By Ochereome Nnanna
EXACTLY one week ago, two directors of Newswatch Magazine – Malam Yakubu Mohammed and Mr. Soji Akinrinade, were ushered into the usual Monday meeting of Vanguard Board of Editors. They brandished the newest product of their “inventive genius” (apologies, Bambulu in James Ene Henshaw’s hilarious play This is Our Chance).

It was a book simply titled: Ojukwu. For reasons that should be pretty obvious to the reader (“Because I am Involved” as the Secretary of the Publicity and Media Committee of the Ikemba burial and funeral body) I not only took an immediate interest in what it might contain, but I also immediately volunteered to “look into it” today.

Let me start by introducing the book. It is a 275-page effort with a greenish-grey cover with the main title: Ojukwu boldly embossed at the top. It has on its cover possibly the most popular photograph of Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in full military uniform; cap-less, as he declared the birth of the Republic of Biafra on Tuesday May 30th 1967. Under the picture is a list of resource persons who contributed to this publication edited by Ray Ekpu: Emeka Ojukwu, Yakubu Gowon, Philip Effiong, Ray Ekpu, Dan Agbese, Yakubu Mohammed, Soji Akinrinade and Ebere Onwudiwe.

When you open pages 3 and 4 (a centrespread) you may receive a shock, depending on your disposition to the very idea of Biafra. You will be confronted by the Biafran flag in all its iconic charisma: red, black and green, with the inspirational Rising Sun almost blinding your eyes.

General Gowon had said of it in his January 15th 1970 address to the reunited nation: “The so-called “Rising Sun of Biafra” is set forever”.

Definitely, the Republic of Biafra was aborted. But today, there is a non-violent Movement for the Actualisation for the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) boldly existing in the streets of South East Nigeria, with the Biafran flag (the Rising Sun and all) fluttering in the skies whenever they have their frequent conventions. An idea never really dies, especially when the conditions that led to the birth of the idea still breathe.

The Biafran Sun rose again because Nigeria failed to solve the problems that led to the aborted secession attempt. And because of that, we have seen, over a period of forty two years, series of attempts to re-enact Biafra in one form or the other through violent rebellion. These include the Ogoni riots seeking a separate Ogoni Kingdom or Republic, the June 12 crisis during which secession was deeply mulled by the Yoruba people, the Niger Delta armed struggle and even the ongoing Boko Haram separatist terrorism in Northern Nigeria.

Let’s return to the book

Ojukwu died on November 26, 2011. He was initially scheduled for burial on February 2, 2012 before the postponement occasioned by the petrol subsidy strike. The Nestors of Newswatch Magazine now semi-retired from the board of the publication were still able to rush out the book. They had only 68 days and still met the deadline. It was purely an effort driven by the journalist’s reflex.

All the trappings of newsroom frenzy are evident: a big story breaks. A meeting is called and story angles are explored and agreed with the editor presiding. Topics are apportioned to “anchors”. Research is mounted in the library, where old interviews are exhumed for use in whole or part. External contributors are contacted for intimate (or inside story) narratives. At deadline scripts arrive at the editor’s desk. He puts them in shipshape (book shape this time) and the whole package is rushed to the printer. Remarkably (but not surprisingly) this rushed work came out almost without blemish in terms of typographical errors or newsroom sins usually (and unfairly) attributed to the Devil.

Said Yakubu Mohammed to Vanguard Editors when he made his presentation: “we wanted to prove the point that in spite of our ages and in our new dispensation (as media consultants) we can still do things for ourselves”. A point well made. No true journalist becomes too old or too big to be one when duty calls. It is a useful lesson to younger journalists who now believe that once you become an editor or desk manager you have risen above being a journalist. The truth is that once a journalist, you will always be seen as one wherever you go, no matter what you have become.

