Former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Akin Aduwo, 75, travels down memory lane in this interview with ADEOLA BALOGUN
At 75, how busy are you even in retirement?
I would say I’m quite busy, both in private and public spheres. I am called to participate in various matters as a former navy chief and in my family. Like the Democracy Day celebration, I was invited by the presidency and I just came back. Saturday is the Nigeria Navy Day which is the anniversary of the NNS; I have got the invitation of the Chief of Naval Staff. There are issues at my place of birth which the elders want me to intervene. I am quite busy but I will not complain because it is good for people to remember you than to forget all about you.
How did you get to know about the Navy which you joined early in life?
I come from Okitipupa but my grandmother was from Ilaje area, which is a riverine area that can only be accessed by canoe and boats; that meant that anytime I went to spend time with my maternal family, I had to go by canoe. Then I joined my uncles and elderly ones sometimes overnight to go fishing. At night, too, I joined them to hunt animals with light on our foreheads. So, I was used to travelling on water but it didn’t occur to me that that would become my profession until I left secondary school and took my first employment with the Ministry of Education in Ibadan in 1957. One day, I opened the Daily Times and saw an advertisement by the Nigeria Port Authority for the training of cadet officers. I applied and was successful. So, I resigned my appointment with the ministry of education and joined the NPA against the wish of my family except my mother. They didn’t know anything about being a sailor but when they found out that part of the training was taking me to England, they said anything that would take me to England was welcome. That’s how I started my training. The NPA sent me on various merchant ships from Lagos to England and in three years, I had finished training as a navigation officer. I then applied to the navy and was recruited as a navigation officer.
By the time you applied to the NPA, was the Navy not in place already?
The Nigerian Navy was just starting; we had only the Nigerian Marine department. In fact, the Navy started with recruits from the NPA, Nigerian Marine and other maritime companies personnel. I would say that we were part of the pioneers of the Nigerian Navy, which was called Her Majesty Nigerian Navy because we were still under colonial rule until after independence that the navy became a fighting force. But we were still sending our officers to England. The first two commanders of the navy were English Royal Naval Officers, one a captain and the last one by the time I was coming in was of the rank of commodore. The British established the naval base where we trained.
Who were your contemporaries, those that you trained together?
You won’t know them. Most of them are long gone to the great beyond. I don’t want to raise any emotion in people’s families. I don’t want to start reminding people of their grief, so spare me that.
How would you describe your career in the Nigerian Navy?
I would say I have enjoyed every moment; and at the end of it, I found out that I did not choose the wrong profession. Even though while at Igbobi College, I was the poorest in Geography, that subject was the basis of my professional line that took me from being a seaman, officer rank, commissioned rank and finally a three-star vice admiral and chief of naval staff.
As a seaman, what was the longest time you were at sea?
Honestly, nobody has ever asked me this question. I would probably say that was the end of 1972 and the early month of 1973 when I took over a brand new ship, NNS Dorina, from the ship builders in England and had to sail it to Nigeria as commanding officer along the Bay of Biscay where you could have the worst of weather. It could be terrifying, it could slow you down. Bringing a ship to West Africa after crossing the Atlantic, one could encounter some challenges, having been slowed down. In my own case, we were running out of fuel and even without previous permission, we had to put into the Liberian capital harbour of Monrovia. As I said, once God prepares you for something, he also gives you the strength and wisdom and luck of running into people he has placed there to be of help. And so it was on New Year’s Day in 1973 that I sailed my ship into Monrovia. Being a public holiday, everybody was celebrating the New Year but I was able to contact the port via radio and given permission to anchor. Apart from fuel, our foodstuff too was low and could only sustain us for a few hours. I asked if there was a Nigerian embassy and they said yes, then I asked to be taken there. But on getting to the residence of the ambassador, he was not in; he was attending a state luncheon with President Tubman at the presidential palace. I headed there and I was able to get through to him and made him realise that it was an emergency and I was in uniform. When he came out, lo and behold, he turned out to be my Geography master, Mr. Olujimi Jolaoso, who gave me the worst result, 23 per cent in 1956. He lifted me up and embraced me; he was very happy to meet me. He went back to ask to be excused and we rode to the house of the managing director of Shell who was a friend of his. And within three hours, my ship was filled up with fuel and enough food. He hosted my men and me to a dinner and we sent sailing the following day. We stopped over at Tema, near Takoradi, Ghana where I made a new friend, the commanding officer of the naval base who was very accommodating. We arrived in Nigeria hours later. All together, that voyage lasted about three weeks; that’s the longest I spent far away at sea but it made me become an international navigator.
How was your experience during the war as a navigation officer?
