Over the last couple of weeks there has been a low-intensity political upheaval in the south east of our country, involving the remnant tribes of Biafra who are fed up with being in the Nigerian federation and are desirous of carving out a country of their own. This time around, the movement has been under the banner of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its leader Nnamdi Kanu. The movement started as a peaceful, non-violent protest. Unfortunately, it has deteriorated into a more violent form of agitation. Shops have been burnt down and about a dozen people have lost their lives in addition to dozens wounded.
Kanu, a rather articulate young man who mostly resides in Britain, has been in detention by the Nigerian security services. His followers want him released at all costs. I understand they had even made an effort to block off the Niger Bridge that links the south east to the rest of Nigeria, but were turned by the armed forces. We are yet to see the end of the unfolding drama.
The question must be asked: Why Biafra, and why now?
Biafra was an unfortunate misadventure spearheaded by the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu who took his people on a disastrous mission that was dead on arrival. The so-called Republic of Biafra was proclaimed on 30 May 1967. It came to an unceremonious end when Dim Emeka Ojukwu abandoned ship and settled in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. His second-in-command, the gentle and amiable Philip Effiong, took over the reins of power briefly before submitting an official military surrender to General Yakubu Gowon on 12th of January 1970. It is an irony of history that Biafra officially came to an end on 15 January 1970, precisely four years to the very day the first military coup took place in Nigeria on 15 January 1966.
Many of the young people who are now agitating for Biafra were born long after the terrible upheavals that led to the loss of nearly two million lives during 1967-1970. Chimamanda Adichie made her name as a literary figure through her novel, Half a Yellow Sun; a novel about the Biafra war that took place long before she was born. Much of what she wrote was what some have called “faction” – a mixture of history and fiction. It was a once-sided tale and quite deceitful in its moral thrust. But the undiscerning public, especially gullible foreigners, are easily taken in by a good story that depicts black people in barbarous terms.
It is intriguing that nobody has ever written a true history of Biafra – how it fared as a country and the detailed account of how the late Emeka Ojukwu exercised power and leadership in that territory in which he held sway for a good thirty months. One of the few insiders was our doyen of letters, the late Chinua Achebe. Achebe, sadly, died a bitter man in 2013, having noisily rejected the award of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR) by the Goodluck Jonathan administration. He had probably abjured his soul of everything Nigerian by the time he left this our poor earth. His last book, There was a Country, was probably his worst. A very unhappy book, it did no service to him either as a writer or as a patriot. As one of the roving ambassadors for Biafra, he was in a position to tell us how the Biafra experiment actually fared. He did none of that. Instead, we were fed the tiresome diet of how Awolowo betrayed the Igbos and what a cruel and genocidal man Gowon was. The truth, as everybody knows, was far more complex than the way Achebe made it out to be.
True, many terrible things happened. As a child, I witnessed how several Igbo families took shelter in our modest missionary family home. My late father was a pious and deeply God-fearing man. He protected Igbo families almost at the cost of his and the entire family’s lives. I am haunted by these childhood memories, of seeing fear and torment in the eyes of grown men and their terrified wives and children. Many left us and wandered off into the primeval night of the ancient savannah, never to be seen or heard of again. I still feel like weeping when I think about it.
I have always said it and I want to repeat it: the rest of Nigeria owes Ndigbo an apology for all the genocidal atrocities that took place against a fleeing unarmed and defenceless people. As long as we wilfully refuse to apologise, the ghost of Biafra will continue to haunt us.
Having said this, we need to speak to each other in all honesty. And I write as a friend of Ndigbo. Biafra was a ghastly mistake, the outcome of one man’s unbending ego to carve out a territory for himself. As a student in the 1980s in England I was often asked, “Do you happen to know a gentleman by the name of Emeka Ojukwu?” Then they would add, “We were in the same college at Oxford and he used to drive around in a Rolls Royce.” Well, I used to tell him that I never met him in person but that he was a very prominent citizen of our country.
Chukuwemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu was born in Zungeru, currently in Niger State, on 4 November 1933. His first language was Hausa. He also spoke Yoruba as a child. It was only in his teens that he went back to the East to learn to speak Igbo. Ojukwu had a very privileged education, thanks to his father’s enormous wealth: Kings College Lagos and Eltham College, a courtly boarding school in the posh English countryside of Surrey. And then Lincoln College Oxford. Having studied Modern History at Oxford, Ojukwu understood that the military are likely to feature prominently in the government and rulership of post-colonial societies, as was the trend in those days in Asia and Latin America. Against his father’s wishes, he enrolled in the army and rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Ojukwu was not one of the masterminds of the January 1966 coup led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu. But there was no doubt that he was a man of ambition.