Now, let’s return once again to the book

OJUKWU is divided into fifteen chapters. As a discerning reader, I was not that betaken by the works (or words) of the military contributors: Ojukwu, Gowon, Effiong and Onwudiwe. Except for Onwudiwe, they were all politicians whose utterances were bound to be guided by political expediencies. I paid critical attention to the works of the journalists. I was hunting for signs of residual bias or Freudian editorialisation in a book recalling the role played by a central figure in the darkest hour of the nation’s swarthy history.

This is why I considered it important

Ray Ekpu is from Eket in today’s Akwa Ibom State. He was a Biafran from the Minority Ibibio ethnic group before the creation of twelve states saw the most of the Minorities switching their loyalties to the Federal side. Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed were from the Northern Region. Akinrinade was from the Western Region. They were all on the federal side during the conflict. Ekpu wrote two chapters dealing on whether the Amalgamation was a mistake and Ojukwu as Igbo leader. Agbese wrote a profile of Ojukwu. Mohammed reported how the war was won and lost, while Akinrinade wrote on Ojukwu: saint or sinner.

These veterans of our trade were called to stand up to the sacred challenge of objectivity. They all excelled, except perhaps to a minute extent, Agbese. I found Mohammed way above it all, though you will be left with the niggling impression that he did not like the word: Biafra. He admitted that Biafra was defeated but not merely run over. Akinrinade’s “saint or sinner” left no room for him to be accused one way or the other. Both were based on well researched attributive reporting.

Ekpu was more generous than the rest in that he even took note of the technological improvisations in Biafra which helped stretch a “police action” from “twenty four hours” to thirty months. As recalled by Mohammed (p.45) Gowon came out of the war admitting: “a commander knows when a war may start, but he cannot know when it will stop”.

Ekpu, on page 3 noted as follows: “Biafra’s adversity produced an amazing spirit of creativity. In spite of the hunger, acute shortage of food, water and salt, and the huge refugee problems, Biafran scientists created the famous ogbunigwe….” Later on at pages 151, 152 and 156, he credited Ojukwu with four “achievements” as a leader – sound management of public opinion, securing recognition from some countries, coping well with the huge refugee problems and ensuring that, for the Federal side, the war against Biafra was not “a stroll in the park”. Even in their often hypocritical adulations of Ojukwu now he is dead, few outside the Biafran enclave are ready to permit that any positive thing ever happened there, which could be copied in our difficult march to a greater Nigeria.

Agbese was, as usual, his old prosaic, engaging self in his profile of Ojukwu. But he made a few errors of fact. On page 17 he noted that Ojukwu was the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in 1999 when the party was not even registered. Secondly, he erroneously credited Ojukwu thus: “we must recognise Ojukwu as being the architect of the current demand for true federalism…” (p. 18). That credit belongs to Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Ojukwu, in his Aburi reform proposals in 1966 picked it up and proposed “confederation” based on regions, but not on ethnic nationalities as Awo did.

His final paragraph at page 20 is fraught with controversy. Notes he: “still, the important and self-important Nigerians who describe Ojukwu as a nationalist and a patriot do more than tickle the fancy of a dead man… the 700,000 soldiers and two million civilians who died in the civil war may have become mere fossilised statistics but they remain a cruel reminder that they are also victims of one man’s cynical sense of his own manifest destiny”.

As far as I am concerned, opinions are free as to whether Ojukwu was a patriot or nationalist or not. Good arguments can be made for both sides. Blaming him for the war and the casualties thereof is yet another thing. Both Yakubu Mohammed and General John Shagaya in Akinrinade’s “Saint or Sinner” piece acknowledged that no officer worth his salt would fail to take the step Ojukwu did when his people were faced with extermination.

Besides, would the secession and the casualties of war have taken place if General Gowon and the federal government had honoured the Aburi Accord he signed? Rather, he took actions that provoked the secession, especially the unilateral creation of states. Obviously, it suits Agbese’s fancies to put the blame on the person who reacted to a provocation rather than the one who created the provocation.

Agbese’s residual anti-Ojukwu angst is merely a symptom of the reality that Ojukwu, Gowon and other major players in the Biafra – Nigeria war will always open wounds which, for many Nigerians, have never really healed and may in fact never heal.