by Chris Chatteris SJ
It seems that President Putin will not be coming to South Africa for the BRICS
summit after all. The change of plan made me wonder if Putin knows of one
General Yakubu Gowon, the former military officer and Nigerian President. He
is remembered for the very public way in which he was forced from office.
It was 1975. Having held power in Nigeria for 9 years, General Gowon went to
the OAU meeting in Kampala. His absence was the ideal moment for a military
coup back home and he found himself in the embarrassing position of being an
ex-head of state among assembled African leaders.
Putin might have thought about at a time when there is clearly a great deal of
unhappiness in the Russian military. Some senior officers are either being killed
by Ukrainian missiles or sacked by Putin himself for their lack of loyalty.
put his own interests second in place of those of the country. He did not appeal
for the overthrow of the new regime or call its legal standing into question; rather
he immediately pledged his loyalty to it.
bring reconciliation to the country in the aftermath, he knew only too well the
limits of violence as a way of solving problems. The dignified statement he made
to the press at the time is still well worth a listen almost fifty years on.
Today General Gowon is going strong in his late eighties, a respected elder
statesman credited by many with holding Nigeria together through his “no victor,
no vanquished” post war policy. He has been awarded peace prizes even though
he did prosecute the war against General Ojukwu’s Igbo Biafran breakaway
attempt with a high degree of ruthlessness.
different from Nigeria back then. However, in at least two respects there are
similarities. Firstly, as in Nigeria in 1975, there is no real succession plan in
Russia despite the Presidential election next year. This is always fertile ground for a coup d’état, as Gowon discovered. Secondly, the Russian Federation, like
Nigeria, is a multi-ethnic country in which there has already been one separatist
movement, namely in Chechnya, and the catastrophic invasion of Ukraine is
currently putting the unity of the Federation to a serious stress-test.
Putin was sensible to opt to attend the BRICS summit on Zoom. Even a
failed coup or a significant Ukrainian blow on the battlefield would have further
weakened him.
He might have saved himself a Gowon-like embarrassment, but whether history
will judge him as leniently as Gowon has been judged, seems unlikely.
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