Yakubu Gowon

His father took pride in the fact that he married on 26 April 1923, the same day as the wedding of Prince Albert and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother).

Gowon was the fifth of eleven children.

He grew up in Zaria and had his early life and education there.

At school, Gowon proved to be a remarkable athlete: he was the school football goalkeeper, pole vaulter, and long-distance runner.

He broke the school mile record in his first year.

He was also the boxing captain.

Yakubu Dan-Yumma "Jack" Gowon (born 19 October 1934) is a retired Nigerian army general and military leader.

As head of state of Nigeria, Gowon presided over a controversial Nigerian Civil War and delivered the famous "no victor, no vanquished" speech at the war's end to promote healing and reconciliation.

The Nigerian Civil War is listed as one of the deadliest in modern history, with some accusing Gowon of crimes against humanity and genocide.

Gowon maintains that he committed no wrongdoing during the war and that his leadership saved the country.

An Anglican Christian from a minority Ngas family of Northern Nigeria, Gowon is a Nigerian nationalist, and a believer in the unity and oneness of Nigeria.

Six of these states contained minority groups that had demanded state creation since the 1950s.

Gowon rightly calculated that the eastern minorities would not actively support the Igbos, given the prospect of having their own states if the secession effort were defeated.

Many of the federal troops who fought in the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, to bring the Eastern Region back to the federation, were members of minority groups.

Gowon joined the Nigerian Army in 1954 and received his commission as a second lieutenant on 19 October 1955, his 21st birthday.

He was trained in the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK (1955–56), Staff College, Camberley, UK (1962) as well as the Joint Staff College, Latimer, 1965.

He saw action in the Congo as part of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, both in 1960–61 and in 1963.

Gowon's rise to power followed the July 1966 counter-coup and cemented military rule in Nigeria.

He advanced to battalion commander rank by 1966, at which time he was still a lieutenant colonel.

In January 1966, he became Nigeria's youngest military chief of staff at the age of 31, because a military coup d'état by a group of junior officers under Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu led to the overthrow of Nigeria's civilian government.

In the course of this coup, mostly northern and western leaders were killed, including Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria's Prime Minister; Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of the Northern Region; and Samuel Akintola, Premier of the Western Region, Lt Col Arthur Unegbe and so many more.

The then Lieutenant Colonel Gowon returned from his course at the Joint Staff College, Latimer UK two days before the coup – a late arrival that possibly exempted him from the plotters' hit list.

The subsequent failure by Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi (who was the head of state following the January 1966 coup-with Gowon his Chief of Staff) to meet Northern demands for the prosecution of the coup plotters further inflamed Northern anger.

There was significant support for the coup plotters from both the Eastern Region as well as the mostly left-wing "Lagos-Ibadan" press.

Then came Aguyi Ironsi's Decree Number 34, which proposed the abolition of the federal system of government in favor of a unitary state, a position which had long been championed by some Southerners-especially by a major section of the Igbo-dominated National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) This was perhaps wrongly interpreted by Northerners as a Southern (particularly Igbo) attempt at a takeover of all levers of power in the country.

The North lagged badly behind the Western and Eastern regions in terms of education (partially due to Islamic doctrine-informed resistance to western cultural and social ethos), while the mostly-Igbo Easterners were already present in the federal civil service.

The original intention of Murtala Mohammed and his fellow coup-plotters seems to have been to engineer the secession of the Northern region from Nigeria as a whole, but they were subsequently dissuaded of their plans by several advisors, amongst which included a number of high-ranking civil servants and judges, and importantly emissaries of the British and American governments who had interests in the Nigerian polity.

The young officers then decided to name Lieutenant Colonel Gowon, who apparently had not been actively involved in events until that point, as Nigerian Head of State.

On ascent to power Gowon reversed Ironsi's abrogation of the federal principle.

In 1966, Gowon was chosen to become head of state.

Up until then, Gowon remained strictly a career soldier with no involvement whatsoever in politics, until the tumultuous events of the year suddenly thrust him into a leadership role, when his unusual background as a Northerner who was neither of Hausa nor Fulani ancestry nor of the Islamic faith made him a particularly safe choice to lead a nation whose population was seething with ethnic tension.

Gowon promoted himself twice as Nigerian Head of State.

Gowon was a Lt. Colonel upon his ascendancy to the top of the new Federal military government of Nigeria on August 1, 1966, however other senior military officers such as Commodore Joseph Wey, Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, and Colonel Robert Adebayo were a part of the government and their military seniority to Gowon was awkward.

To stabilize his position as Head of State, Gowon promoted himself to Major-General just before the start of the civil war hostilities in 1967 and to full General at the end of the civil war in 1970.

In anticipation of eastern secession, Gowon moved quickly to weaken the support base of the region by decreeing the creation of twelve new states to replace the four regions.

The war lasted thirty months and ended in January 1970.

In accepting Biafra's unconditional cease-fire, Gowon declared that there would be no victor and no vanquished.

Consequently, Gowon served for the longest continuous period as head of state of Nigeria, ruling for almost nine years until his overthrow in the coup d'état of 1975 by Brigadier Murtala Mohammed.

Gowon is a Ngas (Angas) from Lur, a small village in the present Kanke Local Government Area of Plateau State.

His parents, Nde Yohanna and Matwok Kurnyang left for Wusasa, Zaria as Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries in the early days of Gowon's life.