ABSTRACT
Shehu Shagari was in his detached ministerial house, 19 Kingsway, near the hotel and the golf-course in spacious Ikoyi, which the British had laid out as a pleasant, green residential suburb across the water from crowded Lagos Island, and which was a favoured place öf residence for Nigeria’s public men. Before dawn Alhaji Ahmed Kurfi, then deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, came to Shehu Shagari’s house with the news that the Prime Minister, with the Finance Minister, who came from coastal Warri, had been abducted. Shehu Shagari then went to the house of his old friend, Sir Abubakar’s Minister of Transport, Zanna Bukar Dipcharima, in nearby Bourdillon Road, to awaken him with the warning that the soldiers had mutinied. The next visitor to Dipcha-rima’s house, Shehu Shagari recalls, was Dorothy Schwarz, wife of the British journalist Walter Schwarz.