As Governor of the Eastern Region after counter-coup that brought Yakubu Gowon to power, Ojukwu looked askance at this peasant provincial boy from the savannah. At the Aburi peace talks to prevent civil war, Ojukwu smoked his Havana cigar into Gowon’s face in total disrespect. He saw himself as the rich kid educated kid and Gowon as the provincial peasant. He under-estimated Gowon to his own discomfiture.
The poet Odia Ofeimun once noted that Ojukwu and his men knew the first thing taught in war colleges is that you cannot go to a battle not adequately armed. Ojukwu took his unarmed people into a war that he knew was unwinnable. And he did so mainly because of personal ambition. This hypothesis is borne out by the way he administered Biafra. He often bragged that he used his own money to finance Biafra. That may well be so. But then he went ahead to manage his benighted country as though it was a private estate, proving that he was not the democrat he claimed to be. In fairness, it could be argued that war does not augur well for democracy and the rule of law. But there was nothing in his character that suggested he envisioned a truly free and democratic Biafra in which he may not be the central player.
Ojukwu executed Victor Banjo, Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Philip Alale and Samuel Agbam simply because they disagreed with him on the course of political policy. We have been told that they were looking for a way to end the civil war without Biafra losing face. Apparently, Ojukwu would have none of it. It has also been rumoured that Ojukwu also orchestrated the deaths of Major Nzeogwu as well as the poet Christopher Okigbo because they did not share the same vision with him about how things should go. Ojukwu had the choice of opening up the country for civilians to receive food aid to save millions from starvation. He stubbornly refused. He was prepared to sacrifice women and children so as to win the world’s sympathy. It was for this reason that the eminent late mathematician Chike Obi minced no words in dismissing Ojukwu as a reckless adventurer.
No, Biafra was not a country. The rulers of the entity did not behave in any way that would have made it look like a civilized jurisdiction governed by constitutionalism and the rule of law. Indeed, only five countries officially recognized the entity, namely, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Haiti, Tanzania and Zambia. Under international law, Biafra was never a country with the attributes of juridical statehood as understood under the Hague Conventions.
The question remains: Who wants to exhume the dead body of Biafra and drag it to the marketplace in today’s Nigeria? And why now?
I can fully understand the bitterness of some Igbo youth, but I can never support or defend their commitment to a lost cause which does a profound disservice for the nearly 2 million who perished on both sides. Several factors are at play here.
First, there is the emergence of a new administration in which the Igbo feel highly short-changed in terms of both appointments and the economic policy thrust. President Buhari had allegedly declared that those who did not vote for him should not expect to be treated on an equal footing with those who overwhelmingly gave him their electoral franchise. It was a very unnecessary remark, given that the spirit of federalism requires that once a government comes to power, the president must embody the aspirations of every section of the country equally. Those who are in doubt should read Alexis de Tocqueville’s eponymous Democracy in America.
Secondly, some may be chagrined by the fact that prominent Igbo APC stalwarts such as Chris Ngige and Ogbonnaya Onu and Geoffrey Onyeama were given portfolios of Labour, Science and Technology and Foreign Affairs respectively that supposedly not particularly “weighty”. There is no Igbo woman in the cabinet.
Some of the current economic policies being pursued by the administration also rankle many sections of the Igbo business community. The BVN and anti-money laundering rules being enforced have not been viewed favourably by Igbo businesspeople, many of whom are traders. The restriction on foreign exchange and the fact that you cannot carry naira or dollars about on long-haul journeys anymore has had a huge negative impact on their businesses. Many of them used to carry cash to places like Dubai to buy their goods. Now they cannot do that anymore. They also complain that they cannot carry two million naira cash without being accosted by police. And what is worse, they cannot even use their Nigerian bank cards abroad, as most are rejected by foreign ATM machines and other payment outlets. The so-called “cashless policy” being implemented by the CBN has had a disastrous impact on their businesses.
