The noisome pestilence over demand for Biafra secession by Igbo youths over the last couple of weeks has, mercifully, subsided. In my column last week, titled, “There was no country”, I wrote that the whole thing amounts to “a storm in a tea cup”. But I also warned that it was a storm nonetheless and that there were real issues and grievances that it would be foolhardy to ignore. I described the festering wound of Biafra as a dark phantom that would not go away – a ghost that would, unless properly addressed, continue to haunt our efforts at nation building.
I will insist now, as I did last week and many years earlier, that the Nigerian people have inflicted very painful wounds on the collective psyche of Ndigbo that requires that we go on our knees in penance. We must apologise to Ndigbo if the wounds of the past are to be healed – if we are to forge a new path together as one people with one common destiny among the nations of the earth.
I received several responses to my write-up by email as well as sms. They varied from the openly abusive from one extreme to the highly complimentary at the other. Some were completely off tangent. Somebody wrote to tell me about the Grail Message. One anonymous reader sent an sms saying, “Helo (sic) Sir, am looking for job”. I have a burden for unemployed youths, but I could not help but wonder what Biafra had to do with his job-seeking. An anonymous reader sent me this terse sms: “Bettor go back to the History and stop showing your ignorance. Biafra is Never a Mistake, and There Was A Country.”
I was touched by a young man who confessed that he was not born when the terrible events happened but was curious to know more:“Good day, I am Nze Raphael. I just read your article on BusinessDay newspaper…As an Igbo youth who obviously wasn’t born at the time of the civil war, I am keen to learn as much as possible from enlightened individuals such as yourself….I would appreciate a complete copy of that your article and any more that would increase my knowledge of the subject….Thank you in anticipation.”
Shuaibu Jimoh from Lagos wrote: “I really enjoyed your write-up… “There was No Country”, just like your other write-ups”. I hope and wish people that really matter will read the article and learn from history and avoid the overzealous and selfish ambition of some select few to thwart the freedom, happiness and progress of the larger people. There are better ways for them to express our grievances. As a Muslim I feel saddened about the activities of Boko Haram, ISIS (although I don’t see them as Muslims), when there are better ways to press home your demand. I have come to realise especially in this part of our world never to trust our so-called leaders claiming to fight for one cause or the other, they always have some personal or ulterior motive behind.”
By far the most comprehensive response came from a gentleman who must have met me in the past and has keenly followed some of my writing as a columnist. Below is his email and my own response to it.
Dear Dr Mailafia,
I am an ardent reader of your Monday Columns (The Wealth of Nations), published on the back page of BusinessDay Newspaper. I briefly met with you at the International Center for Energy, Environment and Development, sometime in 2009, when you were among the consultants contracted to prepare Nigeria’s position paper to the International climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009. I was immediately attracted to your gentle mien and soft outspokenness which did not hide the loads of intelligence packed inside your skull. The consultancy did not last long, but within that short period, I knew you had something to offer to our national development, especially having worked at that highest peak of monetary and economic policy circle.
I read almost every edition of your piece on the back page of BusinessDay on Mondays and find each piece quite engaging and insightful. I admire your style of writings which many times come packed with practical life examples that adumbrate your points. Sometimes, it feels like a Pastor preaching and making real life references to explain ecclesiastical writings, thereby bringing his ideas home. However, your piece “There Was no Country” published on Monday, December 7, 2015 was quite unlike you. Your depth of research was too shallow and some of your statements were quite pedestrian. I have never been a supporter of the renewed agitation of the Indigenous People Of Biafra, IPOB (Whatever that name means), to create a Sovereign State of Biafra because of so many reasons I may not have time to enumerate here. But after reading your piece, I struggled to resist the urge to change my feelings and support the current agitations in the South East. Your piece is annoying and derogatory. It smacks of vilification and denigration of Ndigbo. Your attempt to tie the whole episode of the Biafra agitation to Ojukwu’s ambition is a disgraceful position of deliberate assumption on the fact that the pogrom against Ndigbo in the North never happened. You forgot to mention the senseless killing of Ndigbo in the North and the repeated calls from Ndigbo to desist from that, but you painted a picture that Ojukwu was over ambitious and never wanted ” a peasant provincial boy from the savannah”(your words), to lord it over him the ” rich educated kid” (your words). This is not a correct history. Wrong narratives like these only help in fueling agitations. There is nothing like the truth! It saves and sets free, that’s what the Bible says. Your write up clearly shows your dislike for Ojukwu. Sure, you are not bound by anything to like him, but you are also not allowed to vilify him.
You spoke from both sides of your mouth when you said earlier in the article ” 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 defenseless people”. In your concluding remarks you said, “… 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 Ndigbo.” This is really a sad commentary from an expert researcher like you who believes in churning out real facts and figures. You should know that more Igbos died than the other ethnic groups because Igboland was the theater of the war.
