’s past rest in silence. I extend gratitude to the scholars whose works illuminated Gowon’s contradictions: J. Isawa Elaigwu, whose meticulous biography provided the scaffolding for understanding the man behind the myth; Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, whose searing critiques of post-war Nigeria taught me to distrust the sanitized narratives of power. To the survivors of the Civil War – those who carried children through forests, who rebuilt shops from ashes, who still whisper stories of Biafra in kitchens and prayer halls – your resilience is this essay’s compass.
Special thanks to the communities of the Middle Belt and Southeast, whose unresolved anguish breathes urgency into these words. Your struggles against systemic erasure, your protests drowned out by empty slogans of “unity,” are the heartbeat of this critique. To the historians and journalists who documented massacres the state tried to bury, your courage turned archives into altars.
To the readers who engaged with this essays – questioning, challenging, connecting dots between Gowon’s Nigeria and our own – you reminded me that history is not a monologue but a chorus. This work is not a conclusion but an invitation: to keep interrogating, to keep remembering, to refuse the luxury of forgetting.
Finally, to Nigeria herself – a nation of fractures and fierce hope – may these words contribute, however faintly, to the reckoning you deserve.
– AI-KO
Introduction
When old empires fade and new nations rise, leaders sometimes step forward not with perfect plans, but messy choices that shape history. General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s youngest leader, is one of such figures. He took charge during the country’s most brutal civil war, promising to unite a broken nation. Yet decades later, Nigeria still struggles with divisions and violence tied to his decisions. This essay isn’t about judging one man – it’s about asking hard questions. Why does a country full of wealth and talent remain trapped in poverty and conflict? How did choices made during the war set the stage for today’s problems? Who paid the price for “unity,” and was it worth it?
Gowon’s rule was full of contradictions. He famously declared “No Victor, No Vanquished” to heal wounds after the war, but his policies crushed the Igbo people economically, leaving many homeless and humiliated. He split Nigeria into 12 states to supposedly reduce tribal tensions, but instead sparked new hideous ethnic clashes that still rage today. A deeply religious man who now speaks of forgiveness, he once approved blockades that starved millions – including children – during the war, a horror barely mentioned in his own accounts of history. This isn’t about labeling Gowon “good” or “evil.” It’s about understanding how power works: how catchy slogans about unity can and do hide exclusion, how oil money fuelled greed instead of progress, and how ignoring the past traps us in endless cycles of crisis.
The goal here is urgent. We need to see how Gowon’s playbook – centralized control, harsh tactics, and empty promises of peace – created modern Nigeria. A place where mass graves in Benue, Plateau and elsewhere today mirror the unburied dead of the Biafra war, where government policies meant to “include everyone” actually deepen divides, and where leaders still act like dictators while preaching about shared futures. Using survivor stories, private and personal files, and insights from scholars like J. Isawa Elaigwu and writer Chinua Achebe, this essay connects history to lived experience. It’s driven by the pain of people like me, who grew up with whispers about war, starvation, and forests where families hid. Now, as adults, we see the same violence repeating.
To question Gowon is to question Nigeria itself – its broken dreams, its hidden truths, and its stubborn refusal to give up hope. This isn’t about finding easy answers. It’s about untangling the knots of a leader who thought he was building a nation but ended up deepening its chaos. Let’s start where his words clash with his actions. That’s where we see the real price of “unity” – and the danger of staying silent.
Yakubu Dan-Yumma Gowon strides across the stage of Nigerian history as a pivotal and paradoxical Figure. A man who donned the mask of unity while presiding over a nation fracturing beneath his feet. The title I chose for this reflective, interrogative and exploratory essay “Gowon: A Tragic Jester in His Own Theatre of Shadows” crystallizes my views on this duality, exposing him as a performer in a macabre drama of his own making. Like a jester, he wielded wit and charm to disarm critics and citizens, juggling sleek sounding slogans of reconciliation and federalism with the flair of a showman. Yet behind the theatrics lay tragedy: the statesman who vowed to “keep Nigeria one” now watches, powerless, weak, and sidelined, as the very region that birthed him – the Middle Belt – is devoured by the shadows he failed to dispel.
The essay’s thesis hinges on this tension between Gowon’s myth and his material legacy. It argues that his leadership, forged in the fires of the civil war, constructed a Nigeria that weaponized unity as a facade for systemic neglect and marginalization. His grand gestures – the creation of 12 states, the post-war “3Rs” program, the suppression of Biafra – were less acts of nation-building than sleights of hand, distractions from the rot festering beneath. By “theatre of shadows” I refer to this dissonance: a stage where Gowon’s performative statesmanship masked the erasure of minority rights and voices, including his own kin, and where the specters of unprosecuted wartime atrocities now haunt the Middle Belt’s killing fields.
The title draws its potency from historical irony. Gowon, a Ngas Christian from Plateau State, rose as a compromise candidate to heal a fractured nation. Yet the Nigeria he engineered – centralized, corrupt, oil-obsessed, and structurally unequal – became a prison for Nigerians of the South East and South South, but mostly for his people. The “jester” motif reflects his role as both architect and fool: a leader whose policies disempowered the marginalized while he entertained illusions of enduring legacy.
Today, as Plateau and Benue drown in blood – over 200,000 dead in recent attacks, villages erased, genocide rebranded as “farmer-herder clashes” – Gowon’s theatre collapses into farce. The shadows he once manipulated now consume him, revealing a man whose life’s work is both prologue and epitaph to Nigeria’s unending tragedy of unaccountable power.
What prompted this title, and this reckoning, is the visceral intersection of past and present. Gowon’s recent defections of civil war blame, juxtaposed with the Middle Belt’s escalating carnage, exposes the hollowness of his unifying rhetoric. His refusal to pen a memoir, to confront his role in seeding today’s crises, renders him a ghost in his own story – a jester without a punchline, trapped in a play where the final act is written in the blood of Nigerians and his people. This essay, then, is my critique of the man, and an autopsy of a nation: one where the stage lights have dimmed, the audience has left, and the tragedies of history encore endlessly in the darkness of Nigeria’s putrid soul.
Gowon exists as a farcical figure in the fractured pantomime of his own creation – a disjointed theatrical piece he once co-authored and co-produced with the fervor of a revolutionary. The play, a discordant collage of half-truths and grandiose soliloquies, now mirrors the absurdist tragedy of his existence. Once a puppeteer of narratives, he has become ensnared in the very strings he pulled, condemned to an interminable lifespan that stretches before him like a desolate plain. What was once mistaken for divine favor – a life elongated beyond mortal measure – reveals itself as a cruel cosmic joke. Time, that merciless alchemist, has transmuted longevity into a gilded cage, trapping him in a purgatory where memory festers and purpose withers.
Once a protagonist in his own myth, Gowon now sits as a spectator, paralyzed by the weight of his irrelevance. His hands, once clenched into fists of authority, lie limp in his lap, trembling with the futility of age. The allies he once broke bread with – shadowy collaborators who whispered promises of legacy – now reign as architects of ruin. Behind curtains of bureaucracy and rhetoric, they orchestrate the meticulous erasure of his kin, their schemes dripping with the venom of betrayal. Villages vanish into ash, voices dissolve into silence, and the land itself hemorrhages history. Gowon watches, a ghost in his own story, as the genocide unfolds in relentless acts, each more grotesque than the last.
