Anyone that read just the title of this article might walk away with the impression that I had been converted to the Obasanjo school of dubiety, which was the primary target of the bile of the jilted collaborator in the long-drawn history of misrule that has hobbled Nigeria since independence, Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma. Curiously, it was because of the sordid revelations that were likely to waft from the no-love-lost struggle between these two, now estranged co-conspirators and unbridled chance-takers in the quest to despoil and lay waste a country so richly blessed as Nigeria, that made me buy The Guardian on Sunday, February 17, 2008, where Danjuma tried to explain some of the nefarious actions that still trail him several years after he has subdued Igbo and earned his loot from our common patrimony. I wanted to actually relish the fight between these renegades that have negatively defined the charred course the country had been crashed into since independence.

But to, the most interesting part of that valedictory kiss-and-tell interview was Danjuma’s puerile attempt to weave through his complicit betrayal and killing of General Aguiyi Ironsi and his vain attempt to hide his traditional bile against Ndigbo in that interview. In an attempt to bury his treacherous past and present himself in debonair, clean lights, Danjuma didn’t know when he actually veered into expressing his well-known insipid hatred for Ndigbo when he recalled how Peter Pan Enahoro wrote that the executors of the January 1966 coup be released because they were heroes that dealt with a rampaging cult of political and economic predators; a truth Danjuma and his co-champions of ethnic chauvinism have striven all their adult life to deny and infact turn to a mass holocaust against the Igbo.

When Danjuma was demanded to throw some light on the well-known fact that he conspired, betrayed and indeed led the brutal assassination of his principal, then Head of State, General Aguyi Ironsi, his manliness deserted him as he wangled through the most vacuous and tepid lie I have ever read, to deny and pass bucks in a fact that has been well-explored by those that knew the bizarre treachery of a man that has written his name in the disastrous books of cunning betrayers that strut the country’s landscape.

In the Guardian interview, Danjuma denied ever knowing anything about the bloody putsch that led to the death of Ironsi and the senseless massacre of thousands of Igbo officers and millions of defenseless civilians, which led to the civil war. But the more he denied his involvement, the more he implicated himself by the awkward answers he gave to exonerate himself. He said he was on the entourage of the Head of State, which was on a country-wide tour to calm frayed nerves after the January 1966 coup, that they were in Ibadan to meet the South West opinion leaders and that after the meeting, they retired for the night but that at 1.00am on July 29, a certain Major Garba Paiko, the Adjutant of the Army woke him up to intimate him of developments in Abeokuta where he reported that some Igbo military officers who were meeting were set upon by certain non-Igbo officers and brutally massacred. Danjuma went further to say that he asked the Adjutant if the ‘Supreme Commander’, meaning Ironsi, had been informed of the development to which the Adjutant answered in the negative. He, Danjuma, then elected to inform Ironsi but in very bizarre circumstances, which his attempt to weave through his thick layer of duplicitous lies never sufficiently covered. He armed himself with a grenade and asked for troop reinforcement and went to ‘inform’ the Head of State. He further said that after arresting all the military details attached to Ironsi, he confronted the then military governor of the South West, Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, whom he arrested and who extracted the promise of safety for his guest, Ironsi, after which Danjuma said he went to meet Ironsi. In a bid to drive home his bravado, he said he ordered Ironsi to stand up as he informed him that he was under arrest. He further tried to mumble the facts by saying he lost control at this stage and that he was abandoned by the mutinous ethnic janjaweed, with whom he went to ‘inform’ Ironsi of developments in Abeokuta. He said that the soldiers drove away with Ironsi. The rest, as is often said, is history; a history Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, a man that stands out for his rabid anti-Igbo bile, is now trying to twist and obfuscate to promote his own selfish interests.

