part 4
Achebe civil war controversy. He makes useful suggestions to
his Igbo brothers and sisters as well as other Nigerians on how to dump
the self-righteous mentality of ‘WE AGAINST THEM”.
What is interesting in this regard is that well known acts perpetrated
by other leaders during the war are actually now being credited to
Awolowo by postwar propagandists and are being made to stick beyond
lines of collective responsibility while actual performances that he
made are smudged out of acknowledgement. For a man who could be said to
have done more than any other single individual to have garnered the
out-of-the-war-front intelligence to keep Nigeria as one country, it is
actually a surprise to see how little Federal cover has been given to
Awolowo by Federal agencies and establishments.
Generals who were worried that Awolowo might convert his proficiency
in the management of the country’s finances and general affairs into
political power certainly preferred that the war story be told against
him. For ex-Biafrans who believe that Awolowo disabled their war efforts
through his many ploys, including the change of the currency, the
refusal to devalue the Naira, and the ordering of a stop to food
corridors, Awolowo deserves to be sent to the International court even
post-humously.
The concentration on Awolowo as it turns out is such a fixation that
many are prepared to believe that even if Awolowo was still in prison
when the pogrom took place, he should be arraigned for it. It is very
much unlike the position taken by the Jews who not only went after
exposing the perpetrators of the holocaust after the Second World War
but took extremely inter-subjective care to ensure that no innocents
were punished for crimes that others committed. The reverse, clearly, is
the case with the Nigerian crisis and civil war. It is quite
interesting in this regard, and perhaps, a mark of Achebe’s forgiving
nature that in his The Trouble with Nigeria, he grants the status of
arch-nationalist to Mallam Aminu Kano, of whose faction of the People’s
Redemption Party, PRP, he became a member, even after knowing of the
Mallam’s mobilization of the resistance to feared Igbo domination after
the January 15 Coup. Or he did not know it?
Allan Feinstein, Mallam’s biographer, had given enough leads to
explain the radical leader’s mobilization of the North before the
pogrom. On page 225 of The African Revolutionary ,the autobiography of
Mallam Aminu Kano, he writes that his subject “had to decide what was
right for his country and his North ……..Aminu Kano’s smouldering fear
of Southern domination had finally culminated in what he considered a
genuine and serious threat to the development of his first love,
Northern Nigeria”. As it happened, Aminu Kano was arrested in connection
with the pogrom in the North but was promptly released for want of
evidence. Decades later, as the issues are being memorialized by key
actors of that era, the post-coup mobilization has been coming under
new lights. As happened, it was Alhaji Ahmed Joda, a top aide to Major
Hassan Usman Katsina, Governor of Northern Region, who was sent by “top
civil servants” in Kaduna to meet with Alhaji Maitama Sule in Kano to
“initiate leadership in getting the people of the North to understand
the aims of government” after the January 1966 coup. On pages 211 -212
of the biography, Maitama Sule. Danmasanin Kano by Ayuba T. Abubakar,
it is told of how it was Maitama Sule, an NPC stalwart before the
coup, who “suggested that Mallam Aminu Kano was the most suitable,
because he was widely respected, never held a government leadership
appointment and had the people behind him. Again, he was a leading
figure in UPGA……So Maitama arranged for Mallam Aminu to meet Alhaji Joda
the following day.
Thereafter, Mallam Aminu Kano became the leading consultant for the
government and top civil servants and their link with the rest of the
North”. In The Story of a Humble Life: An Autobiography, Tanko Yakasai,
an Aminu Kano deputy in the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU)
authenticates the story: “At the beginning, most NEPU members were
happy with the military take over. It was only after some few days that
they started to think twice about the situation……the way some Igbo
traders at Sabongari market in Kano started to treat Northerners”.
