By Dr Chuba Keshi
WED JANUARY 4 2017- “I will go to war again if the unity and territorial integrity of Nigeria is threatened”. This was Ojukwu’s comment when interviewers from The African Guardian Magazine asked him if he would fight again. As far as I know, this testimony on Nigeria and by implication of the substance of it, Biafra, by Dim Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu did not change before he died.
Mid last year popular newspaper columnist himself Igbo, remarked that pro Biafra campaigners curiously forgot that Ojukwu’s post humus birthday came up on the 4th of November. Now, given Ojukwu’s last testament on Biafra and the curious omission of his remembrance, one wonders where any truth rests in the claim by the Biafra protagonists that they are carrying on from where Ojukwu stopped.
I was barely five years old when the Biafran war broke out in 1967. As a five-year-old the episode of the war was a very interesting one. First, I recall the day my uncle, a very young Lt. Colonel A. A. Keshi who was a commander somewhere in today’s Edo State, stormed Agbor to pick my father and his family back home in today’s Aniocha North of Delta State. It was a spectacle I enjoyed as a child as we “strolled” past checkpoint after checkpoint which heavily armed soldiers in bandoliers long as snakes, saluted smartly as my uncle and his esteemed convoy headed home. I, my immediate older brother even took the liberty to tease the soldiers sometimes, until our mother’s stern eyes put us in check.
But the concert had only just begun. In the village, I and other children enjoyed colourful sights of soldiers of occupation in warm-up parades. We enjoyed the many sights of fisticuffs between two soldier friends over a stick of cigarette or a girlfriend. We also enjoyed the frog jumps meted out to some of the soldiers by their “kolofo” colleagues. To crown it all, young men who had been conscripted mainly into the Biafran army used to tell tales of escapades in war fronts when they came on short breaks. These we savoured during the tales-by-moonlight sessions or seated by my grandmother’s smoldering faggots from the evening’s cooking. It was lots of fun seeing the dusts of the civil war.
But when the dust settled we were to learn that over one million soldiers, officers, men, women and children had died. We were to learn that there had been no victor and no vanquished. We were to learn that indeed the economy of mainly Igbos had been destroyed. Many rich men and women had been pauperized by the war. We were also later to learn that nothing, actually nothing had been gained from the war. Not even the “reverse engineering” technology developed by sheer Igbo ingenuity was built on. These were in oil refining, in transportation, vehicular parts and accessories, military hardware, food technology, just to mention a few. We were also to learn much later from Generals Gowon and Ojukwu – the two principal actors – that the Biafran war could have been avoided.
Very importantly, as a child of between the ages of five and eight – the time the war started and ended, I was very familiar with the word “saboteurs” which I thought then was not an English word but a word taken from the Biafran vocabulary, because a sentence then made by a “Biafran” hardly ended without the word “saboteur”. This is to say that all the ills being paraded today by Biafra protagonists against Nigeria were in the Biafra of Ojukwu’s time. “Saboteurism” was a form of protest by those who felt marginalized, who felt deprived, cheated, and the out-rightly greedy in Biafra. And there is nothing to show that there is now the collective trust among “Biafrans”, so to speak, such that a new Biafra would be the Orwellian sugar candy island.
In effect, the envisaged most gain of a Biafra namely social justice would fly in the wake of mutual distrust which was, as already observed, even present in the old Biafra. That would be when the Wawa would know that he is distinct from the Ngwa or the Bende. The Ohafia would know that he is distinct from the Abakaliki, the Uyi, the Onitsha (if Onitsha will ever be part of it), the Owerri, etc.
All said, we must see the present agitation for Biafra wholly for what it is. It is now a campaign by a group of brigands and farragoes who have smartly come to realize that terror seems to pay big money in Nigeria. Militants from MEND have been “amnestied” with bogusly huge pipe-line watch contracts and more; the same for the militants of the OPC. Boko Haram war lords burn through the North-East like the Hitlerian hot knife through butter. And I am sure that if they are interested, they too would be offered the greet twig of amnesty.
At best Biafra agitators, mostly young men and women born after the civil war are only consumed in that pristine child-like fun which the debacle of the civil war gave the likes of us children. This time however their “gain” is beyond the amusement we enjoyed as children, but in millions and millions of naira and dollars. And all these at the cost of lives, mainly Igbo lives, and potentially at the cost of the comfortable position of the Igbo as the rulers of business and commerce in Africa’s largest economy, today.
