Revisiting the so-called ‘Diya phantom coup’
By Tiko Okoye
Late Lt. Gen. Donaldson Oladipo ‘Dipo’ Oyeyinka Diya (rtd) GCON, BL, PSC, FSS, mni served for three years 1994 and 1997, as Chief of General Staff (de facto Vice President of Nigeria, upon the short-lived rechristening of the office of Chief of Defence Staff) under maximum ruler late Gen. Sani Abacha. He was widely known as a key player in the Abacha military junta and was to all intents and purposes, the face and poster boy of the jackboot regime.
It couldn’t have been otherwise, considering that while his boss, the ever-goggled Abacha was an introvert who reportedly remained huddled in a bunker inside Aso Villa, Diya was an extrovert who leisurely waxed lyrical on any issue in the company of other people.
By a strange quirk of fate Diya’s lively and confident personality, coupled with his Yoruba heritage, assumed prominence just as the opposition to the ill-fated annulment of the June 12, 1993 was snowballing particularly among his kith and kin. Who else would a hard-pressed military junta dominated by northern elements deploy to placate the irate political elite and hoi polloi in the South-West if not their very own smooth-talking No.2 aburo in the military high command!
To give Diya his due, the charm offensive the Abacha regime launched with him as the arrowhead initially worked wonders. Forces aligned with the presumed winner of the annulled election, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, bought the humbug that he held a very moderate – if not supportive – view of MKO’s efforts to reclaim his mandate. His increasing popularity among the political elite was buoyed by expectations that he would play an invaluable role in convincing his principal, Gen. Abacha, to declare MKO as the winner of the 1993 presidential election and consequently hand over power to him.
Several ranking politicians – after obtaining MKO’s approval – accepted appointments into the Abacha federal cabinet on the consensus that it would be much easier to fight from within than from outside in the cold. But the entire saga was a well-orchestrated ruse by Abacha and Diya to pull the wool over the eyes of the ‘bloody civilians’ and take them unawares in an ambush!
It speaks volumes about just how deeply Diya’s much-hyped antics had successfully undone the solidarity of the dissenting politicians that when MKO ultimately concluded that he had been deceived and called on his supporters holding cabinet posts to quit that they all declined to comply! And that was the point where the Abacha/Diya duo switched off their charm offensive and bared their bloodied fangs.
READ ALSO: Tinubu boasts he deserves to be in Guinness World Records
But in a surprising turn of events, Diya and several dissident soldiers were arrested and jailed for allegedly planning to overthrow the regime of Abacha. At the end of the proceedings of the Gen. Victor Malu-led special military tribunal that tried them, Diya was sentenced to death. The conventional wisdom was that the alleged coup plot was actually a ploy by Abacha to do away with Diya out of jealousy that he was increasingly becoming more popular, but their antecedents and actual facts on the ground indicate otherwise. The coup was for real!
There can be no gainsaying that Abacha and Diya enjoyed a very strongly-bonded relationship much like that between Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Mamman Vatsa, with the former ironically set to suffer the same tragic end as the latter. Abacha practically allowed Diya to run the show in their first two years, very much like President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar in the early years prior to their celebrated falling out. This is not to say that they weren’t top northern elements in the army eager to extirpate the amity between them, and one of such was Lt. Gen. Ishaya Bamaiyi, the Chief of Army Staff, who incidentally was on very friendly terms with both men.
The sly Bamaiyi was able to identify Diya’s deeply-held ambition to be Head of State. But Diya was working towards succeeding his friend and comrade and never for once harboured any thoughts of executing a coup d’etat aimed at prematurely toppling him out of office. Unfortunately for him, Bamaiyi who equally nursed exactly the same ambition deemed it prudent to get Diya out of the way by shoving him under the bus. If only the naive politicians knew what serving top military officers – sans Chris Alli, Dan Suleiman, Allison Madueke – they were running to for support were plotting!