I had gone this far to bring out the shameful concoctions Danjuma indulged in to offload the can of worms that trail him after he elected to become the champion of the North’s bloody quest for vengeance and a purveyor for ethnic hate and perpetrator of perhaps the most bloody holocaust that dot the West African sub region till date. Danjuma did little to hide his deep involvement in the entire deadly plot to wipe out an entire race a.l.a the Tutsi style. In the course of putting up his sloppy defence over the killings of Ironsi and Igbo military officers and civilians in 1966, Danjuma might not have known when he slipped into the reasons why he and his vindictive ilk that included Murtala Muhammad, planned the pogrom that tailspinned into the civil war in 1967. While trying to clear his name of the well-known indictment over kindling the tongs of senseless killings of Igbo in Nigeria, Danjuma said that the reprisal killings which he and his fellow Janjaweeds planned came about because the executors of the January 15, 1966 coup were not prosecuted while “the newspapers including the Daily Times, in fact Peter Enahoro, who was named Peter Pan, in his Sunday newspaper (wrote a column) to the effect that the boys being detained were national heroes. National heroes because they killed corrupt politicians. He didn’t say anything about Army Officers…. they killed corrupt politicians and replaced them with Ironsi whom we call Iron-side”.

In another answer as to why the senseless massacre of Igbo in 1966 and his betrayal of his principal happened, the die-hard traitor said, “We didn’t return fire immediately. We gave Ironsi a chance to deal with the people who killed our seniors. He did not. Then foolish people like (Peter Pan) Enahoro were talking about national heroes-that people who did the killings were national heroes”. The deadly plot was further driven home when Danjuma, an ethnic warlord whose military career was earned from plotting treachery and carrying out bloody massacres of Igbo military officers and civilians, both before and during the civil war, dismissed Ironsi, Nigeria’s first Major General who earned his rank from commanding top UN missions, as in then Congo-Brazzaville, as a ‘useless desk clerk general’. Apart from putting the final nail on Danjuma’s futile rigmarole to whitewash and polish his well-known and well-documented ignoble and dirty role in Nigeria’s history, this last assertion proved the fact that it still remains the lots of a Nigeria, which with a flotilla of armada from Britain, USSR and the United States, crushed the deviant Baifrans who were fighting a war against the world with their local inventions, to write the history of the civil war. Danjuma is doing it in his traditional bile-full, anti-Igbo way. There is nothing wrong with it. He has the privilege because this is Nigeria where mobility is assured by narrow pursuance of ethnic and divisive tendencies, as the Danjuma’s have proved.

But I had expected Danjuma to thump his chest and continue boasting of how he annihilated the Igbo and had Nigeria for himself and would therefore decide who gets what in Nigeria. He had been doing this since he retreated into the background to manipulate and share booty after his glorious outing against Ndigbo in 1970. That was why this shameless vampire vowed to go into exile if Obasanjo, his co-partaker in the booty-sharing business who also earned his commission massacring Igbo, was not rigged into power in 1999. This is why he is today embroiled in a deadly struggle with that Frankenstein monster after a blissful romance that saw him add several choice oil blocks to his corrupt portfolio. I didn’t expect an elderly Danjuma to cowardly hide his tail and adopt the kind of spineless cock-and-bull stories he invented in explaining his role in the killing of Ironsi. I had expected a Danjuma that has grown trenchantly tribalistic, caustically audacious in issues that concern Igbo and seemingly inoculated against the anger and feelings of Ndigbo, to thump his chest and admit that yes, he killed Ironsi and massacred the Igbo in their millions for there lies his claim to military prowess! What is the big deal there? Why should Danjuma be trying to hide behind his finger in explaining what the whole world knows was his role in the dirty developments that led to the 30-months civil war? Does age come with fear such that Danjuma is no longer man enough to admit his deeds, as he previously did? I wonder why Danjuma’s courage fled this time that he became a boneless invertebrate that cannot mobilize enough courage to admit his acts but resort to one huge cocktail of fairy tales, hardly agreeing fallacies and very contradictory narratives to explain his treacherous roles in 1966, which was in pursuance of his narrow and vindictive pro-north interest. From The Guardian interview, Danjuma was desperately managing to weave his facts to favour him but try as he did, he never succeeded in hiding his hatred and contempt for Ndigbo and Ironsi and this raw bile gave him away. The fact that is known and which had been repeatedly stressed by all those that witnessed the sordid accounts of what happened in July 1966 was that Danjuma was the ringleader of the uprising and the massacre of Igbo all over Nigeria. In doing this, he believed that he was fighting the cause of the ethnic North, practically annihilating the Igbo and securing his own place in the vulture-infested country of his dream.