At 31, he became the country’s youngest head of state following the 1966 counter-coup that toppled Aguiyi-Ironsi on a lie about centralisation, which became the linchpin of his administration and policies; inheriting a fractured nation teetering on the brink of disintegration. A British-trained officer with a conciliatory demeanor, Gowon fashioned himself as a unifying force, rallying the nation with the slogan, “To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done.” Yet beneath this veneer of cohesion lay a legacy steeped in contradictions – a man who ended a civil war but sowed the seeds of perpetual crisis for his own people.
His leadership during the Biafran War (1967 – 1970) cemented his place in history as the general who preserved Nigeria’s unity, yet his post-war mantra of “no victor, no vanquished” rang hollow for marginalized communities. While he extended amnesty to some Igbo secessionists, systemic inequities festered, particularly in the Middle Belt, home to his Benue-Plateau kin. The oil boom of the 1970s, which flooded federal coffers, became a paradox: gleaming infrastructure rose in cities like Lagos, while agrarian regions languished. Gowon’s Third National Development Plan, touted as a blueprint for progress, funneled wealth into urban centers, leaving Plateau’s mineral-rich soils untapped and its villages mired in poverty. His creation of 12 states in 1967, aimed at dismantling regional power blocs, instead fractured minority identities, transforming Plateau and the entire middle belt and beyond into a place of competing ethnicities and unresolved grievances.
Gowon’s character – a blend of pragmatism and indecision – proved fatal for his homeland. Praised for his “detribalized” ethos, he refrained from advocating for the peoples of the middle belt and neighboring minorities, leaving them exposed to exploitation by politically dominant groups. His regime’s centralization of power bred a culture of impunity, where corruption thrived and accountability withered. By the time Murtala Mohammed ousted him in 1975, Gowon had delayed democratic transitions and entrenched a military ethos that prioritized wobbling stability over justice.
The consequences for the Benue-Plateau region were catastrophic. Decades after his rule, the region became a theater of carnage: farmer-herder clashes, resource wars, and ethno-religious massacres. The 2001 Zaki-Biam killings, the 2004 Yelwa crisis, and the relentless violence of the 2020s all trace their roots to Gowon’s failure to institutionalize equity. Federal policies continued to siphon Plateau’s mineral wealth to distant capitals, while its villages burned. His people and neighboring groups, once hopeful that a son of the soil would uplift them, found themselves abandoned to a cycle of erasure – their histories buried, their voices silenced, their bodies rendered collateral in a nation’s unending reckoning with itself.
Gowon’s Nigeria has become a tragic paradox for the Middle Belt, the very region he once called home. Gowon ascended to power as a compromise figure amid Nigeria’s post-coup chaos, positioning himself as a unifier. Yet, the Nigeria he engineered through pre, during wartime policies and post-war reconstruction has left his people ensnared in a cycle of violence that mirrors the unresolved contradictions of his rule. His creation of states in 1967, ostensibly to dismantle the Eastern regional power bloc, ended up fragmenting the Middle Belt into a collection of dismantled, broken minority groups pitted against one another, eroding collective identity and institutionalizing fierce ethnic competition. This administrative gambit, celebrated as a masterstroke of federalism, instead sowed the seeds of today’s ethno-religious strife, as minority communities like the Berom, Tiv, and Irigwe found themselves perpetually marginalized in a system that privileged dominant ethnicities elsewhere.
His post-war program, funded by the 1970s oil boom, became an empty promise for the Middle Belt and many other minority peoples. While cities like Lagos thrived, most other places, including his homeland, remained starved of infrastructure and economic investment, its mineral-rich soils and agrarian potential sacrificed to centralized resource extraction and control. The oil wealth that flowed into federal coffers bypassed Plateau and Benue, leaving communities dependent on subsistence farming and vulnerable to climate-driven pressures. As desertification pushed Fulani herders southward into the Middle Belt, Gowon’s failure to codify land rights or revive colonial-era grazing corridors turned the region into a battleground. His silence on equitable resource distribution allowed latent tensions between “indigenes” and “settlers” to fester, morphing into today’s genocidal violence often framed as religious war.
The Middle Belt’s current agony – over 60,000 dead in just two months, villages erased, and a silent genocide unfolding – bears the fingerprints of Gowon’s legacy. His wartime strategy of exploiting minority grievances to isolate Biafra set a precedent for divisive identity politics. By carving states like Benue-Plateau and Rivers to weaken Igbo cohesion, he inadvertently birthed a system where minority groups became pawns in larger power struggles, a precedent his successors have expanded to the present uneconomical 36 today. Decades later, these same communities are now targets of land grabs by armed factions, their ancestral homes seized under the guise of religious conflict but driven by elites exploiting subterranean minerals and fertile plains. Gowon’s refusal to confront the structural inequities of his era – exemplified by his recent deflection of civil war accountability – has left a vacuum where justice should reside. The Benue anti-grazing laws, vehemently opposed by herder groups, echo his own top-down governance style: solutions imposed without addressing root causes, deepening mistrust.
Today, as the middle belt burns and mass graves dot the landscape, Gowon’s Nigeria stands as a marker of the dangers of unity forged without justice. His wartime slogan, once a balm for national wounds, now rings as a cruel irony for Middle Belt communities trapped in a war their forebear helped orchestrate. The very policies designed to “keep Nigeria one” have birthed a reality where his kin are slaughtered with impunity, their cries for accountability drowned out by the ghosts of unprosecuted wartime atrocities. Gowon, now a spectral figure in Nigeria’s conscience, embodies the unresolved duality of his rule: a leader who averted national disintegration but incubated the toxins now poisoning his homeland and the entire country. Until Nigeria confronts this legacy – acknowledging the Middle Belt’s sacrificial role in preserving a flawed federation – the bloodshed will endure, a dark requiem for unity bought at the cost of forgotten Biafran lives.
The only consequential works on Gowon were written by J. Isawa Elaigwu. Reconciling Elaigwu’s Gowon with mine drawn from my lived experiences is a task that has plagued me for years.
Reading J. Isawa Elaigwu’s biographies of Yakubu Gowon feels like encountering a familiar story told through an unfamiliar lens. The scholar’s measured assessment of Nigeria’s wartime leader presents a complex figure – a young soldier thrust into the furnace of history who somehow kept the Nigerian project alive when it threatened to shatter. There’s truth in this portrait, but also telling omissions. Where Elaigwu sees pragmatic statecraft, I see the origins of our modern malaise; where he documents policy decisions, I trace the unbroken line to today’s suffering.
Elaigwu and I agree on the architecture of Gowon’s Nigeria – the 12-state structure that simultaneously contained secession and created new fractures, the oil boom that enriched the center while starving the peripheries, the “No Victor, No Vanquished” slogan that papered over gaping wounds rather than healing them. These were the compromises of a man governing in impossible circumstances. But where Elaigwu’s analysis often stops at explaining these choices, mine insists on following their consequences through to the present day. That 1967 state creation didn’t just reorganize Nigeria – it hardwired a system where minority groups would forever jostle for scraps from the federal table. The post-war reconciliation wasn’t merely incomplete – it established a template where atrocities could be committed without accountability so long as someone declared “unity” afterwards.
