Murtala Muhammed's 1975 Coup Against Yakubu Gowon

On July 29, 1975, while General Yakubu Gowon was in Kampala, Uganda, attending a summit of the Organisation of African Unity, a group of officers in Lagos moved against him. Gowon had ruled Nigeria for almost nine years, having come to power after the countercoup of July 1966 and steered the country through the Biafran civil war of 1967 to 1970. By the mid-1970s, however, his repeated postponement of a promised return to civilian rule, mounting corruption in his administration, and general fatigue with prolonged military government had eroded his support inside the army itself.

The coup was carried out with unusual speed and discipline. Plotters secured key military installations, radio stations, and communication centers within hours, and Colonel Joseph Garba, a junior officer close to Gowon’s own security detail, announced the change of government on national radio. Crucially, almost no blood was shed. Gowon, informed of events while still abroad, chose not to resist and went into exile in Britain rather than contest the takeover. Brigadier Murtala Ramat Muhammed, then 37 years old, was installed as Nigeria’s new head of state, with Brigadier Olusegun Obasanjo serving as his chief of staff and deputy.

Muhammed moved immediately and aggressively to reshape the government. He purged thousands of civil servants accused of corruption or incompetence, launched an anti-corruption drive that targeted senior officials, and set a firm timetable for a return to civilian rule by 1979, a promise Gowon had repeatedly deferred. He also announced plans to relocate Nigeria’s federal capital away from the congested, coastal city of Lagos to a new, centrally located site, a project that would eventually produce Abuja. The tweet that circulated afterward, showing how American officials reacted to Muhammed’s sudden rise, reflected genuine uncertainty in Washington about a young, decisive general who had displaced a leader the United States had grown used to dealing with, and whose foreign policy leaned toward more assertive support for African liberation movements, including in Angola.

Muhammed’s tenure, however, proved brief. On February 13, 1976, he was assassinated in Lagos during an abortive coup attempt led by Lieutenant Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, who was unhappy with the direction of the government and with his own marginalization within it. Muhammed was killed in his car on the way to his office, though the wider coup attempt failed to seize power, and Obasanjo assumed leadership in his place, continuing the transition plan Muhammed had set in motion.

Despite lasting only about six months, Muhammed’s government left an outsized mark on Nigerian political memory. He is often remembered as a reformer whose brief rule combined genuine anti-corruption energy with a bloodless method of seizing power that stood in contrast to the killings of the 1966 coups. His 1975 takeover of Gowon remains a frequently cited example of how quickly Nigeria’s military elite could reshuffle leadership at the top without provoking wider civil conflict, even as the country continued to cycle between civilian and military government for decades afterward.