Colonel Fajuyi pleaded for the life of his guest, Major General Ironsi, and when his pleadings fell on deaf ears, he insisted that if Ironsi would be killed then it would be over his dead body.
The rest is too gruesome to recount here, and out of respect for his family, I will stop here.
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Colonel Fajuyi was a hero like no other. The only person who has shown a similar loyalty in Nigeria’s history is former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was the best friend of Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, and who stood by his friend, in life and death.
After Nzeogwu’s death (the circumstances of his death are still hazy and shrouded in controversy) at the age of 30 on July 29, 1967, his friend, Olusegun Obasanjo, cared for his family, and assisted his siblings with their education, and became like a son to his mother.
(Let me here note that Nzeogwu’s death was spiritual, and dare I say mystical, because it occurred on the first anniversary of the July 29, 1966 Northern counter coup. Why is this significant? It is significant because on that day, Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi was killed as a direct result of Nzeogwu and Ifeajuna’s actions of January 15, 1966. Ifeajuna himself would later be executed in Biafra on September 25, 1967. If you attended primary school in Nigeria between 1960 and 1990, you may perhaps have used an exercise book known as the OLYMPIC 2B Exercise Book. The man who was drawn on the front cover of that exercise book is Emmanuel Ifeajuna. The drawing is of his Gold winning High Jump at the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, in Vancouver, Canada).
At great risk to his political future, Chief Obasanjo wrote a biography of his late friend simply titled, Nzeogwu, which was published in 1987.
That book caused an uproar in the North because of the way and manner Obasanjo eulogised the man who killed the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, believed to be Northern Nigeria’s greatest and favourite son.
Obasanjo did not have to do it. None of Nzeogwu’s military colleagues from Eastern Nigeria did it. But he did. And in the preamble to the book, he admitted that he knew he was attracting enmity to himself, but that he would take it as the price he had to pay for honouring his late friend’s memory.
As a matter of fact, thousands of copies of the book were bought by Northern groups and taken to the University of Zaria (now known as the Ahmadu Bello University), where they were burned in a ceremony eerily reminiscent of the Nazi Book Burnings organised by Josef Goebbels.
As they were burning the books, the mixed group of students, faculty members and clerics were insulting Obasanjo, calling him in English and Hausa “arne”, ”traitor”, ”conspirator” and ”ungrateful person”.
The anger and indignation caused by the book was so widespread. There were riots, and the Niger State Government (the then military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, a great admirer of Ahmadu Bello was from Niger state), revoked the Certificate of Occupancy to a 5,000-hectare piece of land that had previously been allocated to Obasanjo Farms Nigeria Limited.
The furore caused by the event made the book an Instant bestseller, and I read it as a thirteen year old boy. It attracted the foreign press, and the New York Times did a special feature on the troubles caused by the book in a piece entitled ‘Of Fig Leaves, Art and Other Disputes; Nigeria: Strife Stirred By Best Seller’.
That New York Times piece is still available online. I urge my readers to read it.
So, it riles me when some persons accuse the Yorubas of being betrayers. Which person, living or dead, has shown as much love, loyalty and commitment to Nzeogwu, at such great personal cost to himself, as Obasanjo?
It is one thing to show loyalty to the living. However, to show loyalty to the dead is almost unheard of.
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