The differences emerge most starkly in how we treat Gowon’s moral ledger. Elaigwu’s academic detachment leads him to present the starvation blockades, the abandoned property seizures, the economic marginalization of the East as difficult but perhaps necessary wartime measures. I cannot be so dispassionate. Having lived through the aftermath – having seen what “no victor” meant for Igbo families stripped of their livelihoods, for children denied education, for communities left to rebuild without resources – these weren’t just policies but moral choices that shaped Nigeria’s ethical compass. When today’s leaders act with similar impunity, they’re following a path Gowon paved.
What fascinates me most is how Elaigwu’s narrative largely concludes with Gowon’s 1975 departure, while mine insists his legacy lives in every fresh crisis. Those Benue mass graves in 2025? They’re the flowering of seeds planted when Gowon’s government first treated Middle Belt communities as expendable. The brazen corruption of our current ruling class? It takes its cues from the 1970s oil boom when accountability first became optional for Nigeria’s powerful. Even Gowon’s later reinvention as a born-again elder statesman feels significant – not as personal redemption but as part of a national pattern where leaders perform piety or jump parties while evading substantive reckoning.
Ultimately, Elaigwu gives us Gowon the historical figure, while I grapple with Gowon the living ghost. The scholar’s work is invaluable for understanding what happened; mine asks why it still matters. Perhaps this is the difference between history and memory – between documenting events and living with their aftermath. Nigeria today isn’t just dealing with Gowon’s decisions but with the worldview they entrenched: that unity matters more than justice, that power need not explain itself, that some Nigerians are more equal than others. Until we confront these ghosts, we’ll remain trapped in the Nigeria he made – a nation forever promising tomorrow what was stolen yesterday.
Today’s leaders repeat this pattern, using soldiers and slogans to mask their inability to heal poverty or corruption. Gowon’s fear of failure became Nigeria’s curse: a governance style built on silencing critics, not solving problems.
Nigeria itself seems trapped in a loop, what Freud called “repetition compulsion” – reliving past traumas instead of healing them. The massacres in Benue and Plateau, where thousands die in clashes over land and identity, echo the civil war’s violence. Gowon’s war tactics – starving the Igbo to “save” Nigeria – created a template for today’s brutality. Jung might say the nation is haunted by its “collective shadow,” the unspoken sins of its past. Like a family that never discusses a tragedy, Nigeria’s silence about the war and its aftermath fuels today’s chaos.
The lessons are clear, yet unlearned. Gowon’s life teaches us that leadership without honesty is a ticking bomb. His unwritten memoir symbolizes Nigeria’s refusal to face its truths: the greed of elites, the pain of the marginalized, the ghosts of unburied wars. To break the cycle, Nigeria must do what Gowon could not – confront its shadow. This means listening to the Igbo grandmother who still dreams of the child she lost to hunger, the Berom farmer whose land was stolen, the Benue mother burying her son in 2025. It means decentralizing power, not to repeat Gowon’s divide-and-rule tactics, but to let communities heal themselves.
Gowon’s legacy is a warning: nations, like people, cannot outrun their past. Until Nigeria stares down its history – the blood spilled in the name of unity, the lies told to mask failure – it will remain a prisoner of its pain. True healing begins not with soldiers or slogans, but with the courage to say, “We hurt you. How do we make it right?” Only then can the vase, still shattered, begin to mend.
History, an unsparing judge, now dissects Gowon’s legacy through the prism of the present. The systemic genocide unfolding in the Middle Belt – land dispossession, mass graves, villages erased from maps – stands as a damning indictment of his choices. His reign, once celebrated for ending a war, is now shadowed by the bloodshed he failed to prevent, the structures he failed to dismantle, the people he failed to see. Nigeria, still haunted by the ghosts of its past, staggers forward, its unity a brittle myth. Gowon, now a ghostly figure in this saga, wanders the ruins of his own narrative: a man who wielded power to preserve a nation, yet could not – or would not – save his own.
Nigeria, staggers beneath the yoke of its own convoluted past, frayed by greed, violence, and the lies men kill to preserve. The nation’s fractured mirror reflects not unity, but a kaleidoscope of scars. Gowon’s life, once a shield brandished to defend fabricated truths, now stands exposed as a monument to complicity. The fables he championed – of progress, of sacrifice, of a nation forged in fire – crumble like ancient parchment, revealing the rot beneath. His legacy, written in unburied blood and ink, is no longer his to curate.
History today has begun its indictment. The streets murmur with the echoes of the dead; the rivers run thick with unspoken testimonies. Gowon, the jester-king, wanders the ruins of his own narrative, haunted by the faces of those he failed. His longevity is no triumph – it is a sentence. A curse to outlive every lie, to bear witness as the masks fall and the stage burns.
In this grotesque theatre, the final act belongs not to him, but to the people – the survivors, the resistors – who rise like phoenixes from the pyre of his failures. Their chorus drowns out his hollow soliloquies, their truth a blade to the throat of his fiction. And as the curtain trembles, Nigeria’s burdened heart beats on, a drum of defiance in the dark.
Yakubu Gowon’s continued silence is a cavernous void in Nigeria’s collective memory – a refusal, or perhaps an inability, to pen the definitive account of his life and the turbulent era he once commanded. By withholding his biographical reckoning, he has surrendered authorship of his legacy to the shadows, transforming himself into a spectral antagonist in the macabre drama of Nigeria’s history. The absence of his voice – raw, unvarnished, unrepentant – leaves the nation to grapple with a fractured narrative, a puzzle missing its central piece. What truths might he have confessed? What regrets might he have etched into the record? Instead, his reticence hangs like a fog over those critical years, obscuring motives and muddying accountability. The civil war, the state creations, the promises of unity – all remain suspended in ambiguity, fertile ground for mythmaking and revisionism. Critics and apologists alike project their biases onto his silence, turning him into a canvas for every grievance, every conspiracy, every unhealed wound.
Yakubu Gowon’s Nigeria was a contradiction of idealism marred by the fraying edges of tribalism and indecision. His ascent to power positioned him as a reluctant steward of a fractured nation. Gowon was an improbable leader in a country riven by Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo rivalries. By dismantling the Eastern Region’s dominance, he aimed to placate minority grievances, yet this act became the final provocation for Biafra’s secession, plunging Nigeria into a civil war that claimed over a million lives, many through starvation imposed by a federal blockade. Gowon’s post war mantra, “no victor, no vanquished,” echoed as a hollow refrain in the postwar landscape, where Igbo reintegration remained half-hearted. The federal government’s reluctance to exchange Biafran currency for Nigerian notes left eastern economies in ruins, while anti-Igbo sentiment festered in Rivers and South-Eastern states, stifling reconciliation.
Economically, Gowon’s Nigeria was a paradox of abundance and squander. The oil boom of the early 1970s, which saw Nigeria join OPEC and revenues skyrocket, became a curse under his watch. While infrastructure projects like the Kainji Dam and Niger Bridge reconstruction were lauded, the windfall bred complacency. The indigenization decrees of 1972, intended to transfer foreign-owned enterprises to Nigerians, instead became vehicles for cronyism, as politically connected elites seized assets while unemployment soared. The regime’s anticorruption units uncovered vast networks of graft, yet Gowon’s own cabinet was rumored to profit from inflated contracts, such as the scandal involving overseas construction deals. Meanwhile, the Udoji Commission’s recommendations for public service reform – a potential antidote to bureaucratic rot – were diluted to mere wage adjustments, leaving Nigeria’s administrative machinery sclerotic and inept.
