ANALYSIS: Breaking Down the Coup Plot Against Tinubu

ANALYSIS: Breaking Down the Coup Plot Against Tinubu

By Umar Farouk Bala

On January 26, 2026, Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters (DHQ) confirmed that it had uncovered a plot to overthrow President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

According to the military, the alleged conspiracy—uncovered in late September 2025 through joint intelligence by the Nigerian Army, the Department of State Services (DSS), and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)—included plans to assassinate President Tinubu, Vice-President Kashim Shettima, and other senior government officials, as well as to arrest top military commanders.

Reacting to the foiled plot, the Minister of Defence, General Christopher Musa, stated that the officers involved “must have made up their minds” about the consequences of their actions.

“They must have made up their minds when they decided to do this and must have considered their families,” Musa said.
“The perpetrators already know the repercussions of their actions, and I’m sure they are ready to face the wrath.”

The Defence Minister’s remarks raise a deeper and more troubling question: what mental process allows a soldier—fully aware that a failed coup almost certainly ends in death—to proceed regardless? Why does the certainty of execution, disgrace, and familial ruin fail to deter the coup plotter?

History shows that the risks are neither abstract nor exaggerated. Nigeria’s coups of 1966 alone plunged the country into political chaos, ethnic violence, and eventually civil war. Yet, six decades later, the allure of unconstitutional power persists.

At its core, the psychology of the coup plotter sits at the intersection of moral conviction, institutional frustration, and personal ambition. Coups are rarely spontaneous acts of madness. Rather, they are often the end product of a long internal process in which officers come to see themselves not as mutineers, but as reluctant saviours.

Are coups the violent expressions of officers who genuinely believe they are embarking on a messianic mission to rescue the nation? Or are they simply the outcomes of ambition and greed, cloaked in the language of patriotism?

Nigeria’s long and troubled history with military intervention suggests that both impulses often coexist.

The late Chief of Army Staff, General Victor Malu—who presided over the Special Military Tribunal (SMT) that sentenced Lieutenant-General Oladipo Diya, the de facto second-in-command to General Sani Abacha, to death over what many have described as a phantom coup—was known to reflect on this paradox. Why would a soldier, trained to obey command and preserve order, willingly gamble everything on treason?

Civilians may ask a parallel question from a different angle: why would any soldier willingly face death on the battlefield for a state that often fails to reward loyalty or competence? The uncomfortable answer may be that the psychological distance between dying for the state and overthrowing its government for the seemingly greater good is smaller than we care to admit.

In A Journey in Service, former military president General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) argues that coups are rarely arbitrary. Instead, he frames them as reactions to what he terms “extraneous conditions”—periods when the political class becomes so dysfunctional that soldiers begin to view intervention as not only justified, but necessary.

This reasoning aligns with a well-established concept in civil–military relations: when the military perceives itself as the most organised, disciplined, and patriotic institution in a failing state, it becomes susceptible to what scholars call the guardian mindset. Officers begin to see civilian authority not as legitimate, but as an obstacle to national survival.

Between 1966 and the late 1990s, Nigeria experienced no fewer than eleven coups—successful, failed, and allegedly phantom. The bloodiest consequences followed the abortive Orkar coup of 1990, which resulted in the execution of 42 convicted plotters by firing squad—the largest such execution in the nation’s history.

By definition, a coup d’état is an illegal and overt attempt by a military organisation or elite group to unseat an incumbent government. In Nigeria, whether under civilian or military rule, the punishment for failure has almost always been death.

This harsh reality suggests that coup plotting is not driven by ignorance of consequences, but by a psychological recalibration in which the perceived moral necessity of action outweighs the fear of punishment.

To understand this mindset, Nigeria’s coup history must be examined not merely as a sequence of events, but as a record of recurring justifications.

Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu framed the January 15, 1966 coup as a moral cleansing—an uprising against “ten-percenters” and corrupt politicians who had betrayed the promise of independence.

The July 1966 counter-coup, in turn, was rationalised as a response to ethnic imbalance, selective justice, and existential threat.

The 1975 overthrow of General Yakubu Gowon was justified as a corrective to stagnation and broken promises of civilian transition.

The 1983 coup against President Shehu Shagari cited corruption and economic collapse.

Babangida’s 1985 palace coup accused the Buhari regime of rigidity and insensitivity.

By 1990, Gideon Orkar and his associates explicitly framed their abortive coup in ideological terms—denouncing what they described as northern domination within the military and the severe economic hardship imposed by Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme.

Even the 1995 Obasanjo and 1997 Diya phantom coups of the Abacha era were justified by the regime as pre-emptive acts necessary to preserve order and stability.

Across these episodes, a consistent psychological pattern emerges: coup plotters almost never see themselves as villains. They view themselves as patriots trapped in extraordinary circumstances, forced into extraordinary action. Loyalty to the nation, in their minds, supersedes loyalty to any particular government.

This is where the true danger lies. When soldiers begin to conflate the state with their personal interpretation of national interest, constitutional order becomes expendable. Discipline gives way to moral absolutism, and obedience is replaced by self-appointed guardianship.

In the end, treason—especially in the context of coups—is rightly treated as the ultimate betrayal of the state. Yet, the Nigerian experience reveals a disturbing paradox: many coup plotters sincerely believe they are acting in defence of the nation.

Perhaps this is the most unsettling psychological truth of all—that a coup d’état may represent not the absence of loyalty, but its most extreme, distorted, and violent expression.

Umar Farouk Bala is a political and foreign affairs analyst and author of “Diplomacy and Digital Innovation: Youth Insight”. He writes from Abuja and can be reached at: [email protected].