to the military, officially ending the Nigerian First Republic. The fact that Orizu, who was Igbo, and President Azikiwe did nothing to attempt a continuation of civilian rule in the wake of the failed coup helped reinforce notions of a broad Igbo conspiracy. To make matters worse, the coup plotters themselves faced no punishment for their mutiny, despite their arrest and the fact that their actions constituted a capital offense. Saro-Wiwa sympathized with Ironsi, reasoning that if the new leader executed the plotters, many in the country who saw the majors as heroes would rebel against him. If he released them, those aggrieved by the coup would act in much the same way. Ironsi’s solution was to keep them incarcerated without charge, a ploy he hoped would placate both sides, but in reality it only increased rumors of conspiracy. Saro-Wiwa saw Ironsi as a man in an impossible situation, rather than as an active manipulator of the ethnic tensions engulfing the country. Ironsi’s regime began on shaky footing and would end after barely six months, when he was assassinated in another coup attempt. Saro-Wiwa lamented, “We must shed a tear for Ironsi, for he was an honest man.”5
Saro-Wiwa learned of the second coup as part of a joke when one of his schoolmates approached him and declared, “You are the new premier!” Unlike the celebrations that accompanied the January coup, the atmosphere on the campus at Ibadan in July was tense and insecure. Ironsi, who began his tenure as head of state in an unstable situation, had only exacerbated matters in his attempts to stabilize the country. On May 24, 1966, Ironsi issued Decree No. 34, which abolished the regional federal system of Nigeria, replacing it with a single unitary structure. This move stripped the regional leaders of their power, grouping the various areas of the country into provinces. Additionally, all appointments to the civil service bureaucracy and the military would now be handled by the central government in Lagos.
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