Your claim that nobody has written a correct history of Biafra means that you are in possession of the correct history and all you have read about Biafra when juxtaposed by your correct manuscript is all wrong. Please, Dr Mailafia present us with the correct history of what Biafra stood for and what transpired in Biafra, so that we all get the truth into our skulls and rest this matter.
I still and will continue to enjoy your method of writing.
Thank you and God bless.
Unico Kalu
……….
Nwannem Unico Kalu,
Good day to you and many thanks for your email of Monday 7th December in response to my article on Biafra. It’s clear that we must have met some years back. I do remember that interesting project we did with colleagues at the International Center for Energy, Environment and Development. I enjoyed working on the project and preparing Nigeria’s position paper to the December 2009 historic Copenhagen Summit on Sustainable Development. Soon after that project I was off to Brussels, where I spent 5 eventful years as Chief of Staff of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States in Brussels. I only just returned a couple of months ago and trying to settle down and get used to Nigeria again. Your name sounds familiar, but I’m afraid I can’t put a face to the name. Thanks also for following my Monday Column and for your kind compliments. It encourages one to persevere on the straight and narrow path.
I’m sorry if my latest write up caused you some pain. I never write with a desire to cause hurt to any of my gentle readers. Not at all! My friend Jibo Ibrahim is almost getting a heart attack because of the unexpected armada of attacks he is getting in the blogosphere because of his article on the Igbo Question. We wrote from different perspectives – mine critical social science and his neo-Marxian radicalism. So, we are now in the strange and unlikely position of trying to console each other!
To sum up your critique, you said: “Your piece is annoying and derogatory. It smacks of vilification and denigration of Ndigbo. Your attempt to tie the whole episode of the Biafra agitation to Ojukwu’s ambition is a disgraceful position of deliberate assumption on the fact that the pogrom against Ndigbo in the North never happened. You forgot to mention the senseless killing of Ndigbo in the North and the repeated calls from Ndigbo to desist from that, but you painted a picture that Ojukwu was over ambitious….”
First, let me put it to you that you are totally wrong in attributing to me intents and views that are totally out of my character. Vilification and denigration of the entire Igbo race? How is that possible? I could never bring it in my heart to denigrate and vilify anyone created in the image and likeness of the Holy Lord, not alone an entire people, from whom sprang the Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi, Francis Cardinal Arinze, Chinua Achebe of blessed memory and the immortal Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo?
How can I denigrate and vilify the people of the adopted last born of my mother, our beloved Chimezie? How can I vilify and denigrate the people of Ngozi, the first young woman I ever loved with such crushing, burning fiery teenage love? How can I ever bring myself to vilify and denigrate all the best friends of my youth – Eze Okubundu, Chidozie Emenugah, Ernest Achonu and the rest of them?
Contrary to what you surmise, I do not “hate” the late Emeka Ojukwu. But I stand by my judgement regarding his character. Remove Ojukwu from the scene, and the whole Biafra/civil war story would have been a different one. Ojukwu did not single-handedly invent Biafra, but it is clear that his personality, mindset and wilful ambition were decisive factors in the unfolding of that tragic drama.
Was he a man of vaunted ambition? No doubt whatsoever. This is a matter of opinion, of course. But I am not alone in holding such a view. A good number of people, including the likes of the legendary mathematician Chike Obi share my opinion. The late Pius Okigbo, perhaps Nigeria’s greatest economist, was also of that school, although he was more reticent in airing his own political opinions. Many people in Biafra were just too scared of Ojukwu to say their honest minds. The late Owelle Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who wrote Biafra’s national anthem, decided to jump ship before it was too late. It was rumoured that Ojukwu was about to eliminate him when he decided to flee for dear life.
You also said, “You spoke from both sides of your mouth…”Please, do not attribute to me statements I never made. I never said the pogrom did not happen. I have written elsewhere that the North and the rest of Nigeria should be ashamed of the pogrom against Ndigbo. I am ashamed of it on behalf of the North. I have urged the rest of Nigeria to set up a day dedicated to national reconciliation. We must collectively apologise to Ndigbo and seek genuine national reconciliation.
The killing of fleeing defenceless people was a shameful blight on our history. I took a moral position on the pogrom and it is a position I have held for a long time. And I am not about to change that carefully considered position. Let me repeat: We Nigerians must apologise for the pogrom against defenceless Igbo men, women, children and families.
The horrendous violence that was visited on predominantly northern politicians and military during the January 1966 coup was a major factor that poisoned all human feeling in the north; worsened by the celebration of those killings among sections of Igbo civil society. But nothing, in my view, could justify the scale and venom of the reprisals against an unarmed and defenceless people that followed after the July 1966 counter-coup by northern officers.
