Donald Fajuyi, the eldest child of the late military governor of Western Region, Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, in an exclusive interview with Punch Newspapers, recalls his own version of how his father and former head of state Aguiyi Ironsi was murdered.
How and why was he killed?
Everything is in the news. My dad never believed that the military should stay long in governance. His firm belief was that once the military corrected whatever they wanted to correct, try whoever had to be tried, they would restore democracy. What we gathered later was that some core Northern officers were discontent that most of the victims of the January 1966 coup were Northerners, whether it was a deliberate act or whether it was by accident, I do not know. But that was their belief. The second coup in July 1966 was a kind of revenge coup in which Southern officers removed all top officials and officers of the North like Sardauna of Sokoto, Tafawa Balewa who were killed during the first coup. What we were made to understand was that they did not want Aguiyi Ironsi as Head of State.
Aguiyi Ironsi was touring Nigeria, he had toured the East, and he had toured the North. He now toured the West and wanted to settle the Western Region crisis at that time; to put a stamp of approval on what the military governor was doing to quell all those uprisings at the time. He met with the Council of Chiefs at the Secretariat, Ibadan. He came by helicopter from Lagos to Ibadan. They had a full-day session. In the evening, when he wanted to go back to Lagos, somehow, the helicopter developed a fault. It did not start. They radioed to Lagos to send another helicopter. It was then Fajuyi said that as the Head of State, Ibadan was his jurisdiction and persuaded him to sleep overnight, finish his business the following day, and then the issue of returning to Lagos would be addressed. Ironsi bought the idea and that was how he slept over in Ibadan. But a group of soldiers, led by Theophilus Danjuma, struck in Ibadan that night and captured Ironsi. Fajuyi insisted he should be taken along with the Head of State wherever he was to be taken.
We learned that coupists had gone to wait for Ironsi at the helicopter pad at Dodan Barracks in Lagos that night, by the time they waited till 10 pm and the helicopter did not arrive, they deducted that he was sleeping over in Ibadan and since they had already launched the coup, they decided to go to Ibadan to arrest him.
I think it was the insinuation of maybe he knew about the incident or that he had hands in it that made Fajuyi insist that wherever the people were taking Ironsi to, he had to go with them because he had to clear himself that he was not party to it.
We were now able to piece together the story of what happened after Ironsi and Fajuyi were taken away from the Government House.
Although Danjuma said in his book that their mission was not to kill, that he regretted the killing, that he was not a party to it, and that after Ironsi and Fajuyi had been arrested, he was supposed to take them to a location which he did not know, but that he did not go with them. It was the junior ranks that drove Fajuyi and Ironsi towards Lalupon. Lalupon is a satellite village in Ibadan, not too far, they got to a point, where the men asked where they were going and what they would do with Ironsi and Fajuyi. They took Ironsi to the bush, shot him, dug a shallow grave, put his body there, and covered him. They left in their vehicle. After a few metres, they stopped. Then they began to argue among themselves what they would do with Fajuyi. It was at that point that one of them grabbed his gun, corked it, and shot him in the chest. That was how Fajuyi was killed.