The Biafra narrative on the place of Ndigbo in contemporary Nigeria is an additional factor in current angst. The narrative is that the civil war was an act of genocide against Ndigbo. They forget that actually more Nigerians perished in the war than did Nidgbo. The young conscripts that Gowon took to the war front never understood the terrain of the primeval rainforest. They were mowed down like flies. Also, after the war ended, a prisoner-of-war exchange exercise was approved by the Federal Military Government. Thousands of Igbo military detainees were released. From the Biafra side they were none. None was allowed to live.
According to Biafra narrative, after the civil war, their re-absorption into the Nigerian political order was as underlings not as equal citizens. Their currency was abolished and they were all entitled to a paltry amount to start life all over again. Many of their “abandoned propertied” were never returned to them. Sadly, this was true in large, even though many prefer to overlook the fact that many Ndigbo still accessed their bank savings while the likes of Ojukwu were able to reclaim their family properties in Lagos and elsewhere.
Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that the major ethnic groups have reached a tacit agreement that an Igbo man or woman could never ascend to the High Magistracy of our great federal republic. In 1999, Emeka Anyaoku, the much respected former Commonwealth scribe came near enough to clinching the ultimate Prize. But he himself never wanted it. The Igbo are never trusted enough by the rest of Nigerians to concede to them the presidency.
What is worse, throughout the decades of ethno-sectarian crises in Nigeria, the Igbo have always been victims. From Maitatsine to the Sharia riots, the Danish cartoons and up to Boko Haram, the Igbos have been killed and maimed for crimes they did not commit – for which they knew nothing about. And the mayhem has never stopped. I will never forget the young pastor in Maiduguri who was taken by the insurgents and was asked to renounce his faith on pain of death. When he refused they told him to call his wife before they finished him off. He called her and told her: “Darling, I love you. Look after the children. Tell the brethren that I died the death of the righteous – I did not betray our Lord.” What a beautiful way to die, this young man, who will occupy a place of greatness in eternity among the Holy Martyrs.
His Grace Matthew Bishop Kukah, the Bishop of Sokoto, recently declared in a public lecture that the northern elites prepared the fertile ground on which the evil of Boko Haram had sprouted. Some would go as far as to say that they indeed orchestrated it. According to the Biafra narrative, those who orchestrated Boko Haram with the aim of making the Goodluck Jonathan presidency “ungovernable” deserve to have a taste of their own bitter medicine. The re-emergence of Biafra may be an attempt to sabotage and frustrate the Buhari administration in the same manner as the architects of Boko Haram to undermine the erstwhile Jonathan administration.
We live in troubled times. There is a dearth of trust and generosity. The most important missing ingredient in our public discourse today is on the topic of nation building. Our country is in tatters. We need to build on new moral foundations to ensure that we give everyone in Nigeria a sense of belonging and stake in the Nigerian project. I do not agree with the either the method or philosophy – and even narrative – of Biafra. But I can see from where they are coming. The Buhari administration needs to reach out to these young men and women to dialogue with them. They have still not resorted to armed violence. It means that they are amenable to reason. Igbo civilization has always had a deep reverence for human life. The great Judge Elias, former President of the World Court of Justice, pointed out this fact in his most erudite work on African jurisprudence.
I have always told my Igbo friends that the Almighty Creator was not a fool to have placed Ndigbo in the country known as Nigeria. There is hardly any town or village – not to talk of city – in our country where you will not find an Igbo trader. Most of the hotels and real estate in Abuja are owned by Igbo people. The bulk of the businesses in Lagos belong to Ndigbo. Igbo mercantile families have flourished in Ibadan, Oshogbo, Kano, Sokoto, Jos, Maiduguri, Kaduna and Makurdi. Remove them from our great federation, and we would be the poorer for it. Biafra was tried once and it failed disastrously. It is foolhardy to resurrect a dead horse. But Nigerians ought to give the Igbo a fairer deal than they have received thus far. Igbo politics itself has been factitious and divisive. They have never managed to come together to forge a common front to fight for the lost centre.
Having said all this, let me put it on record. Anytime we start our mindless killings of children and families in the North in grounds of religion and ethnicity, on that day I am an Igbo man and a fellow Nigerian. On the day you attack and maim them for whatever reason, on that day I am an Igbo man. Biafra must be put to rest as we seek to build a New Nigeria of the twenty-first century.
Obadiah Mailafia
