Rewriting history with venom: Fani-Kayode, the 1966 coup, and a diatribe against the Igbo.

By Kalu Okoronkwo

More than sixty years after surviving a civil war that nearly shattered its fragile unity, Nigeria deserves truth, context, and healing, not narratives that inflame ethnic suspicion. History must be approached with care and intellectual honesty, supported by evidence from multiple credible sources, not deployed as a weapon of political convenience. Divisive claims, especially when widely circulated, threaten to undo the fragile progress toward national cohesion.

A cursory review of an article published in Daily Trust on Thursday, January 15, 2025, titled “A Morning of Carnage” and attributed to Femi Fani-Kayode, reveals multiple distortions and historical inaccuracies particularly concerning the January 15, 1966 coup and its alleged ethnic character.

Fani-Kayode wrongly asserts that the military takeover was led by a single ethnic nationality. This claim reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how military coups occur. Coups are conspiracies of individuals operating within a command structure; they are not ethnic plebiscites. No tribe is consulted, and no ethnic congress endorses such actions. To impose collective guilt on an entire people simply because some officers shared an ethnic origin is to misread both the military institution and the Nigerian state.

In his autobiography, A Journey in Service, former Head of State, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, addresses the January 1966 coup with the sobriety of an insider and the benefit of historical distance. His account makes clear that the coup’s ethnic profile was far more complex than the simplistic labels often attached to it. The acknowledged leader of the coup, Major Kaduna Nzeogwu, was “Igbo by name” but born and raised in Kaduna, culturally immersed in Northern Nigeria, and fluent in Hausa. Such details underscore how crude ethnic categorisations fail to capture historical reality.

While Babangida acknowledged that the coup “took on an unmistakable ethnic coloration” in perception and outcome, he did not equate this with ethnic intent or design. His reflections suggest that ethnicity became layered, politicised, and misunderstood in the aftermath. Many historians agree that reducing the January 1966 coup to a single ethnic motivation obscures the broader military, political, and institutional failures that shaped the crisis.

By situating the events within a fractured military, a polarised polity, and a volatile post-independence Nigeria struggling to define itself, Babangida’s account decisively complicates the careless label of an “Igbo coup.”

In contrast, Fani-Kayode relies heavily on emotive recollections from childhood. Personal memories or family anecdotes, especially from the perspective of a six-year-old cannot substitute for rigorous historical documentation. Presenting such recollections as eyewitness testimony, without corroborating evidence, only deepens confusion and distorts public understanding.

The contradictions within his narrative are equally troubling. On the one hand, he claims that the coup plotters intended to execute all those they arrested; on the other, he concedes that his own father, who was abducted that night, was released unharmed. Such inconsistencies reveal weak sourcing and a preference for emotional drama over factual accuracy.

Equally significant is what Fani-Kayode omits. He fails to acknowledge the role of the officers, many of them Igbo who moved decisively to contain the coup. Major-General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi acted in Lagos and the Western Region to suppress the mutiny, while Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu stabilised the North, prevented wider bloodshed, and ensured the arrest of the plotters. A police investigation was ordered, and due process initiated, before the tragic events of the July 1966 counter-coup intervened. These facts are essential to any balanced, non-sectarian account of history.

Fani-Kayode also avoids another uncontested fact that severely weakens the ethnic thesis: the stated political objective attributed to the coup plotters was the release of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a Yoruba leader from prison and his installation as Prime Minister. No proclamation sought to enthrone an Igbo leader; no manifesto declared ethnic supremacy. If anything, the mismatch between the alleged ethnic motive and the intended political outcome invites deeper scrutiny. Who benefited? Who shaped the post-coup narrative? And why did perception harden into dogma?

Why, then, does the ethnic label persist? Because it serves politics more than truth. Ethnic scapegoating offers emotional simplicity in place of historical accuracy. It absolves failed systems by blaming entire communities and mobilises resentment rather than understanding. But this false clarity has come at an enormous cost. The mischaracterisation of 1966 fed reprisals, legitimised mass violence, and entrenched mistrust that continues to echo across generations.

