Page 336 - They Also Served

Communications in the military government. However, on 29th July 1975, Gowon was overthrown in a coup while he was attending a summit in Uganda and Murtala Muhammed became the fourth 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 in Abuja, in the centre of the country and closer to the Muslim north. He also demobilized 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 Muhammed 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 was 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 followed, and Lieutenant-General Olusegun Obasanjo became president. Murtala Muhammed is a revered figure in Nigerian history, remembered chiefly, however, for what he might have achieved. His name lives on in the international airport in Lagos and on the 20 naira banknote.
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