14012020 - 50 years after: Let's revisit issues that caused Civil War

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30 — Vanguard, TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2020
The angel of history and the ghost of Biafra WEDNESDAY, January 15, marks 50 years to the day when our tragic civil war was formally ended. That was the day that Colonel Philip Effiong and his men brought the articles of surrender to Yakubu Gowon at Dodan Barracks, Lagos. Gowon famously declared that there were”no victor, no vanquished”. January 15, 1966 was also the date the first military putsch led by Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu took place, setting a chain of events that culminated in a civil war that lasted from 1967 to 1970. As a child I recall when, in the thick of night, dozens of Igbo families turned up at my parents’ modest home in the parsonage in Murya. One of the women had just put to bed. Daddy did all he could to protect them from a wicked pogrom that consumed the souls of more than a hundred thousand defenceless Igbo people. I have never seen such fear in the eyes of grown men. After barely a week, my parents received death threats. In the thick of midnight, the refugees tearfully disappeared into the bowels of the primeval savannah. Never to be seen again. Their memory still haunts me to this day. The debate on whether the January coup was an “Igbo coup” or a nationalist uprising is a spurious binary question. The fact is, it was The shape of prophecies that won’t come to pass in 2020 By BANJI OJEWALE It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not! - Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) English writer and journalist. MOST of those who look into the future, close or distant, talk of the shape of things to come. They hardly speak of the shape of things that won’t happen. Why? It is assumed that we should be led only into the world of the good life awaiting us after today, the prosperity that will take place hereafter, the gilded age hid from us, the world of what we are not seeing at the moment. Why are we afraid to talk of the other world, a sunken world of jaded values? The point is that the future is a déjà vu. We’ve been brewing it all along. Our stew is really several pre-existing independent constituents come together in a cauldron passing through the fire. What emerges in the process isn’t new at all. What you’ve always held on to can’t be said to be new. Can it? We are responsible for what comes forth: a trip to the market, where there are transactions that give us pepper, fish, meat, tomatoes, oil, seasonings, vegetables, etc. They all assume a new life when they eventually become a delicacy; still, we know their history, their past, their source, their distinctiveness. However, they lose their individual disparities in the stew. But they can’t hide their individual distinctions from discerning observers. That is also the way with considerations of the future, any future, nearby or out of sight. Therefore, we shouldn’t be fooled, both. The leaders of the January putsch were Igbo: Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna and their friends were genuine patriots. But the thing was also one-sided in execution. The North felt justifiably aggrieved because their leaders were the main victims. Most of the cabinet and advisers of the new Ironsi regime were of Igbo extraction. His Decree No. 34 which created a new unitary system intensified Northern fears. In July 1966, Northern officers struck in a “revenge coup”. Rumours had been rife that Northern officers were about to be wiped out. The lot fell on a 31-year-old colonel Yakubu (Jack) Danyumma Gowon. He confesses that he accepted the heavy yoke only after long, agonising prayers. Destiny prepared Yakubu Gowon for the singular role of keeping our country together. The son of Anglican missionary parents born in Wusasa in 1934, he was an outstanding student of the famous Barewa College. He had intended to become an engineer or teacher, but his British teachers persuaded him to join the army. He attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst where he acquitted himself with distinction. Gowon was engaged to an attractive young Igbo woman, with whom he has a son. Unfortunately, his colleagues told him it was impolitic to frightened or felled by false prophets with flat, deflated crystal balls pretending to have heard from God about what’s in for Nigerians in the New Year. Whatever is going to happen in 2020 has its roots in 2019, in the years before it. We were all part of that past. And, therefore, we are members of its offspring, the future, which has become the now. As lawyers often say, you can’t build something on nothing. But religionists, taking advantage of ignorant compatriots scared of the so-called uncertain future, engage in a lot of manipulation of the people, especially women and play the Omniscient. Only He sees through the opacity of the ages, far and near. He permits man a glimpse, though. All it takes to locate what Heaven allows of the entrails of the immediate future or to picture it, is to have a luxuriant mind watered by facts and reality of current affairs and history and muscular analysis. Nothing arcane about it as Nigeria’s mercantilist pastors want us to believe. It’s only God Who knows it all, not these lucreloving deceivers who have their ears tied to their bank accounts. The enduring and believable predictions are in the Word of the LORD, not in the word of man. So what does 2020 have for us? We have shown, through the culinary analogy, that the year has nothing to present more than what we give it. Nor can it offer what we didn’t give its predecessor. It is safe then to assert that in Nigeria of 2020 nothing will change from what we had in 2019, just as there has been little change in the country in nearly 60 years of Independence from Britain. In 2019, we were negligent, as we have always been, in handling our politics and electoral process. The outcome was outcry marry from the enemy. Contrary to popular misrepresentations, Yakubu Gowon never waged a genocidal war against Biafra. He saw it as a quarrel between brothers. This cannot be said of field commanders such as Murtala Mohammed and Benjamin Adekunle. But he remains remorseful about all the blood that was shed. He and Awolowo have been blamed for the economic blockade that might have cost the lives of a million Biafrans. But consider the counter-factual: what would have happened if the war had lasted for five or more years. History will absolve Yakubu Gowon. He is the Abraham of modern Nigeria; a man of compassion, justice and restraint. God-fearing and incorruptible. He towers heads and shoulders above all our leaders, past The ghost of Biafra will not go to rest until we treat Ndigbo with fairness and justice and present. History will one day declare him to be the greatest leader this country has ever produced. Biafra is dead, but its ghost continues to haunt our country like a phantom that refuses to go away. Ever since 1970, there has been an unwritten conspiracy that no Igbo man can be trusted to