A meeting was then held in Aminu Kano’s house in Sudawa by old NEPU
stalwarts. Aminu Kano “drew the attention of the meeting to the apathy
pervading the political scene in the North and urged those present to
rise up to the occasion; otherwise it would be difficult to rejuvenate
political interest in the people. The meeting then decided that a tour
of the Northern Region should be undertaken to make contact with opinion
leaders with a view to alerting them of the danger posed by that
situation. The tour was to be undertaken under the guise of paying
condolence visits to the families and traditional rulers of those killed
during the military take-over. ……….
We started from Sokoto, followed by Bauchi and Maiduguri. Within a
few weeks, we covered the whole region”. (page 221). Although accused
of having joined the NPC, “we continued with our mobilization campaign”,
writes Tanko Yakasai. Of course, there were different contact groups
mobilizing, sometimes with cross-cutting memberships. They were all to
make what seemed a consensual response to Major General Aguiyi Ironsi’s
Unification Decree which according to Tanko Yakasai “created a lot of
fear in the minds of the civil servants and traditional rulers….”. A
protest rally organized in Kano against the Unification Decree turned
the seething anger into a region-wide prairie fire that grew into the
pogrom against the Igbo and those associated with them. As it happened,
the pogrom preceded and accompanied the Revenge Coup of July 29 1966.
The matter of interest is that Awolowo was still in prison at Calabar
when it all began to happen. But it was after the exodus of the Igbo
back to the East and of many southerners from the North; and then, the
failure of the various leaders of Thought meetings, including the Aburi
meeting in Ghana, to resolve the consequent loss of faith in the idea
of a united country, that secession was declared. And war began. In the
narration of the crisis and the tragedies of the war, different
partisans have chosen what to emphasize between the grisly images of the
pogrom and the guitar-ribbed and kwashiorkor ridden children in Biafra
and the direct casualties in the war front. Who to blame from the
perspective of those who suffered the dire consequences? To ask is to
put history in a quandary because in the situation of organized
anarchies that preceded the war, it is the botched January 15 Coup that
takes the rap. All murders are bad but it was the unrounded nature of
the violence, the lopsided regional accounting, that Nigerians, North
and South, will always remember.
It turned jubilation into self-questioning angst. The truth is that
the years of distrust already on the ground, allowed for an
interpretation which was incorrect. Otherwise, it did not start as an
Igbo coup. It was turned into one by successive acts of commission and
omission which could have been averted by greater exercise of cultural
empathy. This was, unwisely knocked aside; not just by the arrogance of
power that all military rule insinuates, but the inability of the new
rulers at the centre to see Nigeria as a family of different
nationalities needing an effort of mind and a lot of civility to turn
into a nation of shared conversations.
Admittedly, the leaders had their prejudices; but the necessity for
shared living called for learning how to let people govern themselves
irrespective of how unprepared they appeared to be. Education for
leadership needed to have begun from having laws that were not tilted
against any part of the polity. Unfortunately, once violence became the
definition of the terms of association, it was not going to be easy to
retract. As violence led to more violence, whoeveot on top sought a
draconian hold in order not to be sucked into its quicksand and boil.
Hence those who began by detesting a unitary system of government ended
up creating a unitary hegemony. Trust and a basis for stability became
goals to be achieved through a lopsided cut.
The point is that nothing could replace the effort that needs to be
made in every society, even one that is uni-cultural rather than
multi-ethnic and multi-religious, to let decision –making come from
within a community rather than as an imposition. It so happens that the
failure of the first coup, as with all succeeding ones in Nigeria’s
history came from pursuing the opposite of what they claimed they
wanted. By being generally of a lopsided cut, all of them morphed into
preparations for a genocide of sorts. Thus, once the pogrom in the
North created the basis for a war, or at least some form of return
violence, the word genocide had become regionally or ethnically
positioned to account what would follow. Specific to the period of civil
war: those who used the term genocide tended to do so in the sense of a
propaganda pitch to rev the cause or score points in the competition
for international alms, arms, and domestic power. Not distinguishing
the pogrom in the North from the actual deaths and derangement of life
found in the war situations was quite a grand strategy of Biafrans.
