| R.M. Dumuje | |||||||||
| Honorific Prefix: | Major General | ||||||||
| Birth Name: | Udjeghe Dumuje | ||||||||
| Birth Date: | 24 June 1929 | ||||||||
| Birth Place: | Aladja, Delta State, Nigeria | ||||||||
| Death Place: | Lagos, Nigeria | ||||||||
| Nationality: | Nigerian | ||||||||
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| Alma Mater: | Dore School, Warri, Nigeria RAOC School, Blackdown, England Manchester University, England | ||||||||
Raymond Matthew Dumuje OFR, fss, mni, psc, BEM (24 June 1929 – 9 May 2008) was a Nigerian Army officer and businessman. He became the first Quartermaster general of the Nigerian Army.[1] On 13 February 1976, as a colonel, he was shot and wounded in Ikoyi, Lagos during the failed "Dimka coup" attempt that saw the assassination of the then Military President, General Murtala Ramat Mohammed. The history of the Nigerian Armed Forces records this particular event as a mistaken identity for Lt-General Olusegun Obasanjo, the then Chief of Staff of the Nigerian Army.[2] [3] He was one of very few to have served both in the Nigerian Army and the Nigerian Air Force. He was also a prominent indigene of the Udu clan in Delta state.[4] He retired as the Director General, Nigerian Army, Army Reserve and Recruitment, in January 1984.[5]
Dumuje was born in Aladja on 24 June 1929 into the Udu clan of the Urhobo tribe. He attended Dore Elementary School. He later obtained the Advanced level of the then General Certificate of Education before joining the Nigerian Army in 1948.
He was enlisted into the Nigerian Army on 22 March 1948 as a Regular Combatant. Afterwards, he received the award of The Queen's Own Nigeria Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force from Queen Elizabeth II in 1957[6] and was later commissioned as a lieutenant in September 1960 with Seniority in the rank of second lieutenant with effect from September 1959.
He attended the Ordnance Officers’ Course RAOC School in Blackdown, West Sussex in 1964. He was further promoted to the rank of a lieutenant colonel in 1968 after which he attended Manchester University for a Postgraduate course in Management Sciences between 1970 and 1971.
In 1970, as a lieutenant-colonel in the Nigerian Air Force and a postgraduate student at Manchester University, he was part of the Nigerian delegation to the Soviet Union, led by the then Nigerian Federal Commissioner For Communications, Aminu Kano, where they were met by Premier Alexei Kosygin.[7]
As a colonel, he attended the Senior Officers course at the Army Command and Staff College, Jaji, Kaduna in Nigeria in 1977. Subsequently, he became a Member of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic studies in Kuru in March 1980.
As the quartermaster general of the Headquarters Nigerian Army, he commanded the entire operation to put down a religious insurgent movement in Kano led by a Cameroonian called Muhammadu Marwa, better known as "Maitatsine" in 1980. It was reported that he bluntly told the then president Shagari, who served as the second president of Nigeria’s Second Republic between 1979 and 1983, that he could not guarantee the use of minimum force, particularly if any of his men were wounded or killed.[8]
He retired in the rank of major-general on 16 January 1984 after serving in major states in Nigeria.
Awarded the: