Word: gowon
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Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, a general in the Nigerian army, is a man who always seems to be at the center of the action. In 1975 he and his fellow officers ousted General Yakubu Gowon, who had taken power soon after the outbreak of the bloody four-year Biafran war. The following year, an unarmed Babangida confronted rebellious army officers in Lagos during an attempted coup and persuaded them to surrender. It was he too who masterminded the army coup that, on the last day of 1983, toppled Shehu Shagari, the civilian President whose winking acceptance of endemic corruption had helped...
Meanwhile, a succession of military regimes has failed to resolve the tensions between the Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa tribes that flared into a civil war in 1967 when Biafra, the Ibo homeland, tried to break away. The strongman in power then, General Yakuba Gowon, healed some of the scars by declaring an amnesty at the end of the war, in 1970, but he was toppled in 1975 by other soldiers who objected to his costly schemes, such as the building of a $20 million sports stadium in Lagos...
During the investigation of the coup attempt, 125 people were arrested; 40 have been released. Aside from those already executed, several dozen others are still being interrogated, including Dimka himself. According to the Nigerian government, Dimka has also implicated Yakubu Gowon, the former head of state who was exiled after the coup that brought Murtala to power last July. Gowon, according to the government's charge, instructed Dimka to get together with Defense Minister Bisalla and attempt to overthrow the government. Their reasons for acting, said Nigeria's new defense chief, Brigadier Musa Yarduah, was the government...
...England, where he is a political science student at Warwick University, Gowon denied any involvement in the coup attempt. Nonetheless the Nigerian government, which, after all, overthrew Gowon in the first place, seems bent on punishing him. Lagos radio said last week that "legal and diplomatic steps" are being taken to extradite Gowon to Nigeria, though it seems highly unlikely that the British government will accede to the request...
Champagne Party. Clearly a penny-ante putsch, the coup was the work of a small coterie of disaffected officers, who apparently made their move after an all-night champagne party. The regime claims that the plotters wanted to restore Gowon to power, and had consulted him in advance. The former leader, now studying political science at Britain's Warwick University, convincingly denied those charges...