Politically, Gowon oscillated between autocracy and ambivalence. His 1970 pledge to restore civilian rule by 1976 was undermined by delays, justified as necessary to “eradicate corruption” and complete a census – a process itself tainted by manipulation. The 1973 census, which absurdly claimed a 44% population surge in the North, reignited ethnic suspicions, as it promised to skew political representation and oil revenue allocation. Gowon’s ban on political discourse, justified as preserving peace, stifled dissent but deepened alienation. Even his postwar reconciliation policies, such as the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), were double-edged: while fostering interethnic interaction among graduates, they could not mask the systemic marginalization of Igbo professionals barred from reclaiming prewar positions in the civil service or military.
Internationally, Gowon’s Nigeria projected pan-African solidarity, championing ECOWAS and supporting liberation movements, yet this idealism clashed with domestic realities. His reliance on Soviet arms during the war and Western aid afterward exposed the fragility of nonalignment, while British arms sales to apartheid South Africa strained relations, revealing the limits of Nigeria’s influence. The regime’s humanitarian image, bolstered by postwar food relief efforts, contrasted starkly with the forced displacement of Ibos from Port Harcourt and the economic strangulation of the East.
Gowon’s downfall in 1975, orchestrated by Murtala Mohammed while he attended an OAU summit, encapsulated the tragedy of his rule: a leader who sought unity but sowed division, who envisioned progress but presided over decay. His legacy is a Nigeria that survived as a geopolitical entity but falters as a nation – a testament to the peril of vacillating between the imperatives of statecraft and the seductions of tribal politics. The seeds of today’s ethno-regional fissures and institutional rot were sown in the soil of his compromises, a bitter harvest from the era when Gowon’s Nigeria teetered between aspiration and despair.
This narrative vacuum has calcified Nigeria’s unresolved tensions. The Benue-Plateau region, his ancestral homeland, writhes in cycles of violence that feel like aftershocks of his indecisions. Without his testimony, the complexities of his rule – the balancing act between militarism and diplomacy, the compromises with power brokers, the moral calculus of wartime leadership – remain frozen in debate. Was he a pragmatist navigating impossible choices, or a passive enabler of systems that doomed his people? His silence amplifies the question, rendering him both sphinx and scapegoat. Meanwhile, the nation’s youth, disconnected from the lived history of his era, encounter Gowon as a relic – a name in textbooks, a face on faded old newspapers, a figure stripped of nuance, reduced to caricature in political discourse.
As he ages, his physical presence grows ever more elusive, a decorative dummy propped up in the theater of national memory. He appears at state functions, a stooped figure in crisp traditional attire, offering platitudes about unity while the fires he once banked rages on unchecked. His longevity, once a symbol of endurance, now feels like a cruel joke – a man outliving his relevance, yet outliving none of his contradictions. In a nation obsessed with the performative gestures of its past leaders, Gowon’s muteness becomes its own kind of performance: a pantomime of evasion. The country’s conscience, burdened by the weight of unasked questions, watches him recede into the twilight, a sovereign ghost haunting his own unfinished story.
His reinvention as a born-again Christian in his twilight years is a layered performance – one that intertwines personal redemption with historical evasion. To position himself as a man reborn in Christ, preaching forgiveness and piety, is to cloak the unresolved sins of his past in the armor of divine grace. This transformation is not merely a private spiritual journey but a public recalibration of legacy. For many Nigerians, particularly those in the Middle Belt and Southeast – regions still hemorrhaging from the wounds he inflicted or ignored – this religious rebranding feels less like repentance than revisionism. Gowon’s embrace of Christianity as a core identity today cannot be disentangled from his role as a wartime leader who weaponized federal power to starve Biafran children, nor from his post-war policies that reduced minority communities to sacrificial lambs on the altar of national unity. The dissonance is stark: a man who quotes scripture while his historical decisions continue to fuel genocidal violence in his homeland. His faith becomes a metaphor for Nigeria’s broader tragedy – a nation that kneels in churches and mosques every Sunday and Friday, yet remains morally bankrupt in its governance.
Gowon’s born-again identity which I consider laudable, still raises urgent questions about accountability and the ethics of historical memory. Can a man who presided over mass death, sanctioned blockades that starved millions, and institutionalized systems of marginalization truly be “reborn” without confronting those crimes? In Christian theology, redemption requires confession, restitution, and a turning away from sin. Yet Gowon’s spiritual rebirth lacks these pillars. His refusal to write a memoir, address the human toll of his policies, or even acknowledge the systemic erasure of Middle Belt communities suggests a faith that prioritizes personal salvation over collective justice. This selective piety mirrors Nigeria’s national malady: a country quick to perform religiosity but allergic to moral reckoning. For survivors of the civil war and victims of ongoing violence in Plateau and Benue, Gowon’s sermons on forgiveness ring hollow. To forgive, one must first know what is being forgiven – but Gowon’s silence denies them even that.
His Christian identity also serves as a political shield, insulating him from scrutiny while aligning him with Nigeria’s powerful evangelical elite. In a nation where religion is both a weapon and a balm, his alignment with the Church grants him a veneer of moral authority. He is feted at religious gatherings, quoted in sermons, and framed as an elder statesman guided by God – a narrative that obscures his role in creating the conditions for today’s carnage. This spiritual posturing allows him to evade the harder questions: Why has he never apologized for the starvation of Biafra? Why does he not leverage his influence to demand justice for the Middle Belt’s massacres? His faith becomes a theater of distraction, a way to transmute historical guilt into present-day reverence. Meanwhile, pastors and politicians alike invoke his “God-fearing” example, reinforcing a culture where leaders face no consequences so long as they perform piety.
The consequences of Gowon’s unexamined past ripple through Nigeria’s present. His policies – centralized power, state creation as divide-and-rule, economic neglect of minorities – created a template for today’s kleptocracy and ethno-religious violence. The daily grind of Nigerians trapped in this system – farmers dispossessed by herders, parents burying children killed in midnight raids, youths radicalized by hopelessness – is rooted in the foundations Gowon laid. His born-again persona does nothing to dismantle these structures; instead, it normalizes the idea that leaders need not answer for their sins if they cloak themselves in righteousness. For millions, this is a spiritual and existential insult. It tells them their suffering is invisible to God and man, their histories irrelevant to the sanctified narrative of “one Nigeria.” Gowon’s faith, divorced from justice, becomes another tool of oppression – a reminder that the powerful can always rewrite their story, while the oppressed remain trapped in the plot he authored.
In the end, Gowon’s Christianity is a metaphor for Nigeria itself: a land of fervent believers clinging to miracles while ignoring the man-made hells around them. His spiritual rebirth cannot resurrect the dead of Biafra or Benue-Plateau, nor can it absolve the systems that keep killing. The tragedy is that his faith, like Nigeria’s, is a performance without transformation – a salvation that saves the sinner but abandons the sinned-against. Until Gowon uses his platform to confront the past – to name the dead, to admit his failures, to demand justice for the Middle Belt – his born-again identity will remain what it has always been: a masquerade. And Nigeria, caught between his hallowed myths and its unholy realities, will remain a nation crucified on the cross of unity, its people waiting for a resurrection that never comes.
