Chief Okotie-Eboh: The Coup Target Who Wasn’t Meant To Be One
The Unusual Coup Target
A Killing that Defied the Coup’s Pattern
WHEN Nigeria’s first military coup struck on 15 January 1966, the logic appeared brutally clear: remove the political heads and military high command of the First Republic. Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa was killed. Northern Premier Ahmadu Bello was assassinated. Western Premier Samuel Ladoke Akintola was eliminated. Senior military officers including Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari and Lt-Col. Kur Mohammed also fell. But one name on the death list stood outside this structural symmetry — Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Federal Minister of Finance.
Unlike the other victims, he was not a head of government, a regional premier, or a top-ranking officer. He was a technocrat-politician whose influence was economic, not militaristic or executive. Yet his killing was not incidental — it was deliberate, premeditated, and symbolically charged.
The Rise of a Self-Made Power Broker
Born Festus Samuel Edah in 1912 to Urhobo parents from Uwherun in present-day Delta State, he later embraced Itsekiri identity following his marriage into an Itsekiri family — a personal transition that would itself become fodder for identity politics in the ethnically charged climate of the First Republic.
Long before entering politics, Okotie-Eboh was already an industrialist. He started as an accounting clerk at Bata Shoe Company in 1937, later building his first factory — a rubber-creping plant by 1958. In 1963, he launched the Omimi Rubber and Canvas Shoe Factory, fulfilling a lifelong obsession with manufacturing footwear. Alongside business, he and his wife led one of Nigeria’s earliest examples of private sector investment in education, founding schools including Sapele Boys Academy, Zik’s College of Commerce, and Sapele Academy Secondary School in 1953.
His boardroom credentials were vast — Warri Ports Advisory Committee, Sapele Township Advisory Board, Sapele Town Planning Authority — making him one of the most economically networked ministers of his generation.
In 1951, he joined the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC). By 1954, he became National Treasurer and was elected to represent the Warri Division in the House of Representatives. His ascent to Federal Minister of Labour and Welfare in 1955, then Finance Minister in 1957, was not the start of his influence — it was the institutionalisation of it.
Flamboyance, Media Warfare, and a Manufactured Symbol
Okotie-Eboh’s tragedy was not a lack of achievement — it was a surplus of visibility. He was theatrical, extravagant in dress, and ostentatiously elegant in a period when the First Republic’s politics was being fought as much in newspapers as in parliament. The Action Group (AG) led by Obafemi Awolowo controlled most of the Western media ecosystem. The press, particularly in Lagos and the West, weaponised Okotie-Eboh’s lifestyle into a political metaphor for the perceived excesses and corruption of the Republic.
To the coup plotters — many of whom admired Awolowo and romantically imagined him as a prospective Prime Minister — the media narrative became indistinguishable from reality. The young majors did not merely see a minister; they saw a symbol they had been trained to resent.
A Lesson Carved in Blood
Two days before his death, Okotie-Eboh privately disclosed to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew his plan to resign from politics and return fully to shoe manufacturing. But history had already frozen his public image into a political weapon. His death remains one of Nigeria’s most tragic proofs that perception in unequal societies can eclipse facts and become a verdict of its own.
