26 Facts About Yakubu Gowon

Yakubu Dan-Yumma "Jack" Gowon was born on 19 October 1934 and is a retired Nigerian army general and military leader.

Yakubu Gowon maintains that he committed no wrongdoing during the war and that his leadership saved the country.

An Anglican Christian from a minority Ngas family of Northern Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon is a Nigerian nationalist, and a believer in the unity and oneness of Nigeria.

Yakubu Gowon's rise to power followed the July 1966 counter-coup and cemented military rule in Nigeria.

Consequently, Yakubu Gowon served for the longest continuous period as head of state of Nigeria, ruling for almost nine years until his overthrow in the coup d'etat of 1975 by Brigadier Murtala Mohammed.

Yakubu Gowon is a Ngas from Lur, a small village in the present Kanke Local Government Area of Plateau State.

Yakubu Gowon's father took pride in the fact that he married the same day as the future Queen Mother Elizabeth married the future King George VI.

Yakubu Gowon grew up in Zaria and had his early life and education there.

At school, Yakubu Gowon proved to be a very good athlete: he was the school football goalkeeper, pole vaulter, and long-distance runner.

Yakubu Gowon broke the school mile record in his first year.

Yakubu Gowon joined the Nigerian Army in 1954, and received his commission as a second lieutenant on 19 October 1955, his 21st birthday.

Yakubu Gowon was trained in the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK, Staff College, Camberley, UK as well as the Joint Staff College, Latimer, 1965.

Up until then, Yakubu Gowon remained strictly a career soldier with no involvement whatsoever in politics, until the tumultuous events of the year suddenly thrust him into a leadership role, when his unusual background as a Northerner who was neither of Hausa nor Fulani ancestry nor of the Islamic faith made him a particularly safe choice to lead a nation whose population was seething with ethnic tension.

Yakubu Gowon rightly calculated that the eastern minorities would not actively support the Igbos, given the prospect of having their own states if the secession effort were defeated.

The Aburi Accord did not see the light of the day, as the Yakubu Gowon led government had huge consideration for the possible revenues, especially oil revenues which were expected to increase given that reserves having been discovered in the area in the mid-1960s.

One controversial aspect of this move was Yakubu Gowon's annexing of Port Harcourt, a large city in the Niger Delta, in the South of Nigeria, sitting on some of Nigeria's largest reserves, into the new Rivers State, emasculating the migrant Igbo population of traders there.

Yakubu Gowon subsequently declared his famous "no victor, no vanquished" speech, and followed it up with an amnesty for the majority of those who had participated in the Biafran uprising, as well as a program of "Reconciliation, Reconstruction, and Rehabilitation", to repair the extensive damage done to the economy and infrastructure of the Eastern Region during the years of war.

Yakubu Gowon, was never found complicit in the corrupt practices, he was often accused of turning a blind eye to the activities of his staff and cronies.

On 1 October 1974, in flagrant contradiction to his earlier promises, Yakubu Gowon declared that Nigeria would not be ready for civilian rule by 1976, and he announced that the handover date would be postponed indefinitely.

The corruption in Yakubu Gowon's administration culminated in the notorious "cement armada" affair in the summer of 1975, when the port of Lagos became jammed with hundreds of ships trying to unload cement.

On 29 July 1975, while Yakubu Gowon was attending an OAU summit in Kampala, a group of officers led by Colonel Joe Nanven Garba announced his overthrow.

Yakubu Gowon subsequently went into exile in the United Kingdom, where he acquired a Ph.

Yakubu Gowon served a term as Churchwarden in his parish church, St Mary the Virgin, Monken Hadley.

Yakubu Gowon was finally pardoned during the Second Republic under President Shehu Shagari.

Yakubu Gowon is involved in the Guinea Worm Eradication Programme as well as the HIV Programme with Global Fund of Geneva.

Yakubu Gowon married Miss Victoria Zakari, a trained nurse in 1969 at a ceremony officiated by Seth Irunsewe Kale at the Cathedral Church of Christ, Lagos.