He slayed Akintola, the tyrant of the west and made the first move to save awolowo from prison
Reference : Nigeria's Military Coup Culture; max siollun

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https://www.nairaland.com/3258459/1966-coup-nigeria-balewa-bello-guilty-of-murdering-citizens

lawani post:

'Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precedence but on moral conviction, we are not executing thieves or political opponents, we are executing murderers'- Fidel Casto to critics of executions by the Cuban socialist government in the 1950s.

If General Babangida had led the 1966 coup, it would have been devoid of sentiments and it would have been a success. He planned a coup, the one that removed the inept and corrupt General Buhari government in 1985 and no life was lost. He consolidated the army, convinced his juniors as well as his colleagues then deployed armoured tanks to the police headquarters to hem them in for the moment. No life was lost, the regime heads that defiantly returned to Nigeria were arrested and merely placed under house arrest despite that they approved the death by firing squad of drug smugglers with a retroactive decree, a judicial murder of people better than them. One of the young men thus killed said he does not steal and if he had known he would be killed, he would not have smuggled drugs. Despite this, General Buhari was spared. So a person of General Babangida's temperament, who sees life as sacred would have carried through the 1966 coup properly. You kill ruthlessly those that deserve it and take caution not to kill any innocent. If you engineered rigged elections in the West and deployed police to kill thousands of protesters during the wetie riots, you deserve to be killed, you do not deserve to die peacefully in your sleep, since you are not a higher specie of human than those people you ordered killed even after you cheated them. So someone like President Babangida would have singled out those that will be killed execution style and those to be arrested. If I were PM Balewa, I would have resigned rather than dance to Sir Ahmadu Bello's tunes, that way, he would have survived.  Sir Bello had already made his stand known in several interviews, so as the PM, you had to hold your ground or you fall with him. PM Balewa fell with him. You dont kill thousands of innocents protesting against you for brazenly cheating them and expect to go free. Something would have happened one way or the other. If not this coup then the other. Egypt, Ghana had already fallen.

In thesame way, if the AG leaders hounded to jail for treasonable felony had really planned a coup and got it up to the stage of firing a single gunshot, then it surely would have been successful and neatly done with people slain ruthlessly that deserve to be so slain, any dead innocent would be the victim of an accident not of an assassination. Those people were Ogboni who do things with common sense and people older than them back then would caution them.

However, after all said and done, the advise still holds 'If you are working for a government or an entity, killing people without remorse, you are working as a politician for such a government, you better resign, that is in your best interest because you are culpable as well, if you are urging people on as they kill thousands of innocents, then you are culpable, because your life is not more important than that of those people you see as cannon fodder. To a real empathetic human being, human life is sacred, otherwise you are a beast. So if you are a member of such an entity, the best course of action is to resign in solidarity with the people unjusly slain, because your life is in no way more important than that of those people being killed.

When you complain of Igbo soldiers killing your leaders in an Igbo coup, remember the thousands of Yoruba farmers, traders and etc, innocent people, mowed down by the then FG under the orders of PM Balewa's government. It would be wrong to discount those people while blaming some people for killing your leaders.

So, resignation remains your best bet or line of action when you find yourself suddenly camped on the wrong side of history. The best bet to save your own heads.