Word: nigeria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With that Shakespearean shrug and a gracious pledge of loyalty to the new regime, Nigeria's "gentle soldier," Major General Yakubu Gowon, philosophically acquiesced to a bloodless palace coup that last week ousted him as his country's head of state. Gowon, who himself came to power following a coup in 1966, was the fifth leader of Black Africa to be deposed by a military revolt in the past 16 months.* He was also the first head of state on the continent to be deprived of office while attending a summit meeting of the Organization of African Unity...
Genuine Fear. Although oil revenues have made Nigeria Black Africa's wealthiest nation, inflation has ranged from 30% to 80% since January, when Gowon acceded to civil servants' demands for pay increases of up to 133%. That provoked widespread strikes among workers who were less generously treated. A wave of walkouts in public services left the country without adequate power or water supplies for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, student demonstrators, angry over Gowon's announcement that he would be unable to keep a longstanding promise to return the country to civilian rule by 1976, forced three...
...renewal of the tribal hostilities that claimed more than a million lives during the fratricidal Biafran war of 1967-70. His fears were based partly on the bitter controversy generated by publication of suspect 1973 census figures. Those ranked the Moslem Hausa and Fulani tribesmen of northern Nigeria as more numerous -and therefore more politically powerful under the proposed electoral system-than the predominantly Christian Ibos of the south and the Yorubas of the west...
...latest economic and political crises compounded Nigeria's more chronic problems, which include a notorious degree of corruption-known locally as "dash"-among military and government officials. As one Nigerian newspaper editor recently observed, "If original sin goes back to the Garden of Eden, then Adam must have been a Nigerian." Although Gowon is considered irreproachably honest, he was unable to control the widespread graft that helped prevent equitable distribution of the nation's oil wealth ($8 billion for 1974) to most of the 79 million Nigerians, who must still survive on an average per capita income...
...inheritor of these problems as Nigeria's new head of state is Brigadier Muritala Rufai Mohammed, 38, formerly Minister of Communications and architect of the 1966 coup that brought Gowon to power. Mohammed, who earned a reputation as the army's most brutally efficient commander during the Biafran war, is expected to govern in a more decisive-and possibly less humane-manner than Gowon. He has already cleaned house thoroughly, sacking all army commanders and their top aides, all Cabinet members and all the provincial governors of Nigeria's twelve states...