assume the high magistracy of our federal republic. It is an affront to the highly gifted Ndigbo, with their ingenuity, sagacity and can-do spirit. Part of the problem is that Ndigbo themselves have been their own worst enemies. Betrayal is common among them. The people of the Blessed Cyprian Iwene Tansi and the venerable Cardinal Francis Arinze have become Vanguard, TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2020 — 31 of foul play. Some citizens are even saying they didn’t ask for those they have as their leaders at the moment. Hence, the clamour for the country to be restructured reached a crescendo in 2019. The decibel, it seems, will be higher in 2020, given the mass disenchantment with the order of the day, according to some predictions for 2020. Will these futurologists receive a gold medal if their forecasts come to pass? No way! 2019 and the years that came before it posted an anomalous federal arrangement into the future now arriving in 2020. In Nigeria of 2020 nothing will change from what we had in 2019, just as there has been little change in the country in nearly 60 years of Independence from Britain We must be prepared to live with the killer by-products of a killer federalism: an indolent centre giving birth to correspondingly indolent centres and local councils. Still more distressing consequences: a land with the economic and social potential to outstrip such global prodigies as Britain, Germany, France, Cuba and Japan through its population and elemental natural resources, has neglected its virile youth and women and driven them into drugs, despair, destitution and death. Does anyone need a Nostradamus to announce that a country that had this mix in 2019 would fare well in 2020 if it does not abolish its anaemic system? Now, Bismarck Rewane, Nigeria’s neoliberal economic expert, has simply looked at what obtained in 2019 to predict that the sufferings of his countrymen will be worse in this successor year 2020. He says Send Opinions & Letters to: opinions1234@yahoo.com a godless people who put money before anything else. There is no guarantee that the people will still be united if they were given Biafra on a platter. Their presumptuous attitudes have also alienated the Ijaw and other South-South minorities who do not want to hear the name of Biafra. I am sorry to be so harsh. I speak as a friend of Ndigbo. Only a genuine friend can tell you unpalatable home truths. Biafra was a tragic misadventure. Neither Gowon nor Ojukwu expected what they regarded as a skirmish to end up in a war that took the lives of millions. But then it is in the nature of human conflict that it is capable of assuming a dynamic of its own while moving into unforeseen directions. Ojukwu’s ego stood on the way of a genuine settlement. He saw himself as this golden boy from a wealthy family who drove a Rolls Royce as an Oxford undergraduate. He saw Gowon as an ignorant peasant boy from the rustic backwaters of the North. He under-estimated the man to his tragic discomfiture. A man with a lion heart, Gowon spoke little but carried a big stick. Ojukwu took his people on a tragic misadventure in the single-minded pursuit of personal power. With such great constitutional theorists as Kalu Ezera, Edwin Nwogugu and B. O. Nwabueze, why didn’t Biafra operate a viable constitution? Was Biafra just another African autocracy anchored on personal rule? Was it true that Nzeogwu was set up to be killed at the war front because he was seen as a threat? Were Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Victor Banjo, Philip Alale and Sam executed because they differed with Ikemba on political policy? Why did he abandon his people at their hour of defeat in such a cowardly manner? Albert Einstein observed that “God does not play dice with the universe”. God did not make mistake in placing the Igbo people among us. There is no one to rival their commercial acumen. My own people always say that wherever you go and you don’t find Igbo people there, leave the place immediately! Nigeria will not be Nigeria without Ndigbo. I can understand the anger of Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB movement. A jihadist government that operates on the basis of exclusion and virulent discrimination provides a rationale for resistance and rebellion. Matthew Hassan Kukah, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, is right when he says that our government has created the atmosphere that provides fertile ground for the murderous activities of Boko Haram. Ndigbo continue to suffer disproportionately whenever some Northerners resume the madness of their ritual bloodbaths. This coming Wednesday I will kneel down before every Igbo man and woman I meet and I will ask him or her to forgive us for the horrendous crimes we have committed against them and against God and Humanity. The ghost of Biafra will not go to rest until we treat Ndigbo with fairness and justice. In the words of the German-Jewish literary theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin: “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, and his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”. Nigerians’ income "will shrink in 2020" on account of the central government’s policies. His forecast: "2019 was a year of political trepidation and growing uncertainties…For Nigeria, consumers will groan about the hike in VAT, the restoration of tollgates and cost-reflective electricity tariffs.” He adds that the VAT hike (from five per cent to 7.5 percent) would lead to higher commodity prices. Rewane says "other challenges (in 2020) would include low income per capita (currently at $2,236), high income inequality and rising poverty rate in the country.” The omens, from the foregoing exegesis, are that the New Year will not bring any new thing, since we threw nothing refreshing into it ahead of our arrival into it. Garbage in, garbage out! GIGO! Since Independence, we’ve always talked about bad roads, unstable electricity supply, inadequate funding of tertiary education leading to yearly lecturers’ strike, poor wages for our workers, millions of out-ofschool children, under-empowerment of the youth, wide gap between the haves and havenots, primordial do-or-die politics, neglect of our rural dwellers, nonexistent welfare and medical care for the vulnerable, thieving, insensitive and selfish political leadership etc. There’s never been a radical attempt to battle these demons and ostracize them. So they return year after year to torment us. They are here with us again in 2020. They will not be evicted by the jejune and unscriptural prophecies of happy-go-lucky, sky-domiciled, sybaritic, signs and wondersseeking pastors disconnected from the deprivations of the flock. These men and women of God must come down from their jets and return to their "first love” to "watch and pray” with the people to rescue the country. •Ojewale, a commentator on national issues, wrote from Lagos. C M Y K
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14012020 - 50 years after: Let's revisit issues that caused Civil War

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