Background
He was born on June 6, 1940, at Oturkpo in the Benue Plateau State (central) Nigeria. His parents were of the Idoma people, his father being a local authority councillor.
He was born on June 6, 1940, at Oturkpo in the Benue Plateau State (central) Nigeria. His parents were of the Idoma people, his father being a local authority councillor.
Educated at the Military School, Zaria from 1954 to 1958 and then at Regular Officers’ Training College, Accra (September 1958-March 1959), followed by Mons and Sandhurst in Britain.
Commissioned in the Nigerian army in July 1961; served in the UN Emergency Force in the Congo from November 1961 to February 1962. Then posted to HQ 2nd Brigade in Lagos as a staff officer, until his transfer to the Air Force on December 10, 1963. It was policy to transfer senior army officers to the embryonic Nigerian Air Force (formed July 12, 1962), and he became Senior Personnel Officer until May 1965.
He was then appointed the Nigerian Military Attache in West Germany and remained there, as doyen of the military attache corps, during the Nigerian civil war. He returned home only one month before the collapse of Biafra at a time when the Air Force had won complete ascendancy and was mounting regular raids on Biafran objectives.
He was appointed Chief of the Air Staff on December 22, 1969, and made a member of the Supreme Military Council. It was not until 1971, at a Joint Services Staff College course in Britain, that he obtained a private pilot's licence to fly. He is currently based at the Nigerian Air Force Headquarters and was promoted substantive Brigadier on October 1, 1972.
One of the new generation of Nigerian military men who has risen rapidly since the Nigerian civil war. He was transferred from the army to the Air Force in 1963, but spent almost the whole of the war period as a military attache in West Germany, returning on appointment to the Supreme Military Council as head of the Air Force.