Those in the know told me that given the highly asymmetric payoff, Bamaiyi set about entrapping Diya with all the guile he could muster since it was possible that given the latter’s closeness to Abacha, he would easily be the one in a hot pot of soup were Diya to relate his (Bamaiyi) promptings and prodding to Abacha. But Bamaiyi had guessed correctly. His summation that Diya only needed to be convinced of the possibility of success for his latent ambition to roar to life. Suffice to say that the same Bamaiyi landed the COAS post largely on account of Diya’s very strong recommendation.
But I’m told that it still took a relatively long time for Bamaiyi to finally convince Diya. He countered Diya’s stance that it was better to wait for Abacha to step down from office by saying that virtually the entire country as well as the international community considered Abacha to be highly toxic. Bamaiyi used this ploy to make Diya conclude that toppling – and killing – Abacha was a patriotic act that surpassed pangs of guilty conscience associated with kicking a friend, comrade and mentor out of office.
Yes, many public affairs analysts interpreted the eventual arrest of Diya as signalling deep divisions within the Nigerian military, but to proceed to say that they also reflected rising tensions over Abacha’s apparent intention to remain in office by engineering his own election as a civilian President was too far-fetched.
Divisions within the military came into existence with the fallouts of the January 15, 1966 military coup and have grown worse with indiscipline since then. I was even made to understand that Sgt. Barnabas Jabila Mshiola aka “Sgt.Rogers” – the head of al-Mustapha’s notorious “Strike Force” – regularly parked his car in the parking space allotted to Warrant Officer 1 at Gado Nasko Military Barracks and the poor guy knew better not to grumble or complain.
As evidenced by how he shut his ears to domestic and international appeals to tamper justice with mercy in the case of Ken Saro Wiwa and his colleagues, Abacha was ruthlessly aggressive and uncompromising in the pursuit of his personal objectives. Consequently, bickering among top military generals had more to do with how they were actively engaged in the immediate post-Abacha permutation game.
Diya never knew that Abacha had directed his Chief Security Officer, Major Hamza al-Mustapha, to issue a sophisticated video recorder to Bamaiyi with which all his interactive sessions with Diya were to be recorded. Another telling development was that Bamaiyi had succeeded in getting Diya to buy into the notion that discussions should be strictly restricted to just both of them in order to maintain total secrecy. It meant that Diya even kept his own Chief Security Officer – the brilliant intelligence subaltern called Major Seun Fadipe – completely in the dark until the very last moment.
A melodramatic interlude played out when a group of Yoruba first-class traditional rulers went to Aso Villa to plead with Abacha to tamper justice with mercy and release their son to them. After the parley, a prominent member insisted that it was all a phantom coup. He was promptly kept under ‘protective custody’ for a while, while the leader of the delegation announced that they had “seen sense” in the video shown to them.
The final melodrama played out as Diya was decked out in full military ceremonial uniform as he awaited in his house for Bamaiyi to show up with the troops that will escort him to the parade ground to be sworn-in as the Head of State as had been agreed. But the heavy sound of gunshots gripped the area arising from a shoot-out between al-Mustapha’s goons sent to effect Diya’s arrest and security details of the latter.
I was further reliably informed that when the exchange of gunfire finally ended, the officer who led the team from Aso Villa briskly walked up to Diya and gave him a smart salute, prior to reaching out with his right hand and tearing off the epaulettes depicting his rank from his shoulders.
He then announced to Diya: “I accorded you the respect due to a general in full uniform but by yanking off your epaulettes, you’re now suspect charged with committing the treasonable act of plotting to unseat the government.” And with that he hauled Diya straight to al-Mustapha at Aso Villa.
Abacha finally visited Diya where he was initially sequestered and started shedding Et tu Brute crocodile tears. But Diya who was more interested in seeing that justice was deservedly served to both himself and Bamaiyi kept reportedly asking Abacha: “And where is Bamaiyi?” It was a question he kept repeating before the Justice Oputa Human Rights Violation Investigation Commission aka Oputa Panel!
