Pt 4: Operation Wetie Finale: The Rivalry that the West never recovered from.

[00:00:03]On 15th January 1966, exactly 3 months and 4 days after the Western Region elections, Nigerian soldiers ended the First Republic.

[00:00:15]Samuel Akintola, Premier of the Western Region, was shot dead in his bedroom at the Premier's Lodge in Ibadan.

[00:00:22]The Western Region as a political entity ceased to exist. It has never been restored.

[00:00:34]Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and his fellow coup plotters were watching the Western Region throughout 1965.

[00:00:42]In their public statements after the coup, the chaos in the West, the rigged elections, the burning, the federal government's refusal to intervene was cited explicitly as justification for military action. Nzeogwu, in his BBC broadcast on the morning of 15th January 1966, named the corrupt politicians and the breakdown of order as the reason Nigerian soldiers had acted. Akintola, the man at the center of the Western crisis, was killed by Captain Emmanuel Ifeajuna Obasanjo at the Premier's Lodge in Ibadan.

[00:01:19]He was just 55 years old.

[00:01:22]He had accepted the title of Aare Ona Kakanfo of the Yoruba people, the paramount war commander in the Yoruba just months before the coup. According to history, no holder of the Aare Ona Kakanfo title could die peacefully.

[00:01:39]Awolowo, who was sitting in prison, was released after the coup and would go on to become one of the most important figures of the coup one era.

[00:01:49]The region he had built, the free schools, the hospitals, the television station, the cocoa economy, was left without a political structure to protect it.

[00:02:02]The soldiers who used the Wetie crisis to justify their coup did not restore order to the west.

[00:02:09]They dissolved the very federal structure the west had operated within since 1954.

[00:02:14]The chaos that the coup was meant to end gave way to a counter coup in July 1966, then to a civil war in 1967, then to 29 years of intermittent military rule.

[00:02:28]The western region, which had free education and the first television station on the continent, was broken into smaller states by the military.

[00:02:37]Its economic base, the cocoa industry, was never managed with the same coherence again.

[00:02:43]The Wetie crisis did not produce a better Nigeria.

[00:02:48]Instead, it produced the end of the Nigeria that had briefly been working.