David Akpode Ejoor RCDS, PSC, (10 January 1932 – 10 February 2019) was a Nigerian military officer who served as Chief of Army Staff (COAS).
[2] Ejoor later claimed that then-Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu had approached him and future military Head of State Yakubu Gowon to discuss a coup plot amid the 1964 election crisis.
[3] On the week before the January 1966 coup d'état, Ejoor — who had recently succeeded Adekunle Fajuyi as commander of the Enugu-based 1st Battalion — was in Lagos attending a brigade conference along with many other senior officers.
[4] On the night of 14 January, many of these officers (including Ejoor and several coup plotters) went to a party celebrating Brigadier Zakariya Maimalari's marriage.
Ejoor ordered those soldiers back to the barracks, deployed future minister and then-Lieutenant Yohanna Kure to prevent any attempt to break jailed opposition leader Obafemi Awolowo out of prison, and dispatched future Chief of Staff SMHQ and then-Lieutenant Shehu Musa Yar'Adua to arrest Lieutenant Aloysius Akpuaka — "the officer who relayed Ifeajuna's orders to the battalion.
[10] In his new administrative role, Ejoor became known for his strictness, locking out tardy civil servants before publicly admonishing them in the main square in Benin City.
[13] In the early morning of 29 July 1966, Ojukwu — then serving as Military Governor of the Eastern Region — called Ejoor to inform him of the mutiny in Abeokuta that set off the counter-coup.