In October 1, 1983, Shehu Shagari of the National Party of Nigeria was inaugurated for his second term in the Second Republic, following a shady general election that was suspected of rampant fraud and corruption. With the growing resentment, frustrated mood, and increasing impatience with the mismanagement and incoherence of government, the military used this widow of the volatile public sentiment to seize power.
On December 31, 1983, Brigadier Sani Abacha announced a coup on the radio. A part of the speech is as follows:
“I and my colleagues in the armed forces have—in the discharge of our national role as promoters and protectors of our national interests—decided to effect a change in the leadership of Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and to form a Federal Military Government. This task has just been completed.”
The military coup terminated the Second Republic and made General Muhammadu Buhari the Head of State of the military government. Here is a recap of an event from the former regime (1983-85) that gained international attention.
During Buhari’s anti-corruption crusade, he introduced different measures, which included the aggressive prosecution of allegedly corrupt Second Republic politicians as well as limiting the pressing. For example, Decree 4—the Public Officers’ Protection against False Accusation decree of 1984, was issued by the Buhari regime and was designed to silence the press. Decree 2 “allowed for the detention of critics without trail. The apparatus of repression, dusted down from the previous military regimes, was brought back with minimal changes” (Bourne, 2015, p. 157).
Many Second Republic governors and National Assembly politicians were tried, convicted, and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, most commonly on charges of corrupt dealings (Falola & Heaton, 2008). During this time, Buhari operatives attempted to kidnap Umaru Abdulrahman Dikko, the former transport minister (1979-83) and head of the presidential task force on rice during the Shagari regime. However, when Dikko discovered that service chiefs were being rounded up in the Buhari coup, “he drove to Seme, on the border with the republic of Benin, walked across, took a taxi to Lome, the capital of Togo, and flew to London on KLM via Amsterdam. In London he went onto BBC television, made a vituperative attack on the coup plotters and vowed to wage a jihad against them. He was particularly angry when he discovered that all members of his family and servants, still in Nigeria, had been detained, including his 90-year-old father” (Bourne, 2015, p. 158-59).
When Buhari operatives eventually found him in London, on July 5, 1984, he was drugged and captured outside his house in London’s Bayswater by an Israeli group who, hired by the Nigerian government, loaded an unconscious Dikko into a van. The British police were informed of the abduction by Elizabeth Hayes (Umaru Dikko’s private secretary), and initiated a rescue attempt involving a close watch on all sea- and airports. As customs officials were already notified of the kidnapping, they became suspicious of two wooden crates declared as “diplomatic baggage” being loaded in a Nigeria Airways cargo aircraft. A strong medical scent allegedly emanated from the crates that prompted customs officials to stop the loading cargo.
Thereupon, a British anti-terrorist squad “rushed to Stansted Airport and found that the two wooden crates…, addressed to the Ministry of External Affairs, Lagos, and declared as diplomatic baggage, had no diplomatic markings on them as required by Article 27(4) of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Immunities of 1961. The crates were inspected, as required by Article 36(2)…, in the presence of Mr. Okon Edet, an attaché at the Nigerian High Commission (NHC) who was at Stansted Airport on the day of the alleged abduction attempt” (Akinsanya, 1985, p. 602). When the British authorities inspected the Lagos-bound crates, they found two men: one Israeli and a Nigerian diplomatic. The latter was soon discovered to be Umaru Abdulrahman Dikko, the former transport minister of Nigeria during the Second Republic.
The debacle was embarrassing and there were inevitably diplomatic repercussions, as it strained the relations between the UK and Nigeria. Furthermore, in January 1985, the UK rejected a request for the extradition of Dikko, who went on to qualify as a barrister. He died in London in 2014, aged 77.
~Dr. Ikenna Q. Ezealah
References:
Akinsanya, A. (1985). The Dikko Affair and Anglo–Nigerian Relations. International & Comparative Law Quarterly, 34(3), 602-609.
Bourne, R. (2015). Nigeria: A new history of a turbulent century. Zed Books Ltd.
Falola, T., & Heaton, M. M. (2008). A history of Nigeria. Cambridge University Press.
Obotetukudo, S. W. (Ed.). (2010). The Inaugural addresses and ascension speeches of Nigerian elected and non-elected presidents and prime minister, 1960-2010. University Press of America.
Nation Upbuilding 