It was evident that Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, who planned and executed the first coup in Nigeria's history on January 15, 1966, and which has come to be wrongly called the Nzeogwu coup, was not acting alone and had international masters. Why obvious? Because after the coup failed, he escaped to Ghana with the aid of Christopher Okigbo, his friend from his alma mater, the University of Ibadan, a man who would later die fighting for Biafra, and his first port of call in Ghana was to see President Kwame Nkrumah's Director of Military Intelligence, a certain Brigadier Hasan, and other Ghanaian spymasters.

It was also reported that Ifeajuna actually met with Nkrumah personally. But what was more troubling in Nigeria was what Nkrumah said about Tafawa-Balewa in death. 

Rather shockingly, on January 21, 1966, after his death was confirmed, Nkrumah said "He (Tafawa-Balewa), died a victim of forces he did not understand, a martyr to a neo-colonialist system of which he was merely a figurehead." 

Given that Nkrumah's Ghana had been fingered in the previous 1963 plot to overthrow Balewa's government, this 'coincidence' is too neat. 

This is more so when you consider the fact that other January 15, 1966 mutineers had the opportunity to flee Nigeria when their plot unravelled, but none of them did, except the ring leader, Ifeajuna. Why? 

Additionally, the leader of the Ghanaian opposition at that time, Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, had foreknowledge of the coup and tried to warn Prime Minister Balewa via a cable that only got to the Prime Minister's hand just days before Ifeajuna had savagely murdered him in furtherance of the coup. How did Mr. Busia, who later replaced Kwame Nkrumah as Ghana's Prime Minister, get foreknowledge of the coup? 

Nigeria's Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa was a fierce critic of Kwame Nkrumah. You may want to Google the genesis of their feud.

In fact, so irritated was Tafawa-Balewa with Nkrumah, that he sent his minister, Maitama Sule, to deliver an anti Nkrumah speech at Addis-Ababa, where Sule said inter alia  “If anybody (meaning Nkrumah) makes the mistake of feeling that he is a Messiah who has got a mission to lead Africa the whole purpose of pan-Africanism will, I fear, be defeated.” 

Balewa was not the only one who clashed with Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah also had a bitter clash with the Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, and after their clash, there was also a coup in Tanzania, on January 4, 1960, which was successfully put down by President Julius Nyerere. 

A lot of the Soviet Communist thinking that Kwame Nkrumah had was due to the influence of his mentor, George Padmore, a dedicated communist and later socialist, with links to Joseph Stalin. He spent his last years on Earth as Kwame Nkrumah's Advise on Foreign Affairs and had a vision for spreading revolutionary governments across Africa.

Ifeajuna remained in Ghana until he was forced to flee after Nkrumah was himself ousted in a coup on February 24, 1966. 

The fact that Ifeajuna, after the failure of his mutiny in Southern Nigeria, did not go to Northern Nigeria to join forces with Chukwuma Nzeogwu, who was successful in the North (until Lt. Colonel Ojukwu and Major Obasanjo intervened) showed that he did not trust that Nzeogwu would still be subservient to him now that the balance of power between then had changed.

And while in Ghana, Ifeajuna wrote a bildungsroman, not widely circulated in Nigeria, he asserted that Nzeogwu had postured as though he was the leader of a revolution that was actually his idea.

Why did Ifeajuna go to Ghana after the coup failed? And why was Nkrumah overthrown a month later? Declassified documents in the US have now shown that the coup against Nkrumah was aided by the CIA, as reported by the New York Times on May 9, 1978.

According to the NYT, the coup plotters, retrieved Soviet secrets from the Nkrumah government, which they gave to America.