Truth is, once war was declared, both sides were on a mutual genocidal
binge. Put the word to some test and it turns out to have been so much
a ploy to attract support for Biafra, as the rebel stronghold shrank
from all of Eastern Region to the closed-in Igbo heartland. The weight
of Federal might, against the fast diminishing rebel territory, could
not evade the sheerness of it: that the pounding of one identifiable set
of Nigerians, had the implication of a geno-factor. A war in a
multi-ethnic society poses this execrable frame. Only those who love war
may try to deodorize it by pretending that it does not yield forms of
genocide. On both sides of the Nigerian civil war, the genocidal
instincts were quite alert. And knowing that genocides are such bad
things, propagandists reached for international support by playing it
ur down. This is why talking about the starving children of Biafra as
an incidence of genocide turns out not to be such a straightforward
matter. Biafra lost much international support, except for the
sentimentality of Caritas, when it was discovered, and discussed across
the world, that the General of the People’s Army was engaged in
unethical profiling of starving children in order to attract
international sympathy.
In his letter of resignation from his $400,000 contract and his post
as Public Relations Representative of Biafra in the United States,
Robert S. Goldstein, who had helped to build up much international
concern for Biafra wrote to the Biafran Commander in chief as follows:
“It is inconceivable to me that you would stop the feeding of thousands
of your countrymen (under auspices of world organizations such as the
international Red cross, world council of churches and many more)via a
land corridor which is the only practical way to bring in food to help
at this time………..I cannot serve you any longer. Nor can I be party to
suppressing the fact that your starving thousands have the food,
medicine and milk available to them….it can and is ready to be delivered
through international organizations to you. Only your constant refusal
has stopped its delivery.”
*Gowon and Ojukwu
This piece of archival material may well have been a propaganda coup
for the Federal side but, as its publication in Nigeria’s Morning Post
showed, it cannot be excluded from the story without missing the real
flavor of the times. It therefore be claimed without fear of
contradiction that, around the much-trumpeted genocide, was a Biafran
proto-state that was prepared to send some well-placed children out of
harm’s way to havens in Ivory Coast and elsewhere in the world but was
using other people’s children in Biafra as guinea pigs for propaganda
purposes. The truth, bitter, as it must sound, is that once war was
declared, both sides were on a genocidal binge that no post-war
leveraging can undo.
For that matter, the reverse side of the Biafran charge of genocide
against the Federal side is that the charge can be firmly and rigorously
laid that Biafra sent people into combat who had no weapons to fight in
a real war. And there was a vast civilian population whose food needs
were not considered an issue either in the initial promotion of war
frenzy or in the course of the war. Those who continue to trip on the
propaganda of war, and are probably hoping that they would be given food
stamps and reliefs if they manage to plunge Nigeria into another war
with their unthinking fictions, need to be told that it will not be
called a war if one side must feed the other side. As actually happened.
That such considerations were always there, and were seriously
entertained, is why many writers call the Nigerian Civil war a phoney
war. Or a brother’s war. The gleeful latching upon Awolowo’s statement
that starvation is a weapon of war as a means of raking up old
inter-ethnic animosities or winning a prosecutor’s slot in a
Nuremberg-type trial, wont change this reality.
Even the Federal side which allowed and then stopped food shipment to
Biafra knew it was merely trying to fulfill all righteousness. Who has
yet found a way to stop soldiers in any theatre of war from hijacking
the food meant for the civilian populations? Who does not know that
soldiers move on their stomachs and are more likely to hijack food meant
for civilians than not? Starkly, the question is always there:
whether or how to to allow a welfare package to the other side without
committing suicide. War may thereby be prolonged.
