Tell Magazine

By BEN LAWRENCE

The Biafra revolt was ideological and, therefore, could not be decreed or legislated to die. Only a more potent ideal can exorcise the ghost of Biafra and not the bland talk of Nigeria as an indivisible unit, as if it had existed as one political entity before the invasion of European territorial interlopers. Flora Shaw created Nigeria and that is not flattering. Samuel O. Ogbemudia, the soldier and statesman, said that Biafra would have been “the toast of Africa” if it had succeeded. He was on the federal side. Anthony E. Enahoro, the irrepressible anti-colonialist, who was federal commissioner for Labour and Information during the Civil War, regretted his part in the crisis. It appears that with developments after the war, they would have changed sides if the situation had re-occurred.

So it is not surprising that the ghost of Biafra still haunts Nigeria because the country seems to live a lie about its oneness and indivisibility. Nigeria has not succeeded in winning the hearts and souls of her so-called citizens. Unlike what Kwame Nkrumah succeeded in erecting as the Ghana nation, Nigeria is still a collection of nations with varying ethnic aspirations. The ongoing constitutional amendment is misplaced. Those like Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo, both disciples of Marcus Garvey, who believed in land and vastness in a thriving Negro nation, might not have been pragmatic. Had they started from separation for self-evaluation in a vast territory that the British declared as Nigeria, perhaps, the unity in diversity, as Ahmadu Bello wisely posited, would have been a reality. They were too intellectual and abstract.

So why agonise about Chinua Achebe’s lamentation that his Igbo people were starved to surrender during the civil war? Forthrightly, Awolowo declared then that it was one of the weapons of war. Azikiwe said, “You don’t use Sunday School language to talk to scoundrels,” speaking for the federal side. Achebe’s side ought to have prepared for starvation before the outbreak of hostilities. It is common practice to blockade enemies and it is still being applied by nations all over the world.

But Achebe has a right to moan the plight of his people during the war. Biafra existed beyond the territory as declared by Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. It was very present in what is now called South-west Nigeria. Their sympathisers were overwhelming but had no soldiers to crystallise their yearnings. And as Ernest Hemmingway once wrote, except there is military debauchery, a revolution hardly succeeds. Separation was very present in the West.

The situation seems to have worsened since the Yakubu Gowon generation of British trained soldiers, steeped in colonial doctrine, handed Nigeria to civilians. Corruption is now the ideology. Unfortunately for Nigeria, the idealists and ideologues who strained to mentally build the country into one unit have passed on without replacements. There is now a vacuum, one that is a fertile ground for divisiveness and hate. Small wonder that there is the emergence of ethnic militants masquerading in many guises. Again, thanks to corruption. While I share Achebe’s pains, I am not oblivious of the fact that war is not a riot. To have expected the federal side to look with pity on Biafra sounded inept. My memories are vivid of a security briefing called by Enahoro over the threat posed by Caritas, the Catholic relief organisation, to send food aid to Biafra.

We were very few at the briefing in 1969. Enahoro, his younger brother, Edward, an ambassador, Sam Epelle, and a few others represented the government. Some of the editors, especially Remi Ilori, editor of the Daily Express, hawkishly called on the government not to yield grounds. Enahoro pointed to me to express my views. I only asked whether we could fight the Vatican. Ambassador Enahoro took over and explained all the implications. Tall, lordly and erudite, he succinctly presented our handicaps. His brother added more, telling us that Britain was not fully with Nigeria and that Russia even supplied us substandard arms that backfired. Besides, only our air pilots were efficient because the so-called Egyptian ones were emptying their bombs on non-military targets.

Nigeria was mainly living on her resourcefulness to fight the war and to add the Vatican to it would be backbreaking. Still guided by the Enahoros, there was a consensus that the federal side should reserve the right to inspect all relief materials to Biafra so as to prevent arms from filtering into that enemy territory. The war was no joyride even on the federal side. It was the humility of Gowon that bound the troops together because some other officers had contravening ideas.

Nigeria had sound and experienced political hands on both sides of the war then, not the amateurs who grace the corridors of power nowadays. The coup in Nigeria was not an accident. The politicians dragged the soldiers into it. Many of the officers in the army had started taking sides since the Awolowo treasonable felony trial. There were some of them who were socialists and yearned for change. It is wrong to always blame the military for terminating the First Republic.  Stanley Olabode Wey, first Nigerian to be Secretary to the Federal Government, in an interview in the Daily Sketch before he died, said the Nigerian National Alliance, NNA, of Ahmadu Bello and Samuel L Akintola, had their own coup in the making before the Emmanuel Ifeajuna chaps struck on January 15, 1966, perhaps, to prime that of the NNA. And some senior officers were fingered in that plot. Victor O. Banjo and Odumegwu-Ojukwu had got Gowon and David Ejoor to join one in 1964 that failed because Gowon exposed it. They would have been cashiered from the Nigerian Army but for some powerful intervention.

In fact, when the West boiled, the North expected Banjo to strike, according to one Muffet, a former administrator who wrote a book on the Nigerian crisis. Only perhaps Johnson T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, Babajide Ogundipe, Zakari Maimalari, Robert Adebayo, Conrad Nwaiwo, Yakubu Gowon and a few others were apolitical. George Kurobo told me that he was also not happy with events in Nigeria then and that was why he was suspected to be privy to the January 15 putsch. Francis Fajuyi was deep in the politics of those times.

Ogbemudia confirmed in his book that politicians were visiting the barracks to shop for allies but that he and Chukwuma Nzeogwu rebuffed them. He did not know that Nzeogwu had his own ideological group not tied to the warring alliances of NNA and the United Progressive Grand Alliance. Eventually, it was the federal cabinet, the Northern members, who called on the military to take over when they could not reach a decision on who should temporarily succeed Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister. It was a power tussle between Zana Bukar Dipcharima and Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe.

Aguiyi-Ironsi declined to take over. Banjo said he persuaded him to accept because Nigerianism only existed then in the Army. Why do we bend facts? Igbos did not cause the coup, though they, perhaps, became victims of indecent haste.