He was a brilliant military officer with a Ph.D. in his sights, but on April 22, 1990, Major Saliba Daddy Mukoro took a path that would alter Nigerian history.
Mukoro wasn’t just a participant; he was a mastermind. Alongside Major Gideon Orkar, he helped orchestrate one of the bloodiest and most audacious coup attempts in Nigeria’s history. Their target: the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. In the dead of night, gunfire erupted across Lagos. Mukoro and his co-conspirators stormed the Federal Radio Corporation, broadcasting a speech that shook the nation, while simultaneously launching a ferocious attack on the presidential villa at Dodan Barracks.
For a few chaotic hours, Nigeria held its breath. But the tides turned quickly. Loyalist forces under General Sani Abacha launched a brutal counter-offensive, crushing the insurrection.
The aftermath was swift and merciless. Over sixty soldiers involved in the plot were arrested, court-martialed, tied to stakes, and executed by firing squads. Their lives ended in a hail of bullets. But Mukoro’s fate took a legendary twist. While his comrades faced execution, he managed a cinematic escape. Slipping through the dragnet, he fled into exile, leaving behind the smoking ruins of his military career.
Safe across the Atlantic in the United States, Mukoro completely reinvented himself. The wanted coup plotter traded his camouflage for academic robes, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a respected professor of criminal justice and criminology. Decades passed, and the ghost of 1990 seemed a lifetime away.
Then came the final chapter: redemption. In 2007, President Olusegun Obasanjo granted him an official presidential pardon. Years later, in June 2020, the Nigerian government officially gazetted that pardon, legally wiping his slate clean. Saliba Daddy Mukoro went from a condemned rebel fleeing execution to a free man and a scholar—a living testament to how wildly the wheels of destiny can spin.