During the war, I was placed in command of a fighting Nigerian warship called NNS Ogoja. Because the war was declared against a breakaway part of the country, it became very difficult. This was because many of the officers and men we were going to fight against were trained with us in the Nigerian Navy. But to keep Nigeria one was a task that must be done and then, the project was, ‘Go on with one Nigeria’ (GOWON), that was the mantra then. I cannot say it was interesting but it was a duty that must be done. As commanding officer of NNS Ogoja, that was the ship that led all the nine coastal operations during the war. That was the ship that took the Black Scorpion, Benjamin Adekunle, from Lagos to Bonny where he headed the historic landing operation in Bonny. The coastal push of the civil war was to last three years. On board my ship, Adekunle and I disagreed several times on issues. We argued and disagreed many times; there were times he tried to put the ship in harm’s way when there was supposed to be radio silence so your enemies would not pick signals of your movements. But eventually, we became friends and got on very well. We landed the troops successfully after initial bombardment by my ship. After a few months that we ensured that the Biafrans were routed, we moved out and sailed to Calabar. By the time the bombardment started, we caught the Biafrans unawares and landed the troops successfully. As a matter of fact, the exercise in Calabar made me emotional because the first shot from my 20inch gun landed on top of the very office that I occupied as the first commanding officer of the new naval base in Calabar, which was commissioned in 1964. The shot landed directly on that same table that I was sitting on for about two years. We spent another one year plus and moved on after we ensured that the Biafrans had been driven to Port Harcourt. Lest I forget, when we entered Bonny, a ship that I had commanded some years before that was stationed in Calabar but which was seized by the Biafrans, was brought to Bonny to fight us. Again, it was my gun that hit that ship and set it on fire. My best friend, a fellow officer who was an Ibo guy, was the commanding officer of the ship. The ship started smoking and the officer beached the ship. I stopped firing and the personnel started jumping overboard and I saw the officer, Pascal Odu, who was my best friend among the eastern officers. He did what was expected of an officer, he waited until all his men had left and I saw him walking down from his navigation bridge. I called him from my loud hailer, ‘Pascal, this is Akin, come down, I will send my boat for you, I will protect you’, but he disappeared. Three years later after the war had ended, the guy walked into my office at the naval base. He dragged a chair and sat down and said, ‘Years ago you wanted me to join you, did you really think I would come over to your ship’? I asked him why and he said if he had come over, some of my men might have shot and killed him. Then, if he came and nothing happened to him, his family that were in Biafra then could be harmed by Ojukwu. He is now in America. The war continued and we veered out to various places like Burutu, Sapele, Warri and so on. At Sapele one morning, some fishermen came in a boat and said that the governor was in their village; that he came from Benin. That was Gen. David Ejoor, the military governor of Midwestern State. He rode a bicycle to escape when Biafrans took over Benin. I sent my men with a boat to bring him. He was looking unkempt as he had not changed his shirt for long. I radioed Lagos and Gen Gowon approved a sea plane to fetch him and a few days later, he was made the chief of the army staff. Almost three years later, Gen Obasanjo was appointed to take over from Brig Adekunle and a few months later, he ended the war.
How were you able to square up with a tough officer like Brig Adekunle?
I told him to his face, ‘I’m not one of your soldiers. I’m a senior officer too and don’t shout at me. If you shout at me, I will shout at you too’. We became friends too.
So you worked with Obasanjo too?
No, when he came in to take over from Adekunle, Adekunle had left Port Harcourt and I was the most senior naval officer. So we met everyday. When Obasanjo arrived in Port Harcourt, Adekunle had requested me to hand over the keys of the guest house he was staying to then Col. Obasanjo. So, on his arrival, I went from my ship and handed over the keys, climbed on board and sailed back to Lagos.
At a time you were military governor of the Western State, was it as a result of your participation in a coup or by merit?
Let me emphasise something here, Obasanjo never joined a coup plot. It was after the coup had succeeded that they started looking around for him to help form a government. In my own case, it was a surprise of my life and that was the worst appointment that I was ever offered in my career as a naval officer, I never liked it. I wasn’t interested in the politics of the country. I was only happy and contented and feeling honoured to be captain of my own ship. There is no greater appointment except when you are made the chief of naval staff. As commanding officer of the ship, you are a representative of God in that ship with the lives of everyone under your care. And that is a job you get by merit, not that somebody is doing you a favour. I have had officers coming to me after I had left those ships to ask me how I managed them and to plead on their behalf to be excused from the appointment. If you are not knowledgeable enough to take command of a ship, you will run it against a rock; that is the easiest way to ruin your career.
But if you did not take part in a coup, how come you were appointed a governor?
