Obi says Nigerians should not hold the 1966 coup against a generation barely born then
Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) presidential candidate Peter Obi has urged Nigerians to move beyond historical grievances and build a united country.
He spoke on Thursday on Arise Television’s Morning Show when asked about the January 1966 military coup, in which several political and military leaders, particularly in the North, were killed. The coup was led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and other young officers.
“You cannot hold what happened when I was barely three, four years against me. That’s in the past now. But we must build the future based on love, not on hatred. So it is time to show love. It is time to show unity. That’s why my presidency is about unity of the country, and it’s important that people understand that,” he said.
The 1966 coup remains one of the events that still shapes how some Nigerians read ethnicity and trust in national politics. Obi’s reply treats personal age as a limit on inherited blame: a child of three or four cannot be made to answer for officers he did not command. The larger claim is that a campaign built on unity has to refuse that inheritance as a voting test.
Unity talk is easy to say and hard to cash. Northern memory of 1966 and eastern memory of what followed are not erased by a studio sentence. What Obi has done is to place the coup outside the charge sheet against him personally and to ask that 2027 be argued on present insecurity, hunger and institutions rather than on a night in January sixty years ago. Whether that framing travels beyond a morning show depends on whether other actors accept the same limit—or keep treating history as a standing indictment of anyone from the wrong side of that year.