But this is talking about a war between brothers. Sad, it is, that
the truly brotherly elements that characterized the waging of the war on
both sides of the Nigerian civil war have not been allowed to surface
by the spoilsports of the propaganda Ministries who do not allow
accounting for the foods and beer shared across battle lines between the
combatants. Not to forget the egregious observance of eight-hour
war-day on the Federal side and the deliberate slowing down of Federal
aggression which, sometimes humanitarian but based on scheming for power
in Lagos, lengthened the period of warfare and may unwittingly have
been responsible for the many civilian deaths through hunger.
Talking war as war, when Biafrans made the famous incursion into the
Midwest State, were they thinking of the convenience of Midwesterners?
Their strategic exigencies had little place for the sensibilities of a
region that had shown much sympathy for the Biafran cause up to the
point of not allowing the region to be a staging post for launching an
attack on Biafra. But Biafrans treated the region as mere faggot for the
fire. It turned out that the military Governor of the state, David
Ejoor had been out-numbered and out-gunned by Igbo-speaking elements in
his cabinet who actually out-voted him, six by three, when the pressure
came for Biafrans to be allowed to come in. So we can argue, strictu
sensu, that Biafra did not invade the Midwest. Biafra was invited into
the Midwest State.
Hence, as many writers on the war have reported, no shot was fired.
The food and other resources, including hard currency, for whose sake
the incursion was made, may have been a good enough bargain for the
incoming army. It ended up however, exposing a lot of untoward factors
including ethnic arrogance, which told the minority ethnic nationalities
in the war-torn South what could continue to happen to them if they
remained part of Biafra. To think of it, the easy indifference to the
rights of the minority ethnic nationalities who itched to take their own
lives in their own hands was what horridly vitiated the whole idea of
the Biafran enterprise. And it was this that gave the Federal side such
moral authority, egged on, since the Revenge coup, by the release of
Adaka Boro and his co-partisans who had been sentenced to death,
awaiting execution, for pushing secession for a Niger Delta Republic.
It was this that kept the creation of new states on the hot burner even
without the threat of a Biafran secession to grant its inexorability.
The bottom line is that the evidence of people seeking freedom for
themselves without considering that others also needed it was what
provided the moral fuel that routed Biafra, even as much as Federal guns
and the idea of starvation as a weapon of war.
Let’s face it: it rankles. I mean, the long-standing and brazen
refusal to recognize that there were others in the Eastern Region and
in the Midwest who also lost a lot of relations in the pogrom, and who
deserved to be treated like the proper nationalities that they were,
rather than as pariahs in their own country! What may well be taken as a
factor in this is that it was Awolowo’s fate, from early in his career,
to have earned the dislike of so many whose region, including his own,
he had continuously slated for splitting into their ethnic fractions in
pursuit of his brand of federalism. The creation of states, along ethnic
lines, his lifelong pursuit, sought the turning of Nigeria from a mere
geographical expression to a cultural expression, a nation, through the
establishment of a common access for all and sundry to free education,
free health, full employment and pensions and the freedom of the press
and judiciary. No question about it: Awolowo was a very ambitious man.
He believed in becoming the leader of a great country that could lift
Africa up. He felt it would be a belittling of his project if he stood
by to allow an energetic and ebullient nationality like the Igbo to
excise themselves through the fecklessness of those who would send
people to death in their millions rather than prepare them for the
future with the calculating gumption of true generals.
For him, it was sad to hear people talk about how much the masses in
Biafra wanted war, as if Generals are not supposed to be specially
trained to see beyond anger and bitterness and therefore to be able to
appraise situations objectively, and thus to obviate feckless
projecteering in the name of war. Do you send your children to commit
suicide because you are angry with an enemy? Where went that proverb
which says that you do not ask who killed your father until you are
firmly holding a matchete from the right side? So what was Biafra’s
handle on the basis of which the world was told that no power in black
Africa could subdue her?