Gowon’s words, plucked from the archives of Nigeria’s tumultuous past, read like fragments of a script for a play that never found its resolution. Take his infamous declaration during the oil boom: “Money is not Nigeria’s problem. But how to spend it.” On the surface, it’s a leader’s confident boast about newfound wealth. But peel back the layers, and you hear the whisper of a man already losing grip on the nation he vowed to rebuild. The 1970s oil windfall under his watch didn’t just fund roads and hospitals – it bankrolled a culture of impunity, a belief that Nigeria’s riches existed to be hoarded, not shared. While Lagos sprouted skyscrapers, the Niger Delta’s creeks ran black with spilled crude, and the Middle Belt’s farmlands withered. Gowon’s “how to spend it” became a euphemism for centralized plunder, a precursor to today’s billion-dollar heists and vanished subsidies. His quote, now etched in infamy, is less an economic insight than a prophecy of rot – a reminder that the seeds of Nigeria’s kleptocracy were sown in the soil of his good intentions.
When Gowon claimed, “We fought the war with great caution, not in anger or hatred,” he painted himself as a reluctant warrior, a pacifist general. But the archives tell another story. The blockade of Biafra, which starved millions of Igbo children, was not caution but calculated cruelty – a strategy that treated civilian suffering as collateral in the pursuit of unity. His “No Victor, No Vanquished” slogan, so noble in tone, became a weapon of historical erasure. To declare no victor while presiding over the Abandoned Property Policy – which stripped Easterners of homes and businesses – was to gaslight a nation. The Igbo were vanquished in everything but name, their “rightful place” (as Gowon later promised) reduced to a hollow platitude. This duality – the gentle rhetoric masking ruthless policy – is the hallmark of his rule. It’s a duality that lives on in today’s Nigeria, where leaders sermonize about peace while bombs and bloodshed hover over villages in Benue.
The most telling of Gowon’s contradictions lies in his lament about military rule: “The trouble with military rule is that every colonel or general is soon full of ambition.” Here, the architect of Nigeria’s centralized autocracy feigns dismay at the monster he helped create. His post-war decrees, which placed the government “above the law,” didn’t just prolong military rule – they sanctified it. By the time he was ousted in 1975, he’d normalized a culture where power was seized, not earned, and where dissent was a luxury the marginalized couldn’t afford. The coups that followed – Babangida’s smirk, Abacha’s terror – were not aberrations but continuations. Gowon’s critique of military ambition rings as hollow as a dictator’s apology; it was his regime that turned the state into a prize to be looted, a precedent that still fuels the desperation of today’s power brokers.
Then there’s the ghost of Aburi – the 1967 accord where Gowon and Ojukwu briefly clasped hands over a confederal vision. Gowon’s subsequent betrayal of that agreement wasn’t just a tactical pivot; it was the original sin of Nigerian governance. By reneging on promises of regional autonomy, he established a template: agreements with minorities could be scrapped, dissenters sidelined, and power concentrated at the center. The collapse of Aburi didn’t merely spark a war – it taught generations of leaders that impunity pays. When today’s politicians ignore restructuring demands or dismiss Middle Belt genocide as “clashes,” they’re reciting lines from Gowon’s playbook. His legacy is the unbroken thread connecting Aburi’s ashes to Plateau’s mass graves.
Gowon’s later reinvention as a born-again elder statesman, tweeting Bible verses while Benue burns, completes the tragic arc. His faith, like his famed “detribalized” persona, feels less like redemption than evasion – a performance of piety to offset the bloodstains of history. The man who once swore to “bind the wounds” of the Igbo now presides over a Nigeria where wounds are continually reopened, where unity remains a slogan, not a practice. His quotes, polished over decades, are not insights but epitaphs – for a nation that learned to speak the language of reconciliation while perfecting the art of exclusion. To parse Gowon’s words is to trace the contours of Nigeria’s DNA: the lies it tells itself, the past it won’t confront, the future it keeps deferring. He is both playwright and ghost, haunting a stage where the same tragedy encore – now with bombs, hashtags, and mass graves that bloom like cursed flowers.
“A man is best known and appraised from his words and thoughts,” wrote the philosopher Seneca, a maxim that rings with particular resonance when applied to leaders who shape nations. Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s wartime ruler and self-styled “Reconstructor,” left behind a trail of pronouncements that serve as both compass and Rorschach test for understanding his legacy. His speeches and quotes – polished with the sheen of statesmanship yet often divorced from material realities – reveal not just the man, but the contradictions of the Nigeria he sought to build. To parse Gowon’s words is to confront a central paradox: how a leader who spoke so fervently of unity, reconciliation, and human dignity could preside over policies that entrenched division, normalized impunity, and devalued the very lives he claimed to uplift.
Historians like J. Isawa Elaigwu, in his seminal biography Gowon: The Biography of a Soldier-Statesman, frames these contradictions as products of their time – a young nation grappling with post-colonial fragility. Yet as this essay argues, Gowon’s rhetoric transcended historical circumstance; it became the DNA of modern Nigeria’s governance. His famous declaration, “No Victor, No Vanquished,” was not a post-war slogan but a governing philosophy that promoted performative unity over justice. When he asserted, “Money is not Nigeria’s problem. But how to spend it,” during the 1970s oil boom, he unwittingly authored the creed for generations of leaders who would treat public funds as private spoils. These were not offhand remarks but ideological blueprints, encoding a worldview where power centralized, dissent was criminalized, and the marginalized were told to subsist on slogans.
Gowon’s words gain darker hues when juxtaposed with his actions. Consider his 1970 pledge to “bind the wounds” of the Igbo people while enforcing the Abandoned Property Policy that dispossessed them. Or his lament about military ambition (“every colonel or general is soon full of ambition”) even as he clung to power for nine years, delaying democracy until his own ousting. Scholars like Chinua Achebe, in There Was a Country, and Wole Soyinka, in The Open Sore of a Continent, have dissected this dissonance – the gap between Gowon’s conciliatory language and the systemic violence it masked. His quotes, when studied alongside policies like the 12-state creation (which Balkanized minority groups) and the suppression of the Aburi Accord (which rejected regional autonomy), expose a pattern: words as anesthetic, dulling the pain of structural betrayal.
This essay, drawing from historical records, survivor testimonies, and critical scholarship, positions Gowon’s rhetoric as the foundation of Nigeria’s enduring crisis. His speeches were not mere reflections of his era but active agents in shaping Nigeria’s political imagination. When he declared, “The wealth of a nation is not in its oil or minerals, but in its people,” while allowing the Niger Delta’s oil to flow through pipelines that bypassed its starving communities, he perfected a form of cognitive dissonance that still governs Nigerian leadership. To appraise Gowon through his words is not to judge him alone, but to trace how language can calcify into policy, how slogans can become shackles, and how a nation’s loftiest ideals can be weaponized against its most vulnerable.
In the end, Gowon’s quotes are more than historical artifacts – they are mirrors. They reflect the Nigeria that was, the Nigeria that is, and the Nigeria that might yet be if it dares to reconcile the promises of its past with the bloodstains they left behind. As we dissect these words, we do not merely critique a man, but autopsy a nation’s soul.
Growing up in the 1980s under Nigeria’s military regimes felt like living in a room where someone kept dimming the lights. The government, still shaped by Gowon’s obsession with control, wanted us to see Nigeria only one way – their way. In school, we chanted “One Nigeria!” like robots, while our history books remained mute about the Civil War and turning Igbo tragedy into a bland story about “mistakes,” erasing the pain of those who lost homes and loved ones. But even then, something in me pushed back. I craved the Nigeria I heard about from older relatives – a place of vibrancy, wit and neighbors who laughed together despite their differences became an illusion and an aspiration.
