THE ABURI VERDICT: WHAT GOWON AND DANJUMA NOW KNOW THAT OJUKWU KNEW THEN

History has a long memory and a cruel sense of justice.

General Yakubu Gowon is from Lur, in Kanke Local Government Area of Plateau State. General Theophilus Danjuma is from Takum, in Taraba State. Both men are Middle Belt Christians. Both were architects of the military decision that frustrated the Aburi Accord in 1967 and prosecuted a devastating war against Biafra in the name of Nigerian unity. Today, the communities of both men are under violent siege: burned, displaced, occupied, and renamed by armed Fulani militias operating with what their own victims describe as federal acquiescence.

The irony is not subtle. It is thunderous.

At Aburi, Ghana, in January 1967, the military governors of Nigeria's regions reached a consensus. Ojukwu, representing the Eastern Region, argued for a confederal arrangement: one that would give regions genuine autonomy over their security, resources, and governance while preserving a loose Nigerian association. It was a rational response to the mass killings of Igbo people in the North in 1966. It was also, as events have since confirmed, a prescient diagnosis of the Nigerian state's foundational pathology: that a hyper-centralized federal structure controlled by a militarized northern establishment would inevitably become an instrument of domination rather than protection.

Gowon returned to Lagos and repudiated Aburi. The Decree 8 implementation was gutted. War followed.

The justification offered then, and repeated for decades by the victors and their apologists, was that Nigerian unity was non-negotiable and that strong federal authority was its necessary guardian. Ojukwu was cast as the secessionist, the troublemaker, the man who broke Nigeria. The federal side was cast as the defender of one indivisible nation.

Fast forward to 2025 and 2026. In Plateau State, Fulani bandits have seized villages in Gowon's ancestral homeland, renamed them, converted churches to mosques, and driven twenty-five thousand people into displacement camps. In Taraba State, Danjuma, the man who personally terminated General Ironsi's life on the night of July 29, 1966 and helped midwife the federal military consolidation, has now issued repeated public calls for his people to arm themselves for survival. He has described the killings as genocide. He has accused the Nigerian military of complicity. He has said, in words that should echo across every archive of this nation's troubled history: "if you depend on the Armed Forces to protect you, you will all die."

Ojukwu said something remarkably similar in 1967. He was called a rebel.

The conclusion that sober history compels is uncomfortable but inescapable. The Aburi Accord, had it been honoured, would have created a Nigeria in which regions retained the power to protect their own people. The massacres of Igbo in the North in 1966, which drove Ojukwu to Aburi, have found their structural echo in the massacres of Angas and Jukun people in the Middle Belt today. The mechanism is identical: a centralized federal security apparatus indifferent or hostile to the survival of non-Fulani communities.

Gowon and Danjuma chose centralization over justice in 1967. Their people are now paying the price of that choice. Nigeria did not become better for rejecting Aburi. It became a country where the same violence that Ojukwu fled eventually came for everyone.

History has rendered its verdict. Aburi was right. An Igbo-hater on this page said he was happy Gowon repudiated Aburi Accord. Banditry has already reached Ibadan. Igboho is now asking for permission to set up a security outfit to defend the Yorubas. But that was something Aburi Accord offered them 60 years ago. 