Then, one would be forced to ask Danjuma what remains after the mauling of the Igbo. What next for Danjuma and his co-rapists who are now embroiled in a deadly battle for the booties of the conquest; a struggle that sparked the bitter vituperations of Danjuma against Obasanjo, in the first instance? Pray, where are Danjuma’s people in all these? I mean the victorious Nigerians that were united in one bloody orgy of fun as Danjuma and his fellow mullahs ran riot and smoked the Igbo? What is in all this for Danjuma’s North, still wrapped in the most debilitating privations ever seen by mankind while the Danjuma’s employ their names to kill others and loot the common patrimony in the process? Strictly speaking, can Danjuma, despite his vain gloating over the Igbo, claim that his people are better off today than the conquered Igbo despite the individual loot he had curried out of a lifetime business of hating and killing Igbo, and scheming and positioning with fellow marauders, which peaked with the seizure of his oil license by Obasanjo, which set him on his present self-propelled battle against Obasanjo?

But without stretching the issue further, I know that Danjuma is suffering the inner torture that comes ordinarily from his penchant for treachery and betrayal. He is dying with the blood of Ironsi on his very bloody hand and no wonky and dawdy attempt to befuddle the truth about how Ironsi died in the hands of a traitor called Danjuma will bail him from his fate. I heard he is already a psychiatric case and if you add that to his present booty war with Obasanjo, you would easily see a disastrous case in our hands. Let Danjuma exercise the greatest sense of restraint in seeking to continue insulting the Igbo, who are still bearing the brunt of his actions. He should warm up to the fact he will live and die with the blood of Ironsi and the millions of Igbo whose massacre he engineered, in his hands and nothing, not even the most potent detergent will wash him clean!

Peter Claver Oparah.

Ikeja, Lagos.

E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 Anyone that read just the title of this article might walk away with the impression that I had b...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 25.02.2008 11:33

Willy  Villager

# 2 Peter, It goes without saying that I almost always agree with you, and I do so on this matter, however, there are issues that we must consider in order that another Danjuma does not afflict us as a people and/or country. The first is that Danjuma has an Igbo title along the lines of military valour, who gave him that title, what have Igbos done to the criminal that did so? The second is that Danjuma's picture hangs in the livingroom of the house of the man widely believed to be the first Igbo medical doctor at Enugu, same Danjuma is godfather of a child of that home and I know for certain that he used his leverage on Godwin Abbe (former governor of Rivers and his erstwhile staff) to get back some of the PH "abandoned properties" of this illustrous family. If these two actions, clearly selfish and narrow minded among others are not resolved among our people, more Danjumas will spring on us in our life time. Cheers and do keep them coming Posted by Willy| 25.02.2008 13:03

nike  Villager

# 3 What baffles me is how a whole group of people can stand-by and let this spineless hyena, collectively heap insults on them. Is it that collectively we do not have the balls to take on this coward who betrayed his commanding officer, a commanding officer who thought enough of the coward (danjuma) to entrust him with the protection of his life. He has commited the ultimate betrayal and yet he bestrides the Nigerian and Igbo lanscape like a collosus. I very much doubt that this traitrous scum would be alive today if he committed the same betrayal against a Yoruba or an Housa. Yet he is alive and well today and has enough confidence in his miserable skulking cowardly self to make these kinds of irresponsible statements that have been attributed to him. The shame is on us not on him!!! Posted by nike| 25.02.2008 16:11