Gowon reveals how Obasanjo would have been sacked from the Army for evicting American embassy

Former military Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon on Thursday said that his government almost dismissed ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo from the army in the 70s for ejecting the American Embassy in Lagos.

He said that Obasanjo was however spared for causing a diplomatic incident because he was too important to be let go.

He stated this during the launch of the biography of a former chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Senator Amadu Ali, at the Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja to mark Ali’s 82nd birthday.

But explaining how the event happened, Obasanjo said he and Ali conspired together to sack the Americans, but that he never knew the action was a diplomatic one.

Applauding Ali for his love for Nigeria, Obasanjo said that Ali had done many good and ‘bad’ things, including the sacking of the United States officials from their embassy in the early 1970s.

He said, “Amadu Ali had been appointed the head of the NYSC and he needed an office and it was being occupied by the American embassy and it was too close to the cabinet office. It was something we had complained and protested against and we expected the Americans to vacate and be given an alternative office but they wouldn’t leave.

“So, Amadu Ali and I conspired together that we would move the Americans out of that office. Of course, I belonged to the corps of engineers I had military men under my command, Amadu had none under his command so I had to be used to perform the task. And I made it a military operation.

“By 4am soldiers had surrounded the office and when the Americans were coming to work in the morning, they were not allowed to go in and of course, I didn’t realise the diplomatic implication. They moved out and Amadu Ali had an office.

“But it didn’t stop there because the Americans violently protested and I was reported to the Commander-in-Chief, Gen. Yakubu Gowon and I was carpeted.

“So, when I spoke with General Gowon this morning about the incident, he said, ‘So, Amadu Ali was part of it?’ and I said, ‘Amadu Ali was the cause of it!”

Speaking earlier during the launch of the 423 page and nine chapter book entitled, “The many colours of a rainbow: A biography of Senator Amadu Adah Ali” and written by Gideon S. Tseja, the former PDP chairman explained that the decision to support Obasanjo’s tenure extension was a personal one and that he never used his position as party chairman to manipulate the system in favour of Obasanjo.

According to Ali, he had to wholeheartedly and genuinely support Obasanjo’s third term bid despite his apparent failures because for him the former President was an extraordinarily good leader.

The book read, “What happened was that in the previous PDP administration (1999-2003) a number of constitutional amendments – 106 of them – was proposed. The new House took up the unfinished business which had been publicised and gazetted and began to debate.

“One of the proposed amendments was on the extension of the term of the President. The press focused on this one proposal and spawned new emotive descriptions to characterise the proposal as ‘President for life’, sit-tight President,’ tenure elongation campaign and so on.

“Senator Ahmadu Ali had his personal views about it and in fact, supported Obasanjo’s ‘tenure elongation’ wholeheartedly because he genuinely believed that Obasanjo was an extraordinarily good leader in spite of his perceived failings.”

In the biography Ali also talked about the event of 1978, when he was a Federal Commissioner for Education, where university students staged ‘Ali Must Go’ protest against him.

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According to him, he was wrongly blamed for the incident which led to the death of some students. On what happened, he said that the protests erupted after the decision to increase the lodging fee from N150 to N468 per session while the cost of feeding was also increased by 50k.

Ali said that the decision was taken by the Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Prof. Jibril Aminu, and Chief of Staff to the Supreme Military Council, General Shehu Yar’Adua, without his knowledge.

In his speech at the event, Ali called on Nigerian youths to stop waiting for power to be handed over to them and said that Gowon was 31 when he became head of state, and that before he rose to power had already imbued himself with leadership skills, as he was already controlling a battalion of 1,000 men before becoming commander-in-chief.

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