Garlands for Yakubu Gowon at 70
By Olu Obafemi ( omoajon@yahoo.com)
Thursday, October 21, 2004

Last Tuesday, General Yakubu Gowon joined the septuagenarians, an age which the Scriptures say, one begins live overtime. Given the hazards of living in a country like Nigeria, and considering the man’s life as a soldier, who took this country through a civil war, there is something to celebrate in the sheer longevity and the quality of his unique life.

Only a few Generals outlast the wars they lead-in completeness of spirit; if their physical life is not consumed by the war, what about their innate selves-their morality, their humanity and their sense of value? This compels me to tarry awhile with that great German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, with whom strangely, General Yakubu Gowon shares a few attributes. War is indeed a monster. And as Nietzsche has said, "He who fights with monsters should look into it that he himself does not become a monster.

And when you gaze into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you". If for nothing else, the fact that General Gowon was not consumed by the monstrosities and bestialities of a fratricidal war makes his life a compulsive study-- in simplicity, humility and courage. It takes all of these to preach "No Victor, No Vanquished", when wars are fought with the merciless spirit of demolition, when once you are at an advantage. It takes the possession of ones humane values to launch a post-war programme of rehabilitation, reconciliation and reconstruction. Note here that we are talking of motives and intentions, not actual accomplishments-- where a debate may be floated, when we make recourse to the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermaths. As I said last week, in a different context, the scars of wars never heal completely. Ours is no exception-as MASSOB reveals to us.

I was talking of incidental, shared attributes between the philosopher Nietzsche and Yakubu Gowon. This is obviously not in terms of philosophical profundities-as you know; one was a teacher and writer, the other a soldier and statesman. But both men recorded outstanding achievements in life. Nietzsche became a University Professor at the tender age of twenty-four, while Gowon ran the most populous country in Africa at the frightfully young age of just above thirty-two.

They are both offspring of clergymen, which may, in fact inform the meditative life- styles that they led, out of active service. Nietzsche withdrew from the material world, literally, after having served in the Franco-Prussian war. Gowon has engaged himself in the art of praying for the health of the country he once ruled, that is beset with seemingly interminable crises. The comparison ends there, as Nietzsche wars a nihilist while Gowon is an optimist. Nietzsche died at the age Forty-Five. Gowon is seventy, and still bouncing around like a young man in his forties-or like Larry King after thousands of interviews on Larry King Life, just warming up!

I had put a telephone call to General Gowon, to express my birthday felicitations to him. I had expected this to take him by surprise, since we only met once, October 9, at the Congress Hall of Nicon Noga at the NNLG’s Prizes award night. As soon as I mentioned my name, he displayed instant recognition and stunning familiarity, which then took me by surprise. When I asked him how he felt at 70, he promptly retorted; "On top of the world…that the country I once led is still intact, in spite of all the odds". Both my chanced meeting with him, before he was politely whisked away to more royal and status-studded company and the call I made to him, compel me to formalize my wishes for him in this forum. He was simple, humble, cheerful and trusting and open-even to a mere stranger. In those thirty-five minutes acquaintance, he had taken me through the story of the final parts of his stewardship as a Military Head of State-especially his helicopter- tour of the general geographical area that is now the Federal Capital Territory-via Keffi, Nassarawa, Lokoja and the Abuja Belt. He had compared his life, expectedly, given his deeply religious disposition, to those of Moses, Joshua and, I think Aaron, in the particular sense that Moses was taken to the top of the Mountains by God and showed the Promised Land. In his own case, he saw the new capital from the air, but was overthrown before he could build it. Even to those who overthrew him, especially to Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo, he was so magnanimous and gracious in the praises he showered on them. Here again, is a lesson in the essence of the capacity to be generous at heart, when in and after leadership. It is also a lesson about the transience and ephemerality of power-as Achebe once said, those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by the benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble. Note that Gowon has offered so many apologies to those whom he had wronged while in power-including our Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, whom he had jailed for most of the tenure of the war.

On that night, he had been called to make a brief remark and he had taken time off to shower his former prisoner with candid accolades. When I had asked Professor Soyinka immediately after if they were now friends, he had smiled genuinely and referred to Gowon as his aburo. This is also an instruction of the graciousness that is an attribute of truly great people. For, indeed, power is what you have, but which you do not deploy to its limits of negativism. Here are two people, remarkable people in their individual rights-one was in power, the other was his victim. Thirty-five years after, both have accepted the essence of interrogating power, its conflicts and impacts in the process of making sacrifice towards the national ideal.

On a lighter note, I have not succeeded in letting him know that I also deserve an apology-as I almost became a casualty of the war. My colleagues and I were trapped, returning from school, on a fateful December evening in 1967, in the ferry, as Bomber 26 off-loaded its content on River Niger, between Lokoja and Shintaku. Lokoja was nearly besieged. We slept in the bush, at the outskirts of Lokoja. It was our own little taste of the horrifying experience of the war. You can imagine the quantum of burden that the man Gowon must carry-having led the country through those turbulent aegis, with all its errors and accomplishments. In the end, it is, as Dennis Brutus, the South African poet mused, in the midst of the dehumanizing clutch of Apartheid, it is the tenderness of the man’s spirit that gave him survival.
So, General Gowon, our former and youngest, ever, Head of State, Garlands on your neck. When next I am lucky to see you, I shall give you as your Birthday present my copy of Frederick Nietzsche’s book, Human, All Too Human-which summarises my thoughts of the essential Gowon, after the Barracks.
Happy Birthday, dear Elder Statesman-as the ship of our State totters on-- in a war that never ends.