Emeka Ojukwu: Hero or Coward?

Emeka Ojukwu was born on November 4, 1933, in Zungeru, Northern Nigeria to Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, a businessman from Nnewi, present-day Anambra State in South-Eastern Nigeria.

Ojukwu Snr. was into the transport business; he took advantage of the business boom during the Second World War to become one of the richest men in Nigeria.

Emeka Ojukwu started his secondary school education at CMS Grammar School, Lagos at the age of 10 in 1943. He later transferred to King's College, also in Lagos, in 1944 where he was involved in a controversy leading to his brief imprisonment for assaulting a white British colonial teacher who humiliated a black woman.

At 13, his father sent him overseas to study in the United Kingdom, first at Epsom College and later at Lincoln College, Oxford University, where he earned a master's degree in History. He then returned to colonial Nigeria in 1956.

Ojukwu joined the Nigerian military, against the wishes of his father, receiving his commission in March 1958, as a 2nd Lieutenant from Eaton Hall as one of the first and few university graduates to join the army as a recruit. Upon completion of further military training, he was assigned to the Army's Fifth Battalion in Kano.

Emeka Ojukwu's background and education guaranteed his promotion to higher ranks. At that time, the Nigerian Military Forces had 250 officers and only 15 were Nigerians.

After serving in the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in the Congo, under Major-General Johnson Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi, Ojukwu was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1964 and posted to Kano, where he was in charge of the 5th Battalion of the Nigerian Army.

He was in Kano when the January 15, 1966, coup was executed. #HistoryVille #EmekaOjukwu

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