The 1975 Coup That Overthrew Nigeria's Yakubu Gowon in Kampala

On July 29, 1975, General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria’s military head of state for nine years, was overthrown while he was more than 2,000 miles from Lagos, attending the twelfth summit of the Organisation of African Unity in Kampala, Uganda. The coup back home was bloodless and swiftly executed by a group of officers led by Colonel Joseph Nanven Garba, commander of the Presidential Guards Brigade and a man Gowon had trusted. Garba announced the change of government in a radio broadcast, and by the time the news reached Kampala, Gowon’s nine-year rule was already over.

Gowon later recounted that he had not known the exact timing of the plot, though he had reason for unease: his chief security officer had warned him before the trip that Garba and another officer, Anthony Ochefu, might be involved in a conspiracy. Gowon summoned Garba, who denied it, while Ochefu avoided the meeting altogether, deepening Gowon’s suspicion without giving him anything concrete to act on. He traveled to Uganda regardless.

The story of how he learned the news at the summit itself has become one of the most retold anecdotes in modern Nigerian political history: Uganda’s president, Idi Amin, who was hosting and chairing the OAU summit, approached Gowon during the proceedings and handed him a note reporting that his government had been toppled in Lagos. Accounts of the note’s exact content differ slightly: some describe it as a folded handwritten message, others as a Reuters wire dispatch Amin passed along, but they agree on the essential scene: Gowon received the news of his own overthrow, delivered by a fellow head of state, in the middle of an international summit, and read it calmly before the assembled delegates. He later said he tried to appear composed despite the shock.

Gowon did not attempt to return to Nigeria or contest the coup. He left Uganda aboard Amin’s executive jet, traveled through Cameroon and Togo, and eventually settled in Britain, where he earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Warwick. He broadcast a message accepting the new government under Brigadier Murtala Mohammed, who took power promising a return to civilian rule, a transition Mohammed did not live to complete, as he was assassinated in a failed counter-coup the following February. Gowon’s own position grew more precarious after that assassination, when the coup plotters implicated him in an alleged prior meeting in London; he was stripped of his military rank and pension, both later restored once he was cleared and Nigeria returned to civilian government. He remains the only Nigerian head of state removed from office while abroad, and the manner of his removal, delivered by note, mid-summit, by a fellow African leader, has made the episode one of the most vivid single images of Nigeria’s post-independence political turbulence.