These, I must add, are questions that I think we should all bear in
mind, as we confront situations such as when those returning home to
Nigeria after Biafra found a country not too different from the one they
left. Unhappily, the Biafra they knew maltreated Biafrans as much if
not more than Nigeria kept maltreating Nigerians. To be borne in mind is
that much of it came more from improper organizational setups, plain
incompetence, rather than sheer wickedness or hatred as we are all being
made to believe when we come to it.
Rather than describe the problems with a clarity that allows for
seeking genuine solutions, we get all manner of exorbitance, which push
away answers and solutions. For instance, as a way of laying a basis
for more disharmony between ex-Biafrans and fellow Nigerian siblings,
we are not told about the many who returned to find that their
properties were intact and that people actually protected their rights
in those properties in their absence. We are not told about the many
valiant efforts that were made by other Nigerians to rehabilitate the
East. It may not have been more competently done than all the other
things that were happening in the country.
But quite a brave effort it was, making it possible for General
Yakubu Gowon, whatever his many lapses, to be seen internationally as
doing a yeoman’s job, personifying his unitarian precepts including an
immediate representation of the East in the Supreme Military Council
after the war. For that matter, there were too many elements of a
siblings war, at least from the Federal side, in spite of the
inevitability of both sides seeking and using the most deadly weapons
that money could buy. Take it from the start of police action to full
scale war; the charge to soldiers to a close observance of the Geneva
convention during the war, the implied necessity to treat all the
captured fairly and decently – and many were court-martialed who broke
the rules – right through to the post-war rehabilitation and
reconstruction.
The No Victor No Vanquished code may have had flabs but the
re-absorbtion of former soldiers back into the Nigerian military, many
of whom soon became high flying, and civil servants , who were granted
special three weeks leave and granted ‘mercy pay’ to help them settle
down, all these are not heard of in the post-war propaganda. Nor is it
heard enough about the special clearance for ships bringing in post-war
reliefs.
After the war, there was clearly more than a silver lining which
ought to be acknowledged even in the face of the harsh circumstances
that existed. It is in the fact declared by SG Ikoku, the Commissioner
for Economic Development in East Central State in the Daily Times of May
22, 1971 that “the Federal Government had made available 21.505
million pounds grant and 10.620 million as advances and loans. It was
part of the accumulated amounts saved for the East Central State during
the war by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Commissioner for Finance and Vice
Chairman of the Federal Executive Council, on the basis of population
distribution of revenue. No one, these days, is ever allowed to know
this little matter even if the point is to show how well those who
wanted the Biafrans dead followed the financial regulations that guided
the Federation and so kept what was due to the East in reserve for them
till they returned to the fold.
This is not even to ask about how the money was actually spent,
which I am sure must be blamed on those who had saved the money.
Besides, there really ought now to be a cross-check of Awolowo’s claim
that he saved African Continental Bank post-haste in order to help
shore up the economy of the East. Or how quickly the Niger bridge was
rebuilt, the cement factories rehabilitated and the African Development
Bank cashiered into rehabilitation work with agricultural loans that
Federal authorities had to look away from appraising on strict terms.
Such things were left in the way that those who took monies from Biafra
to buy food and ammunition but failed to deliver have been forgotten
with their loot of war.
This is why, across the social media, it is painful to encounter the
many angry discussants of the civil war years who see it only in terms
of what needed to have been done for the East. We hear so much so much
about the absolute deprivation of Biafrans through the granting of N20
ex-gratia payment (slightly more than the equivalent of a third class
clerks monthly pay) to every survivor after the war. It is forgotten
that it was meant as a short-term welfare package to enable many get
back to their homes from wherever they were at when the war ended. It
was not meant to be payment for being rebels or as an exchange for
Biafran money. That was why it was called ex-gratia. It was supposed to
be a provisional payment while sorting out those who could still find
the papers to prove how much they had in their accounts. Accountably,
the system collapsed. Only a few could have managed to keep their papers
who had not already emptied their accounts while they were leaving a
country they did not intend to come back to.
Admittedly, the whole matter called for a special exercise of leadership on all sides.