Other societies scarred by internal and ethnocentric conflicts have learned, often painfully that healing begins with truth. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not erase the crimes of apartheid, but it refused to allow falsehood to become the foundation of a new nation. Rwanda’s post-genocide recovery combined accountability with a deliberate rejection of ethnic demonisation, choosing national identity over inherited hatred. In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement acknowledged grief on all sides while building institutions to prevent the past from imprisoning the future. In each case, the lesson is clear: memory must be honest to be redemptive.

Nigeria’s own path to restoration demands similar courage. The wounds of 1966 cannot be healed through denial or by recycling accusations that turn citizens into suspects by birth. They require a national reckoning grounded in evidence, empathy, and restraint, one that distinguishes individual culpability from collective identity. Silence in the face of falsehood is not neutrality; it is complicity. But responses must be anchored in facts, not counter-myths.

Some wounds do not bleed openly, yet they refuse to heal. They harden beneath the skin of a nation, shaping fear, mistrust, and resentment long after the original trauma. Nigeria’s experience of the January 1966 coup, the July counter-coup, and the civil war represents such a wound. Six decades later, the echoes of those ruptures still haunt our politics, inter-ethnic relations, and collective memory. The tragedy lies not only in the lives lost, but in the fragmentation and manipulation of truth.

This is why the Forum for National Reconciliation and Restoration  that recently convened is no longer optional, it is a national necessity. The events of 1966 were more than military upheavals; they were psychological earthquakes that shattered trust barely six years after independence. Families were torn apart, communities displaced, and entire regions retreated into fear. Yet Nigeria never truly confronted the full story: who did what, why it happened, who suffered, and how the nation should collectively mourn and move forward.

In the absence of truth, silence prevailed, rumours hardened into “facts,”perceptions became dogma, while ethnic blame replaced sober analysis. Generations born decades later inherited these narratives without context or evidence. A nation that fails to explain its past condemns its future to misunderstanding.

The Forum for National Reconciliation and Restoration offers a way out of this inherited bitterness. It is not a court for vengeance, nor a platform for ethnic score-settling. It is a moral and inclusive space where Nigeria can finally tell itself the truth. Healing begins with listening. Listening to victims across regions, to families of slain officers and civilians, to targeted communities, and even to institutions that failed in their duty to protect life.

Reconciliation does not imply equality with guilt; it affirms shared responsibility for the future. Restoration does not erase history; it rescues it from distortion. Through a structured national forum, myths can be separated from facts, individual actions from collective identities, and political manipulation from historical evidence. It affirms that while crimes were committed, no ethnic group holds a monopoly on guilt or suffering.

Without such a framework, every political season risks reopening the wounds of 1966. Opportunists will continue to weaponise history, stoke ethnic fears, and mobilise young people who were never told the full story. A national forum would serve as a firewall against such manipulation, grounding public discourse in documented history and shared humanity.

Beyond history, this effort is about the future. Nigeria’s present challenges including economic hardship, insecurity, and social fragmentation cannot be solved by a nation suspicious of itself. Trust is a strategic resource. Unity is not a slogan; it is the outcome of justice, truth, and inclusion. Healing the wounds of 1966 is not about reopening old graves; it is about preventing new ones.

The necessity of the Forum for National Reconciliation and Restoration lies in its promise: a transition from accusation to understanding, from inherited hatred to deliberate healing, from silence to truth. It is a call to courage, a recognition that the past will continue to poison the present until it is honestly confronted.

Sixty years is a long time to carry unresolved grief. Nigeria owes it to the dead, the displaced, and generations yet unborn to finally say: let us talk, let us listen, let us heal. Only then can the shadows of 1966 recede, allowing the nation to step fully into the light of a shared future.

To write about 1966 is to touch a nerve in the Nigerian soul. That responsibility demands discipline: to verify before asserting, to contextualise before condemning, and to remember that words can either reopen graves or help close them. Rewriting history with venom may win applause in the moment, but it impoverishes the nation in the long run.

Nigeria deserves better. And the only true panacea for the wounds of 1966 is truth patiently assembled, courageously told and reconciliation that seeks healing over victory. Anything less is a betrayal of the dead, the living, and the future still struggling to be born.

Kalu Okoronkwo is a communications strategist, a leadership and good governance advocate dedicated to impactful societal development and can be reached via kalu.okoronkwo@gmail.com