Gen. Yakubu Gowon

Yakubu Dan-Yumma 'Jack' Gowon was born on 19 October 1934 at Lur, a village in the Pankshin Division of the Plateau Province (modern Plateau State), the fifth child of Yohanna and Saraya Gowon. His parents were Ngas Christians and his father served as a catechist of the Church Missionary Society at the Wusasa Mission in Zaria, where the young Gowon was raised among the Hausa-speaking Christian community of the Sabongari. He attended St Bartholomew's Primary School Wusasa, Government College Zaria (1950–53), and was commissioned into the Royal West African Frontier Force after officer training at Eaton Hall, Cheshire (1954) and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (1955–56).

By 1966 Gowon was a 31-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel and Army Chief of Staff. He emerged as the compromise candidate after the July 1966 counter-coup — a Middle Belt Christian acceptable to both the predominantly Northern Muslim plotters and the Yoruba Western Region. His broadcast of 1 August 1966 included the line 'the basis for unity is not there' that nearly conceded secession; days later he reversed course.

On 27 May 1967 he created twelve states by decree — splitting the four regions and isolating the Igbo East from the Niger Delta's oil — the single most consequential political-geography reform in Nigerian history. Three days later Lt-Col. Ojukwu proclaimed the Republic of Biafra. The 30-month war that followed killed an estimated 1–3 million people, mostly from starvation under the federal blockade. At the surrender at Dodan Barracks on 15 January 1970 Gowon proclaimed 'No victor, no vanquished' and his '3 Rs' policy of Reconciliation, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation, ending one of the few civil wars in the modern era without mass reprisals against the defeated side.

The post-1973 oil boom transformed his administration. The Udoji wage award of 1974 doubled federal salaries; the Third National Development Plan ($30 bn) launched a building programme of universities, refineries and the National Theatre. Indigenisation Decree 4 of 1972 (and its 1977 successor) transferred ownership of foreign enterprises to Nigerians. He hosted the Second All-Africa Games (Lagos 1973) and the OAU summit. But by 1975 he had postponed indefinitely the promised return to civilian rule; on 29 July 1975, while attending the OAU summit in Kampala, Brigadier Murtala Muhammed seized power in a bloodless coup.

Gowon went into exile in Warwick, England, where he enrolled at the University of Warwick and completed a PhD in political science (1984) with a thesis on the OAU. The Dimka coup of 13 February 1976 named him as a sponsor; he denied involvement and a Nigerian extradition request was refused by the Thatcher government. He returned to Nigeria under amnesty in 1983 and has since maintained a public ministry, the Nigeria Prays interfaith movement, and serves as a senior elder statesman. He married Victoria Zakari at Lagos Cathedral on 19 April 1969 — the wedding of the wartime Head of State while the war was still being fought — and the marriage produced five children. He turned ninety in October 2024 and is the longest-living Nigerian Head of State.