It called for genuine brokerage techniques, of lobbying and even
muzzling of whoever was in authority to act beyond the rule of law and
to find a way of resolving the clearly confused circumstance of so many
people having Biafran money in a country where it was impossible to
regard it as legal tender. But just as in the planning for the war,
there was so much left undone even in the manner and mode of surrender.
After the war, I used to wonder why the leaders dissolved into atoms. I
am saying this partly because I am yet to meet someone who has
vouchsafed a formula that could have resolved the matter of the
ex-gratia payments without rancor. Even today, no one is volunteering
how it could have been done better. The same goes for the issue of
abandoned property which no longer had a public advocacy once Sam Mbakwe
who had briefed Awolowo to take the matter to court was importuned to
withdraw it on the awkward reasoning that if Awolowo won the case in
court he would make political capital out of it.
It became a case of better not fight the abandoned property issue for
the masses, if some old enemy would share in the glory. Hence the
matter festered till it became a case of everyone for himself. The
General of the People’s Army had to wait till as late as the last week
of General Ibrahim Babangida in office in 1993 to wrest his own
abandoned property. We don’t know about those who never had that luck.
We don’t know about the soldiers who could not get their pensions after
the General got his. It is the way the post-civil war atomization of
demands got covered up by a rev of self-interest that many like to
present as the interest of the whole nationality.
The truth is that those to whom things happened, and who hardly had a
chance of happening to anything, but suffered all the same, never had
champions. It left many grumblers in the public space who are wondering
why others wont fight battles they themselves have been obliged to
abandon.
The shame of the moment is that, unable to look the history of our
differences in the face, we allow ourselves to be flattered or incensed
by sheer serenades of ethnic and regional fictions. Even those who know
that it is bad for their ethnic groups to seek to live like islands
unto themselves are gleefully developing discrepant moralities: a
benign one for themselves and a pernicious or predatory morality for
others. It is usually based on bad logic and poor thinking, as much of
this narrative has shown. The point is, when people think badly they
want to hide it by putting the rest of us in situations where, if we
disagree, we can be accused of being haters of their ethnic group or
nationality. So I may be told that a proverb belongs to an ethnic group
so that if I disagree with the bad thinking that goes with it I may be
charged with pushing for ethnocide or genocide. It is a form of
blackmail that yields backwardness for a people.
It something that deserves to be back-handed off. We should feel
free to show our dislike for it. When people are being roughed up by
their own, we should all cry out as when they are being roughed up by
other people. By the same token, if bad logic is claimed for or by an
ethnic group, we need to see it as self-immolation on everyone’s part
to sit quiet and say it is their business. It is not just their
business. Because their bad logic will not let neighbours live well or
rest in peace. It obliges us to be always our brothers’ keepers. Even
then, we need always to contest the veracity of what is claimed against
other perceptions of reality. Until cultural empathy is achieved or
approximated. I mean: not even the disabilities and pains of one life
authorizes that life to deny other lives their due.
Odia Ofeimun
This makes it truly odd, to see it being suggested so incongruously,
at the end of the war, that it was those who hated Igbo people who were
working so hard to bring them back to Nigeria by force! Or who were
threatening to leave Nigeria if the Igbo were ever to be allowed to go;
and going the whole hog to plead with Igbo leaders not to go to war! It
does not add up. It may be good for war propaganda to tone the hatreds
that shored up the conflict . But it does not make good post-war logic.
