Category: History – Civil War
-
John Nanzip Shagaya; Soldier, administrator who served as minister of internal affairs, 1985-91 under General Ibrahim Babangida’s military regime. Shagaya was born September 2, 1943 in Langtang, Plateau Stat. Shagaya had been one of General Babangida’s boys, so much so that the Head of State accompanied him to the bestownment upon him of a traditional…
-
Odumegwu Ojukwu; Army officer, listed in the Nigerian Army in 1957 and rising through the ranks to become the military governor of the Nigeria Eastern Region in 1966. Ojukwu was the chief secessionist of the defunct Republic of Biafra, which he declared shortly after failed effort to broker peace with Head of State, Yakwubu Gowon…
-
Third Marine Commando; Nigerian military unit and a major player in the Nigerian civil war, representing an important portion in the Nigerian history, especially between 1967 and 1970. Benjamin Adekunle, who was trained at Sandhurst, an excellent global military training institution located in the United Kingdom, raised and moulded into a credible fighting force the…
-
Azikiwe Nnamdi; First Nigerian governor- general and later ceremonial president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Before this, Zik became the Premier of the Eastern Region in 1954. His party, the National Council Nigeria and the Cameroons, NCNC dominated the politics of Eastern Nigeria, winning for the Region internal self-rule in 1956. Zik was at…
-
Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi; First military Head of State of Nigeria. General Aguiyi-Ironsi was described in Major Ademola Ademoyega, a revolutionary Yoruba officer and one of the key actors in the famed “Igbo coup” later, in his memoirs, Why We Struck, as a reactionary who mobilised his men to abort the January 1966 revolution in…
-
NZEOGWU Chukwuma Kaduna, Soldier and masterminder of the January 16 1966 coup which led to the dissolution of Nigeria’s First Republic, hence ushering in a military rule. No one except Nzeogwu, said the first republic legislator, Mbadiwe, thought it possible before this time[1]. Brash and naïve, Chukwuma showed good judgment on occasions, but it was…
-
Isaac Adaka Boro was a Minority rights activist and hero of the Nigerian Civil War on the side of the federal government, who paradoxically was himself a former secessionist, declaring in February 1966, an independent state of the Niger Delta People’s Republic. Boro was born in 1938 in the town of Oloibiri where oil will be…
-
Ijaye; sub-group of Yoruba ethnicity, whose forebears migrated from the region around Old Oyo, which comprised the present-day Kwara State, to their present site in Abeokuta and Lagos. Ijaye of old Oyo was the base of Kurunmi, the famous Aare-Ona Kakanfo or Generalissimo of Yorubaland, who, despite his widely acknowledged military exploits against invading Fulanis…
-
Ogedengbe was the appellation taken by Orisarayibi Ogundamola as an adolescent. He was the 19th Century warrior and liberator of Ekiti and Ijesha people from the domineering power of Ibadan. Ogedengbe was born in 1822 c. in a small village, Atori, within the Ijesha territory. The time of his birth coincided with one predicted by…