I found scraps of that Nigeria in hidden places. In dusty bookshelves where I dug out old novels with cracked spines, Ekwensis’s “Jaguar Nana” and Achebe’s “ The Man of the People”. Their pages told stories of politicians, hustlers, and everyday people – flawed, funny, and real. These books felt dangerous, like secrets, because they showed a Nigeria that questioned authority instead of blindly obeying. The government wanted us to think of ourselves as lucky citizens of a perfect nation, but these stories whispered: We’ve always been messy, and that’s okay.
Even small moments defied the regime’s gloom. At Federal School Of Arts and Science [FSAS] Ogoja, where I was then, friends staged plays in backyards, their jokes about greedy leaders making us snicker nervously. In postwar Enugu, market traders shared stories of the war disguised as bedtime tales for children, their voices dropping when soldiers walked by. These weren’t just stories – they were lifelines. They proved that Gowon’s “unity” was a lie. You can’t force people to forget who they are.
But the shadows lingered. In Port Harcourt whilst on an excursion, I met an Igbo family living in a half-collapsed house – home stolen from them after the war,they said. The government had promised to “heal” the nation, but all we got were empty slogans and more soldiers patrolling the streets in most major Igbo cities. Their idea of peace was forced silence.
My notebooks then became my rebellion. I filled it with fragments of the Nigeria they tried to bury. These were proof that our past couldn’t be erased. Gowon’s “One Nigeria” tried to smother us under rules and restrictions, but we kept poking holes in the blanket, letting in slivers of light. They told us to move on, but we kept digging – not for treasure, but for truth.
In Igbo cosmology, the masquerade is sacred – a bridge between the living and the ancestors, cloaked in mystery and power. To derobe and unmask one especially in the market square is an act of exposure and sacrilege; it is a cosmic stripping of authority, a public reckoning with the mortal beneath the myth. “The masquerade has been derobed and unmasked in the market square,” Igbo Elders often say. Such is the fate of Gowon today. The once-revered general, draped in the regalia of statesmanship, now stands exposed – a mortal man dwarfed by the consequences of his choices, his legacy laid bare in the harsh light of history’s judgment.
The “market square” here is Nigeria itself – a nation now forced to confront the hollowness of Gowon’s unifying rhetoric. His state structure, sold as a panacea for tribalism, fractured the South East and South-South and threw the Middle Belt into warring factions. The Ngas, Tiv, and Berom – communities he might have uplifted – were instead abandoned to the whims of a centralized state that prioritized oil wealth over agrarian dignity. His post-war “reconciliation” became a euphemism for amnesia, a refusal to prosecute wartime atrocities that emboldened future generations of power brokers to act with impunity. The market square, once a stage for his performative unity, now thrums with the cries of the butchered: What good is a nation kept one, if its people cannot recognize themselves in its reflection?
Gowon’s unmasking is both symbolic and visceral. In Plateau State, mass graves overflow with victims of raids that bear the fingerprints of his failures. The 2001 Jos riots, the 2023 Christmas massacres in Bokkos, the systemic land grabs disguised as religious conflict – all are threads woven with indifference. His silence today mirrors his silence then: when Middle Belt leaders begged for federal intervention, when whispers of genocide first slithered into public discourse. To witness Gowon now, grinning at state banquets while Benue farmers bury their children, is to see a masquerade stripped of its sequins, its wooden frame splintered by the weight of its own contradictions.
On another level, the Igbo proverb cuts deeper still. For Ndigbo, who endured the brunt of Gowon’s wartime policies – the starvation blockades, the razing of villages – his unmasking is both vindication and indictment. It vindicates their decades-old claim that Nigeria’s unity was built on a foundation of lies; it indicts a nation that still refuses to atone. Yet even this reckoning is incomplete. The Middle Belt’s suffering, that most Nigerians see as karmic retribution for its role in the civil war, reveals a darker truth: Gowon’s Nigeria is a Uroboros, a snake devouring its own tail. The violence he unleashed in the Southeast now consumes his homeland, a grotesque cycle of debt and retribution where the only creditors are the dead.
To derobe Gowon is not to diminish his humanity but to demand accountability for his mythmaking. The man who once declared, “To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done,” now faces a task he cannot outsource to history: to speak, to confess, to reckon. For if the market square has unmasked him, it is only because his people – the butchered, the displaced, the forgotten – have already written his verdict in blood. The tragedy is not that the masquerade has fallen, but that it took so long for the nation to see the face behind the mask.
History, ever restless, continues to script his verdict without him. The systematic erasure of his people, the mass graves dotting the Middle Belt, the whispered accusations of complicity – all unfold in the shadow of his unwritten memoir. Gowon, once the author of Nigeria’s fate, now exists as a marginal note in a text he no longer controls. His legacy, like the nation he sought to unite, remains fractured – a mosaic of silence and sound, action and absence, where the loudest voice is the one he never chose to use.
The Easter of 2025 – a season meant to symbolize resurrection and hope – instead baptized Plateau and Benue in fresh blood, as over 150 lives were extinguished by marauders armed with the same impunity Gowon’s Nigeria institutionalized. The grim headlines – “Sombre Easter As Over 150 Residents Slain In Plateau, Benue” – are not anomalies but footnotes in a decades-long saga of systemic failure. President Tinubu’s distant condemnation, issued from Paris, echoed the hollow rhetoric of leaders past: “Forces of evil will never prevail over our country.” Yet evil has already prevailed – in the charred villages, the mass graves, the hollowed-out eyes of displaced families. Tinubu’s platitudes, like Gowon’s “no victor, no vanquished,” ring as empty as the promises of a jester who knows his audience has stopped listening.
Opposition leaders Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, in their scathing critiques of Tinubu’s inertia, unwittingly indict a lineage of leadership failure stretching back to Gowon. Atiku’s accusation – “utterly incapable, wholly incompetent, and completely devoid of any coherent ideas” – could just as easily describe the post-war vacuum Gowon left in the Middle Belt. When Obi declares, “Enough is enough,” he channels the fury of generations for whom “enough” came and went with the 1967 state creations, the 1970s oil booms, the unprosecuted massacres of the 2000s. The Benue and Plateau of 2025 are still paying for Gowon’s original sin: a centralized state that elevated political theater over material justice, leaving minority communities to fight for scraps under the banner of a unity that never included them.
Governor Caleb Mutfwang’s plea – “over 60 communities have been taken over by land-grabbing criminals” – is a direct indictment of Gowon’s legacy. The “land-grabbing” Mutfwang decries is not new; it is the culmination of a half-century of federal neglect, a relic of Gowon’s refusal to codify land rights or protect ancestral territories from predation. The marauders swarming Benue and Plateau today are heirs to the same structural violence Gowon enabled: herders pushed south by desertification, yes, but also by a state that has always viewed the Middle Belt as collateral in its quest for stability. Tinubu’s directive to “end insecurity decisively” reeks of the same militarized Band-Aids Gowon applied – sending soldiers to quell symptoms while ignoring the disease.
