By Chuks Iloegbunam
Chief Victor Umeh, the Senator representing Anambra Central at the National Assembly, has instituted a lodestar that must henceforward be emulated by all legislators from the South East geopolitical zone, whether serving in their states of origin or Abuja. Last week, Senator Umeh called General Yakubu Gowon, Head of State of Nigeria from August 1966 to July 1975 to order.
He told Gowon that he owed Ndigbo an unreserved apology, the absence of which is at the root of the nation’s enduring instability.
What had Gowon done wrong? For the third time since October, when he turned 90, the man has, in three public statements on the Nigerian condition, demonstrated that appropriating the truth was beyond his competence. Had he heard of and listened to Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), Gowon would have remembered the German philosopher’s warning that, “By a lie a man throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity as a man.” Just by the one lie, warned Kant. Of Gowon, however, the dreadful reality is his preponderance of concocting a legion of barefaced lies, a chronic incapability to face the truth, even for one millisecond.
General Gowon granted an interview to the Daily Trust on October 19, 2024. He spoke again on June 7, 2025, when he was honoured for, believe it or not, “Integrity and Achievement” by a Christian body of the Abuja Anglican Diocese. Finally, on June 18, he granted Arise TV an 80-minute interview. It raises eyebrows that a man central to Nigeria’s contemporary history, who had remained taciturn since his ejection from power half a century ago, has suddenly become enamoured of mass media profusion. It is astonishing that in all three of the cited interventions, he reiterated his proclivity to distort the truth to the imperatives of his sectional political agenda.
Among the living, the questions Gowon is best suited to answer are only a handful. What happened during the coup d’état of January 1966? What happened during the countercoup d’état of July 1966? How did he, as Nigeria’s commander-in-chief, prosecute the Biafran war? What is his scorecard as the country’s leader for nine years? What is the state of the country he bequeathed to posterity? Unfortunately, his answers to these inerasable questions fly in the face of logic and veracity.
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