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On 5 March 1986, three of Nigeria’s most celebrated literary figures — John Pepper Clark, Chinua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka — arrived at Dodan Barracks in Lagos.
They went to appeal directly to Nigeria’s Head of State, Ibrahim Babangida, seeking clemency for their friend and colleague, Mamman Vatsa, a Major-General in the Nigerian Army.
Vatsa, who was also a poet and a long-time associate of Babangida, had been accused of involvement in a coup plot against the military government. Despite the intervention of the three writers — representing the moral voice of Nigeria’s intellectual community — the appeal was unsuccessful.
Major-General Mamman Vatsa was executed later that same day, marking one of the most controversial episodes of Nigeria’s military era. The event highlighted the limits of intellectual influence under military rule and remains a powerful symbol of the tension between power, friendship, and conscience in Nigeria’s history.
Source: History Ville