Even the Senate President’s Easter appeal – “respect the sacredness of human life” – feels grotesque against the backdrop of history. Godswill Akpabio’s call for unity is a pantomime, a script Gowon himself might have penned. What “sacredness” exists in a nation that has never acknowledged the sacredness of the Igbo children starved under Gowon’s blockade, the Berom farmers slaughtered on ancestral soil, the Plateau villagers now labeled “casualties” in security reports? The hypocrisy is ancestral: leaders who invoke Christ’s resurrection while presiding over the burial of whole communities.
The IGP’s order to “enhance visibility policing” is perhaps the most damning proof of Nigeria’s cyclical farce. After decades of mass killings, what good is “visibility”? The police, like the 12-state structure Gowon designed, are a prop in this theatre of shadows – meant to be seen, not to act. When marauders scribble “No more Irigwe in Nigeria” on blood-smeared walls, they are not criminals to be policed but actors in a play Gowon staged long ago: the erasure of “troublesome” minorities in service to a hollow national myth.
Gowon’s silence today mirrors Tinubu’s absence in Paris – both men orbiting the carnage, never touching it. The 90-year-old general, once a wartime hero, now exists as a living monument to Nigeria’s refusal to confront itself. His unwritten memoir is not a personal failing but a national crime: a void where truth should be, a darkness where light is owed. The Easter massacres of 2025 are not mere news items. They are epitaphs for Gowon’s Nigeria – a nation resurrected yearly in rhetoric, only to be crucified anew on the cross of its founder’s lies.
Gowon, now merely a relic in a museum of illusions, understands too late: the greatest tragedy is not death, but to endure as a punchline in a joke no one laughs at anymore.
As the death toll mounts – 2,600 lives erased in Benue per Amnesty International’s damning 2025 report – the ghost of Gowon’s Nigeria looms large, its fingerprints smeared across the blood-soaked soil of the Middle Belt. These are more than statistics; they are verdicts. Each number – a child buried in the rubble of a shuttered school, a woman butchered on ancestral farmland, a community reduced to ash – is an indictment of the structural violence Gowon institutionalized. The Amnesty report, with its cold, clinical precision, lays bare the human cost of a nation built on performative unity: 55 schools destroyed, generations of education extinguished, thousands displaced into the purgatory of IDP camps. This is not insecurity; it is genocide by attrition, a slow-motion erasure Gowon set in motion when he reduced the Middle Belt to a chessboard for his wartime gambits.
What would Gowon say to the mothers of Benue, whose children now haunt the ruins of classrooms he failed to build? How would he justify a legacy where “keeping Nigeria one” meant severing the bonds between a people and their land, their future, their dignity? The Amnesty report’s call to “address root causes” is a mirror held up to his rule – a rule that treated symptoms with slogans and left festering wounds to rot. His post-war “3Rs” program, a masterclass in cosmetic governance, rebuilt some bridges but not trust, some hospitals but not hope. Today, as schools crumble and marauders dance on graves, we see the harvest of those half-measures: a nation where violence is the only language left to the disinherited.
Gowon’s defenders might argue he cannot be blamed for the failures of successors, but this is evasion. The “root causes” Amnesty demands we confront – land dispossession, political marginalization, systemic impunity – are weeds that took root in the soil of his policies. When Amnesty notes that “women and children” bear the brunt of this violence, it echoes the Igbo mothers who starved under his blockade – a grim symmetry of sacrifice demanded always from the powerless.
The report’s timing, released on the eve of another Easter massacre, is a cosmic rebuke. As Tinubu’s government recycles Gowon-era platitudes about “forces of evil,” the world now bears witness to Nigeria’s unending tragedy. Amnesty’s global platform transforms Benue’s agony from a “local crisis” to an international scandal, exposing the lie of Nigeria’s post-war “unity.” Gowon, once feted as a statesman on the global stage, must now confront his role in scripting this horror – a horror that stains not just Nigeria’s conscience, but his own.
His silence, as ever, deafens. Will he dismiss Amnesty’s findings as “foreign interference,” as his successors do? Or will he finally reckon with the truth that his “detribalized” rhetoric was always a masquerade, one that cloaked the dehumanization of minorities in the pageantry of nationalism? The 2,600 dead in Benue are more than casualties; they are prophets. Their blood cries out from the earth, demanding the unmasking of every lie that sustained Gowon’s theatre. The jester’s crown slips further – what remains is the face of a man who gambled a nation’s soul and lost.
Gowon’s silence today is his loudest confession. An elder now, he glides through life now as a living monument to unspoken sins. When various reports expose the slaughter Nigerians in various parts in an ever increasing terrorist attack – mostly women and children – it is not an anomaly but an epitaph. Schools reduced to rubble, generations stripped of education, villages erased from maps – these are not failures of security but the climax of his legacy. The same federal troops that bombed Biafran hospitals now idle as the middle belt and more than half of the North burns, their indifference a relic of Decree No. 28, Gowon’s 1975 edict placing his government “above the law.” Power, he taught Nigeria and Nigerians, is a weapon to wield, not a trust to steward.
Centralization, one of the reasons they killed Ironsi, was his gospel. By hoarding oil wealth and gutting local governance, he turned the state into a predator, feasting on the resources of the marginalized. The Middle Belt’s minerals, the Delta’s oil, the North’s grain – all flowed to Lagos, leaving hinterlands to rot. When marauders swarm Benue and the rest of the country today, they are not only seizing land but exploiting a void – a state that exists to extract, not protect.
Gowon’s Nigeria was a hall of mirrors which still exists today. The “unity” he brandished hides mass graves. His regime birthed today’s ethnic warlords; his wasted oil boom birthed today’s thieves. Even his persona – the detribalized Christian from Plateau – is a riddle. How does a son of the Middle Belt watch his kin butchered, decade after decade, and still call this nation “one”? The answer lies in the quiet treachery of compromise: he traded their future for a seat at the table, and now the table drowns in blood.
To understand Nigeria’s pain, study Gowon’s blueprint. The boy who vowed to glue the shattered vase became the man who scattered its pieces. His unwritten memoir is Nigeria’s unwritten truth – a past buried but never dead. Until this nation confronts the ghosts he left, the cycle will spin: children will play on fresh graves, generals will chant old slogans, and the vase, forever broken, will cut anyone who dares to hold it.
Adewunmi J. Falode, Ph.D. & Bolarinwa J. Olusegun, Ph.D wrote a piece titled A Reconstructor and Nation-Builder: General Yakubu Gowon and Socio-Political. Development in Nigeria, 1966–1975, where they strenuously tried to sanitise the Gowon years.
Some quotes from Falode and Olusegun’s “A Reconstructor and Nation-Builder” presents Gowon’s post-war policies as compassionate and unifying, citing his “magnanimity” toward defeated Biafrans and international praise for his peacemaking. Yet this framing clashes starkly with my lived experiences as I have argued inthis essay: that Gowon’s “reconciliation” was less about healing than theatrical statecraft, a performance of unity that masked systemic exclusion. The authors’ claim that Gowon’s administration was “compassionate” and driven by a “desire to build a functional and cohesive Nigeria” echoes the regime’s own propaganda – slogans like “Go-On-With-One-Nigeria” that papered over unaddressed wounds.