I was appointed or suggested, maybe, by people who planned the coup without even my knowledge. I guess the junta did that but it was against my wish. In fact, it was a surprise, a shock. But then, everything that happens to me in life, I put it before God. Like Jesus said, let this cup pass over me if it be thy will. And that’s what happened to me. Thirty days exactly, I was recalled. I prayed to God to be removed. In the West, Pa Akintola had just been brutally killed and it was in the very house, the Premier Lodge where he was killed, that I had to stay for the first few days on arrival in Ibadan so that they could renovate the Government House. And there were bullet holes everywhere; the bedroom had about three air-conditioners, yet I was still sweating. A journalist asked me recently, how you can be uncomfortable when you are governor in charge of all naira and kobo in the state? I said that is not my style. If I wanted to enrich myself, I could have done so much more easily during the war. The Central Bank sent on board my ship to Bonny £3m cash in trunk boxes. Pa Awolowo was the minister of finance by that time and the vice chairman to General Gowon. I carried the trunk boxes from Lagos to Bonny and handed them over to the Black Scorpion and he signed for it. A year and a half later, we were in Port Harcourt, the same Central Bank sent on board of my ship £8m cash. But that is not my upbringing; it did not even occur to me until Brig. Adekunle joked with me, he said, ‘You are a very stupid person, you are not like some Nigerians. They gave you all that money from Lagos two times, why didn’t you throw a grenade and say Biafrans bombed your ship and let about four of the trunk boxes disappear? You would have been a wealthy man’. If I did that, I would have sabotaged the war effort. Some friends said in the one month that I was governor, I should have taken care of myself. I did not even know where the treasury of the Western State was. Even my security vote, I did not know how much it was.
But it was not that you were too young not to know what to do as governor.
No, of course, I knew the duty I was sent there to perform but not to steal money or mishandle the money I was supposed to spend in improving the lives of the people of the West. I am convinced that doing that would have affected my career in the navy and I would never have been chief of naval staff. The prize of sin is death and I might even have been killed in that war.
But we learnt that the manner of your removal was humiliating.
That is what a typical Nigerian thinks because they believe that being governor is the greatest thing anybody could aspire to. That is why they are killing one another. But I was not brought up that way. I am a prince in my place of birth but if today, they send a delegation here that the oba is dead and I should be the one to ascend the throne. I would tell them to go home to expect me. But I will book my flight and fly out of the country same day. I had a mother who was a passionate Christian and who must praise God for everything. During the war, many stories went to her that I was no more, but she would tell them that her son was alive.
So if you were not humiliated, what then happened?
How could I have been humiliated when I was not arrested or detained or court martialled? What kind of humiliation? I was appointed and posted to be governor of the Western State and a month later, I was recalled from Ibadan. I was just told that I was too slow in the military precision style which I was supposed to cover but I’m a Yoruba man. The Yoruba have a way of doing things and achieving results. Papa Awolowo never did anything without planning it thoroughly. I had started consultations but my appointing authority felt I was not fast enough.
You heard on radio that you had been removed; maybe that’s why people felt you were humiliated.
I didn’t feel any humiliation. I thanked God that He answered my prayer; that He had passed the awful cup over my head. One of the state governors now calls himself the Chief Servant unlike many of his colleagues who are referred to as Excellencies.
But the opposite was the case when you were made the chief of naval staff later…
It was because I was operating within an environment in which I had been trained and functioned over the years; and I knew the rules and the discipline. If I walked in to address a naval assembly, even if I cracked a joke, nobody dare laughed. But would that be the same thing if I walked into an assembly of traditional rulers, eminent persons, market women and so on? To be high handed with people of the West would have spelt doom for any governor, either military or civilian. I was doing things my own way and if I went there 20 times, I would do the same thing. That was my modus operandi. I didn’t feel humiliated; did I commit a crime? If I did, I would be marched from Ibadan straight to Kirikiri.
Did you plan to marry a military officer?
No, my late wife was a midwife in Calabar. We met at the post office on the first working day of 1963; I went to buy a postal order to send to my mother and she came to post a letter or something and I saw her reading a newspaper. She was dressed in white and I was also dressed in my uniform. She was from Harris Town near Abonema while I’m from Okitipupa, Ondo State. That’s how we met and we eventually got married. After she moved to Lagos, I asked her whether she would like to join the Nigerian Army medical corps and she agreed. When I was going on course in the UK, I took her along and she did some higher nursing courses. At the time she joined the military, she was a sergeant but by the time she came back from the UK, she was promoted as a commissioned officer and served at various places. When I was made the chief of naval staff, she had to be brought to Lagos for some functions as wife of the chief of naval staff. Eventually, she retired in 1986 as a Lt-Col. and deputy matron of the Creek Hospital, Ikoyi. I retired in 1984 when Buhari/Idiagbon took over the government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari under which I was serving.
Why was your late wife buried in her hometown and not yours?
That is their tradition and culture and that’s what delayed the burial from May to July. Even their family head came here and we discussed it. She was made a chief of Ife, just like me. Then, like I said earlier, my own father was a traditional ruler and that made me a prince. It’s against our own culture to bury the wife of a royal family away from the family home, but we reached a compromise and respected the wishes of her people. Kabiyesi Ooni sanctioned it and we decided that we could not turn enemies after 44 years of marriage. And so we took her and buried her in her place of birth.
What is your regret in life?
As a person, I would say my regret is not being able to fulfil my ambition to be a lawyer. I started private studies in law as a lieutenant when I was a recruiting officer for the Navy based in Apapa, then the war broke out just about a month or so when I was to take my intermediate exam. It was a correspondence course but as time went on, I could not get back to it but I think I would have excelled.
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