Page 135 - Wish Stream Year of 2019

in Lagos. At the start of the Nigerian Civil War in 1967 his meteoric rise continued with temporary command of the newly formed 2nd Division and promotion to Colonel the following year. Dur- ing his time in command, the Division achieved some spectacular successes, pushing Biafran forces from the mid-western region. However, these were achieved at considerable cost with several river crossings causing thousands of soldiers to be drowned or killed by enemy fire. Furthermore, troops from the Division carried out a massacre in the town of Asaba, killing close to a thousand people. Although there was no evidence that Murtala Mohammad ordered the killings, he must bear some responsibility.
Murtala Mohammad was marked for further promotion by attending the Joint Services Staff College, Latimer, 1970-71 and became Briga-
Before the reorganisation of Sandhurst in the 1870s, the College had the air of a board- ing school with some Cadets being enrolled
as young as 14 years old. Many took to carving their names and cadet numbers in the brickwork of Old College, the Mons Hall (then the racquets court) and the library tables. Some have survived remarkably well, enabling the ‘culprit’ to be iden- tified. We have been researching some of these
dier on his return. In 1974 the President, General Yakubu Gowon, made him Federal Commis- sioner for Communications in the military gov- ernment. However, on 29th July 1975, Gowon was overthrown in a coup while he was attend- ing a summit in Uganda and Murtala Moham- med became the 4th President of Nigeria.
Hitting the ground running as President, his decisiveness and dynamism won him popular support, and the phrases ‘My fellow Nigerians’ and ‘with immediate effect’ were his trademarks. He created seven new states and moved the national capital from Lagos in the predominantly Christian South to a new site at Abuja, in the centre of the country. He also demobilised some 40% of the Army as a ‘peace dividend’ following the end of the civil war and adopted a ‘Nigeria First’ foreign policy.
On 13th February 1976 Murtala Mohammad and his ADC were assassinated when their car was ambushed in Lagos. Such was the President’s apparent popularity that there was no escort and the ADC’s pistol the only weapon carried. The coup plotters were eventually rounded up and executed by firing squad and, as was the way with the murky politics of the time, former President Gowon, safely in exile in London, was implicated. Despite the attempted coup and its bloody aftermath, an orderly transition of power was made, and Lieutenant General Olusegun Obasanjo became President. Murtala Mohammad is a revered figure in Nigerian his- tory, remembered chiefly for what he might have achieved. His name lives on in the international airport in Lagos and on the 20 Naira bank note.
Scrawl of the Wild
Vaughan Kent-Payne
to provide a snapshot of military life in the 19th Century. Little did Gentleman Cadet Borton real- ise that he would be ‘outed’ on social media 160 years after his minor act of vandalism.
The son of a serving Army officer, Arthur Close Borton was born on 9th January 1851 in Ath- lone, Ireland. He entered Sandhurst in February 1868 as a fee-paying Cadet, by which time his
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