Every day came with new limitations, new prisons. Perhaps some of these limitations would have been endurable if one could have found a moral basis on which to be loyal to the military rulers, if one could somehow have believed in the mission they were set on. (Like the Ghanaians had in the early years of Rawlins, or the Nigerians themselves had in 1984–5 under the regime of General Muhammadu Buhari and Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon.) But there was nothing to believe in: the only mission the military rulers had was systematically to loot the national treasury; their only morality was a vicious survivalist agenda in which any hint of disloyalty was ruthlessly crushed.

But the funny thing is that the military first entered Nigerian politics as messiahs, to save the people from the squandermania and blatant ethnic rivalries of the civilians (or so they claimed). The first putsch in Nigeria occurred on 15 January 1966. It was staged by a band of young military officers, led by Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, against the civilian government that had come to power after the departure of the British colonialists six years earlier. The coup was one of the bloodiest in Nigerian history, with the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the Northern Premier, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and a lot of other prominent first republic politicians, mainly from the North, losing their lives. The coup failed and General Ironsi, the most senior army officer, became the new leader.

But Ironsi’s choice was unfortunate; it only served to heighten ethnic tension instead of reducing it. Ironsi, like Nzeogwu, was Ibo, and a lot of Hausa officers, to whose ethnic group the late Prime Minister had belonged, saw this as an attempt by the Ibo to dominate the country by force. The Northern officers staged a counter coup, during which General Ironsi and many Southern officers were killed. It was this succession of events that culminated in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of 1967–70.

The war, more than anything else, served to entrench the military in Nigerian political affairs – because of this, General Gowon’s regime, which succeeded Ironsi and which executed the civil war, lasted a whole nine years. This was followed by the regime of General Murtala and General Obasanjo, which managed to return power to the civilians in 1980. From Ironsi to Obasanjo, the military had ruled for an unbroken period of fourteen years. The Second Republic that ensued lasted only four years, October 1980 to December 1984. But the Buhari–Idiagbon military government that ousted Shagari’s Second Republic was in turn ousted by General Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) in a palace coup the following year.