Irrespective of the polemics and rhetorical afflatus that, since
then, have bedeviled public arguments with notions of how Nigeria has no
future, it is clear that a Nigeria together, as it is, even with all
the poor quality of the quarrels that we all have with one another, is a
better country than the fractionized mayhem, each acting like a mini
anarchic Nigeria, which we would otherwise have to deal with, in the
event of a break-up. On this score, it is such a fantastic deal to have
an Awolowo, solid, disciplined, thoughtful, far-seeing, on the right
side. He believed in the country and showed it during the civil war. He
deserves to be truly lionized for it, not left in the brambles of the
fiction-mongers who wish to turn the re-uniting of Nigeria into ashes in
the mouths of all succeeding generations. The truth is that, even
without the benefit of a poll, it can be safely asserted that there are
too many Nigerians who agreed and still agree that Nigeria deserved to
have been saved from disintegration and kept as one country. Some may be
having second thoughts because of some recent events. But Nigeria as
one country was a business well worth doing. The mode in which the Igbo
are all over Nigeria proves it. We must not allow ourselves to be
intimidated into regressing in the tripe of those who do not agree. No
question about it: this country is still the closest that Africa has to
one that is able to stand up to the rest of the world and thrive for the
good of all Africans. Even the supposed differences that some people
deplore, and Awolowo spent his life seeking to re-engineer in creative
directions, are actually part of the strength of this country. Who
wants to live in a country that is all winnowed ethic, one monochrome,
without arguments and debates, and all dead matter, mere ornament! The
point is to prepare all concerned to work for a defined future rather
than merely grumbling, seeking scapegoats for our own failings, dousing
it with cynical rhetoric, while waiting for an undefined future like
manna from heaven.
My grouse, in this regard, is that the issues, as they concern the
civil war, are not being discussed in terms of what the leaders of the
East owed the people but failed to deliver. Most of the intellectuals
and leaders of opinion go about seeking to entrench fictions that
merely disable the capacity of the ex-Biafrans to build with other
Nigerians. The good thing is that the average Igbo man and woman is way
ahead of the griping ones who do not know that the civil war ended long
ago. They are everywhere long gone beyond sweating talk about how to
become Nigerians. They have proved it that they are just bloody
Nigerians like the rest of us. Others, instead of helping the people to
think through the necessity to get empowerment through education,
industry and genuine employment, are busy reproducing fictions that
landed the country in the current mess of incivility. Adding no value
to existing answers beyond the fluff of ethnic nationalism that
masquerades as highmindedness, they are blaming neighbors for the mess
they helped to create by not caring or standing up for an identifiable
principle.
It is certainly no way to go. Similarly, the habit of shouting my
people my people has become a way of not caring for or about the
people. This can be proved by simply asking why all the governments in
the zone contrived so much helplessness for forty years while the roads
in the East deteriorated to war-time conditions. In a region where trade
is an eze with feathers on a red cap, you would have expected that all
the governments in the zone would come together as a matter of emergency
to tackle the monster that was ruining the ethic of commerce. A people
so energetic and gutsy, pumping so much enterprise across the country
ought really never to be seen so self- neglecting as to be waiting for
others to raise or de-maginalize them. Unless as a strategy for getting
more and more in the national spoils system! I mean, it is plain bad
manners to blame other Nigerians who have not found answers to their
problems and with whom cooperation is a fitter strategy than the
politics of the gripe. At any rate, which part of Nigeria is in a good
state? Where have industries not collapsed and public schools not
been mired in a sorry state?
As I see it, a distracted individualism which some people prefer to
describe as republicanism, is being priced above a genuine sitting down
to plan with and for the people. What it calls for, instead of inventing
enemies, and seeing competition in zero-sum terms, is a mobilization
of affect and resources to rise above the disabilities that we all
share as Nigerians. We do need to bring the civil war to a proper end by
looking into the past without flinching and wresting ourselves from the
goblins of pernicious fictions. The bottomline, as I have argued in
Taking Nigerian Seriously, is that there is no Igbo solution to the
Nigerian problem; no Yoruba, Efik, Hausa, Fulani, Edo, Ijaw, or Kanuri
solution. Until we allow cultural empathy to govern the roost, and we
learn to work consciously for the much maligned geographical expression
to accede to heightening the cultural expression that it has already
much become, the tendency to take refuge in pernicious fictions will not
abate.