Falode and Olusegun rightly note that post-war Nigeria needed rebuilding, not just reform. Their comparison of Gowon to Lincoln and Ataturk – leaders who reconstructed nations after civil wars – highlights his fatal flaw: Gowon prioritized symbolic gestures (e.g., appointing Igbo administrators) over structural justice. As this essay has argued, his “3Rs” program rebuilt roads but not trust, hospitals but not hope. The Abandoned Property Policy, which seized Igbo homes and businesses, contradicted his “magnanimity” myth, entrenching economic apartheid that still marginalizes the Southeast today. Falode and Olusegun’s praise of Gowon’s “compassion” ignores how his policies – centralized control, resource hoarding, and historical amnesia – planted seeds for today’s crises: the Niger Delta’s oil rebellions, the Middle Belt’s genocide, and the Igbo’s lingering alienation.
Their reference to John de St. Jorre’s praise – “the black man has little to teach us about making war but a real contribution in making peace” – exemplifies the international community’s willful blindness. To outsiders, Gowon’s “peace” looked noble; to those of us living its aftermath, it felt like suffocation. As Chinua Achebe wrote in “There Was a Country”, Gowon’s Nigeria demanded the Igbo “sing the national anthem louder” to prove their loyalty, while denying them the right to mourn. My view aligns with J. Isawa Elaigwu’s observation (cited by Falode and Olusegun) that Gowon acted as a “reformer” rather than a “rebuilder.” Reform implies tweaking systems; rebuilding requires dismantling rot. Gowon chose the former, leaving Nigeria’s foundational fractures – ethnic hierarchy, resource greed, militarized governance – to metastasize.
This analysis dovetails with the essay’s conclusion: Gowon’s “One Nigeria” was a Faustian bargain, unity purchased with silence. His “compassion” was a performance, his “reconstruction” a facade. As Falode and Olusegun inadvertently reveal, even scholarly appraisals of his regime often parrot its slogans, mistaking rhetoric for reality. The true test of “nation-building” lies not in foreign applause but in the lived dignity of the marginalized – a test Gowon’s Nigeria, then and now, continues to fail.
But let us dispense with academic detachment. Let us speak plainly: I am angry with Gowon. Angry at his silence, his prevarications, his refusal to confront the wreckage of history he helped engineer. Angry that he parades as a marquee decoration at high-profile events – a masquerade for hire, swaddled in crisp agbadas and hollow platitudes – while the people of Plateau and Benue and many more communities across the Middle Belt and South East bleed. Millions have died, villages reduced to ash, yet he remains mute, a relic polishing his myth while the South East and the Middle Belt specifically drowns in a genocide rebranded as “farmer-herder clashes.” His refusal to write his memoir, to unwind the tangled threads of his decisions, is not mere evasion – it is a betrayal. By clinging to silence, he condemns Nigeria to a future shackled to half-truths, where the voids in our history boil into fresh violence.
What good is an elder statesman who speaks only in catchphrases? Who reduces himself to a prop in the very theatre of power he once dominated? Gowon’s Nigeria – a nation he molded with wartime urgency – has become a funhouse mirror of his failures. The man who promised unity sowed division; the unifier became a bystander to erasure.
To speak of Yakubu Gowon is to trace the contours of a nation’s soul – a soul fractured long before he took power, yet reshaped indelibly by his hands. This is not an indictment of the man alone, but a meditation on the Nigeria he inherited, the Nigeria he molded, and the Nigeria that now staggers beneath the weight of compounded choices. Gowon did not conjure our demons from nothing; he inherited a colonial Frankenstein stitched together by British greed, its seams already straining with ethnic suspicion and economic disparity. But like a sculptor handed clay already cracked, his touch – however well-intentioned – hardened the fissures into permanence.
The Nigeria Gowon led was a storm in search of a lightning rod. When he fragmented the regions into 12 states in 1967, he sought to quell a rebellion but ignited a thousand smaller ones. His “No Victor, No Vanquished” mantra, noble in theory, became a blanket thrown over smoldering embers – denying oxygen to the fire but ensuring it would smoke for generations. The oil boom, that dizzying windfall of the 1970s, could have been a bridge to unity. Instead, under his watch, it became a moat, separating the privileged from the damned. Lagos rose in glass and steel; the Niger Delta drowned in oil slicks; the Middle Belt simmered in neglect. Gowon’s Nigeria was not the origin of our sickness, but it was the moment the fever spiked.
Today, as marauders sack villages and politicians peddle Band-Aid solutions, I see echoes of his playbook: centralize power, mute dissent with slogans, let the periphery burn. The seeds of our present chaos – land grabs framed as “ethnic clashes,” corruption masquerading as federalism – were sown in his era. Yet to blame Gowon alone is to ignore the ghosts that preceded him: Lugard’s arbitrary borders, Azikiwe’s and Awolowo’s compromised idealism, the British poison of divide-and-rule. Nigeria’s curse is generational, a relay race of trauma where each leader passes the baton of failure.
But here lies the paradox: Gowon, perhaps more than any other, crystallized the modern Nigerian state. His wartime ruthlessness, his post-war paternalism, his centralizing decrees – they built the scaffolding for today’s dysfunction. To study him is to study our DNA. The child soldiers of the Niger Delta, the genocidal whispers in Plateau, the Igbo entrepreneur still eyed with suspicion – all are characters in a story he helped draft.
This reflection is not a verdict but a mirror. I stitch these truths from threads of lived memory, historical record, and the screams of today’s headlines. Gowon’s Nigeria is a river; we swim in its currents still. To dam it, we must first map its source – not to curse the past, but to navigate the rapids ahead. For better or worse, he shaped the vessel. We, the living, must now decide if it sails toward open waters or circles endlessly in the storm he weathered – and we endure.
In his twilight years, Gowon’s rebirth as a genial elder statesman completes the paradox. The man who once greenlit blockades to starve Biafran children now quotes Psalms about mercy, his piety a polished shield against historical reckoning. His refusal to confront the human cost of his wartime decisions – to apologize, to explain, to mourn – mirrors Nigeria’s own addiction to amnesia. The nation, like its former leader, prefers the comfort of selective memory to the scalpel of truth.
Yet Gowon’s greatest legacy lies not in his policies but in the precedents he set: that power could be centralized with impunity, that dissent could be crushed under the banner of unity, that the marginalized could be told to subsist on promises. His Nigeria – a theatre of shadows where slogans masked suffering – remains our Nigeria. The generals and politicians who followed, from Babangida to Buhari, are merely actors reciting lines from his script, their coups and corruption plot points in his unfinished play.
To conclude this interrogation is not to condemn Gowon alone, but to recognize him as the archetype of Nigeria’s ruling class – a class that conflates survival with leadership, control with vision, silence with wisdom. Until Nigeria confronts the ghosts he left – the unmarked graves of Biafra, the stolen lands of the East, the simmering rage of the Middle Belt – it will remain a nation haunted by his choices. Gowon’s symphony, unresolved and echoing, demands a final movement: one where the living finally compose their own future, no longer shackled to the discordant past he orchestrated.
Gowon is a tragic Jester. A man who danced to the tune of national unity while his people burned. His theatre is collapsing around him, the shadows he once manipulated are now swallowing the stage. The laughter has died; only the echoes of grief remain. This essay is an autopsy of his rule, but a scream into the void: a demand that history’s chaperone – relentless and unsparing – strip away the masks. Let Gowon speak, let him reckon, before death silences him and his secrets forever. Let his silence no longer mock the graves of the forgotten. For in the end, a jester’s greatest folly is not his act, but his delusion that the audience cannot see the strings.
Follow us on all social media platforms @dailyquery for news and analyses around the globe.
