By Douglas Anele

Col. Ojukwu proclaimed the Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967; but instead of Awolowo fulfilling his position to lead Western region out of Nigeria if the East secedes, he accepted appointment into Lt. Gowon’s Executive Council as Vice-Chairman and Federal Commissioner for Finance, and asked the Yoruba to support Gowon fully. Gowon was deposed by a military coup on July 29, 1975, exactly nine years after the revenge coup in which Ironsi, Fajuyi and scores of Igbo military officers were murdered. Anyway, during the war, Awolowo, Anthony Enahoro and other hardliners in Gowon’s cabinet enthusiastically supported starvation as a weapon of war against Biafrans.

Those who argue that there was no genocide against Biafrans should go and read Article Two of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, adopted on December 9, 1948, which defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Genocidal acts enumerated by the Convention include, inter alia, killing of members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and so on. On the strength of the above, there is no doubt that Northerners committed genocide against Ndigbo in the 1960s, which they eventually took to a higher level during the civil war. More concretely,

If the massacres in Asaba, Owerri, Ameke-Item and other Biafran communities; the relentless and inhuman strafing of hospitals, schools, farms, residential quarters, refugee camps and other non-military targets by the federal forces which killed over half a million people; operation “starve Biafrans to death”; and the cumulative death of over two million people do not constitute genocide, then genocide has never occurred since human beings evolved on earth.
Besides, in my humble opinion, if there is an iota of justice in this world, members of the Nigerian armed forces who are still alive today and who committed heinous atrocities against civilians during the war, particularly children, must reap the karmic effects of their wickedness. Keep in mind that on the surface, Gen. Gowon’s declaration of “No Victor, No Vanquished” was a commendable magnanimous and humanitarian gesture. But to ascertain Gowon’s true intent, that conciliatory statement must be juxtaposed with the dehumanising anti-Igbo policies he implemented afterwards, which were akin to dropping an opponent on the ground during a fight and putting sand into his mouth to finally humiliate him. After the collapse of Biafra, the former Eastern region was, according to Prof. Achebe, “a vast smouldering rubble”.

*Gowon and Ojukwu

Thousands of Biafrans were dying because of diseases and starvation. Yet, Gen. Gowon and some shylocks in his cabinet still wanted to extract their pound of flesh from the defeated and emaciated Biafrans. Hence, instead of accelerating rehabilitation and reconstruction of the devastated region, the federal government rejected both human and material assistance from countries and humanitarian organisations that supported Biafra. Furthermore, it nullified bank accounts operated by Biafrans, and approved a paltry sum of twenty pounds for each Biafran depositor of the Nigerian currency, irrespective of the amount in his or her account. Concerning that, Achebe wryly remarked, “if there was ever a measure put in place to stunt, or even obliterate the economy of a people, this was it.”

To be candid, no objective observer who personally witnessed the pogroms by Northerners in the 1950s and 60s against Ndigbo and the wanton destruction of lives and property in Biafra by the Nigerian military during the war, or reads about them in well-researched historical source materials, would blame the Igbo and their immediate neighbours for believing strongly that Northerners wanted to conquer and subjugate them perpetually. Sometimes when I think about the causes of the Biafran war and its tearful devastating repercussions on Igboland, some perplexing questions pop up in my mind with pulsating urgency.

First, why did Northern leaders who for several years had been threatening secession and at the peace conference of 1966 initially supported the idea that Nigeria should be a confederation of semi-autonomous regions suddenly change strategy, to the extent of overwhelmingly backing the use of military force to compel Eastern region to remain in Nigeria?

As a corollary, why was Lt. Col. Gowon who on August 1, 1966 wanted to announce secession of Northern Nigeria less than a year afterwards eager to kill and destroy to “keep Nigeria one”? What is actually responsible for Gowon’s hasty decision to employ military force less than two months after the East seceded, without really allowing enough time for exploring and exhausting peaceful alternatives? Why did Britain and the United States of America, self-styled bastions of liberty and democracy, support Nigeria instead of the fledgling Republic of Biafra, considering that the latter was necessitated by the urgent desire of Easterners to assert their right to self-preservation and self-determination in the face of atrocious human rights abuses?

After the war, what prevented Gen. Gowon’s administration from harnessing the creative ingenuity of Biafran scientists, engineers and technologists for industrial and technological advancement of the country? How can the Igbo be truly integrated into Nigeria when there is a deliberate unofficial policy dating back to Gowon’s government of concealing embarrassing truths about the war, and plain refusal to deal with the question of genocide against Biafrans? If indeed the civil war was meant to keep Nigeria one, why did successive military administrations deliberately mismanage the issue of abandoned property and deploy devious boundary adjustments to emasculate Igboland by ceding a reasonable number of communities in Igbo speaking states to non-Igbo states?
Why is it that despite the havoc done to the concept of ‘One Nigeria’ by pachydermatous ethnic irredentists and religious zealots from 1950 to 1967 many influential politicians are still using the same warped logic of ethnic and religious exclusiveness in their quest for elective positions? I will explore answers to these questions sometime in the future. Suffice it to say, however, that given the scientific and technological ingenuity displayed by Biafran engineers and scientists, collapse of the secessionist attempt robbed Black Africa the opportunity of hosting a truly self-reliant and virile nation which could have seriously challenged the white supremacist fallacies of Western imperialism. Now, forty-three years after the guns went silent, the troubling conclusion from our very brief sketch of Nigerian history, I am afraid, is that Nigerians, especially the ruling elite, have yet to learn appropriate lessons from the mistakes of our past leaders.

The centrifugal forces which precipitated the crises that eventually led to the civil war are still there, suggesting that our leaders, because of greed, blindness to the lessons of history and sheer stupidity are repeating the very mistakes that almost destroyed the country. Some armchair critics might conclude that I am an Igbo irredentist trying to scratch old wounds. Of course, I am an authentic Igboman – nwa afo Igbo, to be precise. Still, my aim is not to project Ndigbo as a people without blemish or portray Northerners as devils.

TO BE CONCLUDED.