Murtala Mohammed

Murtala Ramat Mohammed was born in Kano, Nigeria, on the eighth of November 1938, the son of a Hausa-Fulani official. He took his military training at Sandhurst (1961) and his command service through the Congo Crisis of 1962-63 and the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70.

He became Head of State of Nigeria through the coup of the twenty-ninth of July 1975 that displaced Yakubu Gowon. He held office for six months. The acts of those six months remain among the most consequential in modern Nigerian history.

He dismissed approximately ten thousand corrupt or incompetent federal civil servants — the largest single anti-corruption purge in Nigerian government history. He created seven new states in February 1976 (bringing the federal total from twelve to nineteen) to defuse the ethnic over-concentrations of the existing structure. He committed Nigeria to a return to civilian rule on a published timetable (which his successor Olusegun Obasanjo executed on schedule in 1979). He declared Nigerian recognition of the MPLA in Angola in defiance of South African and U.S. pressure — establishing the African anti-apartheid front-line state alignment that held for the next fourteen years.

He was assassinated on the thirteenth of February 1976 in his official Mercedes on Awolowo Road in Lagos — gunned down with his driver and an aide-de-camp by an Army officer named Buka Suka Dimka acting at the head of a failed coup. He was thirty-seven.

The Lagos international airport bears his name. The largest denomination of the Nigerian naira carried his portrait from 1979 to 2007.

He is honored here as the head of state whose six months reorganized Nigerian federal structure and aligned the country with the African front-line states.