NIGERIA: Festival of Death

Usually, Bar Beach on Nigeria’s Victoria Island is dotted with sun umbrellas and gaily painted food stalls. Last week it became the scene of a kind of festival of death. Thousands of Nigerians, chanting “Traitors, traitors,” jammed the beach, trampling the candy-striped awnings underfoot. A similar throng gathered not far away at Kirikiri Prison, just outside Lagos, the capital. Both high-spirited crowds were assembled to witness the public executions of some 30 soldiers, including four lieutenant colonels and six majors, and a lone civilian. A special military board had convicted them of planning the abortive coup of Feb. 13, in which Head of State Murtala Mohammed was assassinated (TIME, March 1).

“The condemned men are all in mufti,” a Lagos radio correspondent announced crisply, giving a running account of the executions on Bar Beach. “Most of them look sober. Some manage to smile at newsmen.” Religious confessions, Christian and Moslem, were received by two priests and a mallam (a Moslem religious leader). While the throng looked on, the 15-man firing squad opened up. The shooting lasted ten minutes, as one by one the coup plotters slumped to the blood-soaked sand.

With the executions, Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo, who took over the government of Black Africa’s largest and richest country after the killing of Murtala, made good on his promise to dole out military justice to those found guilty. Surprisingly, one of the executed officers was former Defense Minister I.D. Bisalla, who had helped bring Murtala to power in an earlier, successful coup last July. Bisalla and many of the others were apparently implicated in the plot by Lieut. Colonel B.S. Dimka, the man who led the Feb. 13 overthrow attempt. Dimka managed to stay at large for three weeks, despite a nationwide manhunt, but he was captured at a roadblock in eastern Nigeria earlier this month.

During the investigation of the coup attempt, 125 people were arrested; 40 have been released. Aside from those already executed, several dozen others are still being interrogated, including Dimka himself. According to the Nigerian government, Dimka has also implicated Yakubu Gowon, the former head of state who was exiled after the coup that brought Murtala to power last July. Gowon, according to the government’s charge, instructed Dimka to get together with Defense Minister Bisalla and attempt to overthrow the government. Their reasons for acting, said Nigeria’s new defense chief, Brigadier Musa Yarduah, was the government’s plan to cut the size of the army by almost half, a move that would transfer the 100,000 soldiers affected to other jobs, but which might leave a number of them out of work.

In England, where he is a political science student at Warwick University, Gowon denied any involvement in the coup attempt. Nonetheless the Nigerian government, which, after all, overthrew Gowon in the first place, seems bent on punishing him. Lagos radio said last week that “legal and diplomatic steps” are being taken to extradite Gowon to Nigeria, though it seems highly unlikely that the British government will accede to the request.