But I do not take the same view on the war effort. War is war. War is never a gentle “police action” as Gowon mistakenly assumed. War is a messy, bloody business. You either kill or be killed. There were a few excesses by the likes of Murtala Mohammed, whose own view on the conduct of the war was that all of Ndigbo should be wiped off. Gowon nearly court-martialled him on account of his military recklessness. He had to be removed as Division Commander because of that recklessness. Gowon sincerely believed that it was a war among brethren. Those of us who know him well know that he is a man with a compassionate heart – a man who loves justice and mercy and walks humbly with his God. He may not have succeeded entirely, but he did all he could to minimize the scale of the bloodshed. We were told that when federal troops found the body of the fallen Chukwuma Nzeogwu, weeping and wailing, they gave him the burial befitting a national hero.
You may not believe it, you may never accept it. The statistical truth is that more federal troops died in Biafra than did Biafrans themselves. Gowon used a lot of forced conscripts, some of them barely in their teens. With their oversized boots and wobbly weapons, having never seen the rainforest terrain in their lives, they were mowed down like grass. Desperately short of ammunitions, it was the weaponry of the fallen federal conscripts that Biafran soldiers mostly resorted to using during the war. Gowon had access to a far larger pool of soldiers than Ojukwu ever could. There is hardly any home in northern Nigeria and especially the Middle Belt where they did not lose a son to the civil war. In the Middle Belt, there is no single home that did not lose somebody. That is a very large number, when you come to think of it.
You also noted, “Your write up clearly shows your dislike for Ojukwu.”
Again, you are mistaken. I do not hate the late Dim Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, unless you imply that not admiring someone is synonymous with hating or disliking them. I really do not think he had much to admire in his character. Look at the manner he fell out with his own father right from his youth. Look at his failed marriages and disorderly family life. Look at his brooding, unpredictable wilfulness when he returned from his self-imposed exile in Côte d’Ivoire. The poor bewildered Chief C. C. Onoh never wanted to give his legendarily beautiful daughter Bianca to such a man. Alas, she fell for his charms. Now his children are after her, because, for them she was nothing but a shameless gold digger. On and on the nonsense goes! What am I supposed to admire in such a character??
Also, please, look more critically at the way he governed Biafra. Was there a real constitution? Was government in the enclave based on constitutionalism and the rule of law or the wilful caprice of one man and his megalomanic commitment to personal rule? Why did he execute people who disagreed with him on questions of principle and conscience?
Finally, you concluded: “Your claim that nobody has written a correct history of Biafra means that you are in possession of the correct history….”
This is reasoning from false analogy. Because I declared that the real history of Biafra is yet to be written, therefore, ipso facto, I must be in possession of the correct history. You may not be in possession of the truth, but does not stop you from seeing a lie when you can smell it from a distance. Much of what has been written about Biafra so far amounts to a giant anthill of emotive, one-dimensional, self-justifying lies. A few soldiers like Alabi-Isama and Benjamin Adekunle (Black Scorpion) from the federal side and Philip Effiong from the Biafra side, have provided interesting insights. But we cannot take merely the accounts of the dramatis personae, some of which are loaded with sentiments and biases, as the gospel truth. We need genuine professional historians to write the true history of the civil war and of Biafra from a scholarly and scientific viewpoint. We need to be able to interview in rigorous detail some of the characters involved, many of whom are dying. I fear that, at current trajectory, the true history of Biafra may never be written. Instead, we are being fed a diet of lies and mystifications. I stand by this not only as a scholar but also as a concerned citizen and committed public intellectual.
On a final note, everything I wrote, I wrote as a friend of Ndigbo. As a young man I often visited one of my godfathers, the late Chief Akanu Ibiam in his home village of Uwanna in Afikpo. Ibiam was one of the greatest human beings I have ever met. He was not only a man of high intelligence, he was a pious Christian – missionary, medical doctor and President of the World Council of Churches. He told me amazing stories about the miracle of a bomb that was thrown right into his compound by the Federal air force. Mysteriously, the bomb refused to explode. Had it done so, it would have obliterated the entire compound and all its inhabitants. He continued to mourn his late Yoruba wife, who refused to leave his side on pain of death.
I share with Ndigbo on everything they have suffered in the past and in contemporary Nigeria. I really meant it when I said that that any day an Igbo man or woman is killed in the name of religion or ethnicity in our country, on that day I am an Igbo man. But all that does not mean I should not look you in the face, and say, no, Biafra was a horrendous mistake. Nigeria is where you belong – the land of your ancestors and mine.
Obadiah Mailafia
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