Beyond this, it is central and for the purposes of justice to point out very clearly that Biafra should not be only about the Igbo. There are indeed other ethnic groups trapped in the erstwhile Biafra enclave. And it is on record that perhaps these non-Igbo ethnic groups may have suffered the most both from the sinews and the ruins; the real detritus of the Biafran war.
It is a fact of history that apart from Ojukwu himself who provided most of his personal fortune toward the Biafra course, there was perhaps no other Igbo who willingly gave his resources for the war apart from the ones that were confiscated. The flip side of this was the fact that the brunt of the war was mostly borne by either the non-Igbo or the Igbo of the Midwest. First these people’s lands remained the theatres of war, such as Asaba in the Midwest and parts of the Southeast, even after some important towns of the Igbo heartland such as Nsukka and Enugu had since the early days of the war, fallen to the Federal side.
In addition, most of the quality officer core of the Biafran Army was made up of non-core Biafrans. These were either Midwestern Igbos or officers from other ethnic groups. There was for instance Col. C.D. Nwawo a Midwestern Igbo who was the most senior commissioned officer in Biafra. He was senior to both Ojukwu and Effiong. Other Midwestern Igbos included Cols. Joe Achuzia, Emmanuel Ossai, Mike Okwechime, Rudolf Trimnell and Alphonsus Keshi. Majs. Kaduna Nzeogwu, Albert Okonkwo, Onyekwelu, Ochei, Okonweze, Nzefili, Okafor, just to mention a few. There were those from the old Southeast or Rivers State such as Cols. Philip Effiong (Ojukwu’s deputy), George Kurubo, E. A. Etuk, Assam Nsudoh, Maj. Victor Achibong and Capts. Fiberesima and Etuk-Udoh, just to mention a few.
Indeed the Midwest Igbo officers who were conscripted into the Biafran Army initially refused to fight for Biafra; a project they did not believe in. They only fought and most gallantly too, when they had no choice; faced with prospects of serious reprisals even from the Federal side. In an interview Col. Keshi remarked to The Sun: “When we (Midwest Officers) got to Enugu (after the fall of Midwest), we held a meeting with Eastern officers. … we insisted on neutrality. Chude Sokei (Lt. Col) who was my colleague in Sandhurst – and we were quite close – reminded me that we (Midwesterners) were defeated people. We were instructed never to travel to the Midwest without permission from Ojukwu. … In fact, when we (Midwest Officers) were ‘conscripted’ in Enugu, we decided that we were not going to use the Biafran insignia of the rising sun. Instead we adopted our own which was a palm frond and which I kept to until I returned to the Federal side.”
Officers like Col. Henry Igboba (Midwestern Igbo) bluntly refused to be conscripted into the Biafran Army. He was promptly detained in Benin prison by Col. Banjo who commanded the invading Biafran Army. Igboba was later to be executed by overzealous Federal officers after Midwest was retaken. As a result these Midwest officers were marginalized in spite of their relative edge. Nwawo, Aldershot-trained and Biafra’s most senior officer (Commissioned 1954; Effiong 1956; Ojukwu 1957) was not given an appreciable place in accordance with military custom. Keshi, Nzeogwu and Kurubo (the latter from Rivers State) three of the very few Sandhurst-trained officers in Biafra were not given serious commands (Keshi was the first Nigerian military officer to undergo a full course in the US Army Command and Staff College Leavenworth). Nzeogwu died under suspicious circumstances. Keshi, Trimnell and Kurubo took the risk and returned to the Federal Side. While as noted, Igboba was killed, Keshi and Trimnell were detained in Ikoyi prison by the Federal side until after the war. Kurubo – a non-Midwesterner – was sent to the Soviet Union as Nigerian Ambassador.
All said, it is very clear that Biafra as a geographical entity had no place for ethnic groups other than Igbo, the heartland Igbo. Not even Igbos of the Midwest and indeed those of Rivers State had a place in Biafra. Effiong (Ibibio of today’s Akwa-Ibom) became Vice Head of State in a bid to woo the people of his region obviously because of the strategic economic relevance of his oil-rich region. However, de facto, he was a ceremonial deputy to Ojukwu. So, given the real experience of these non-Igbo-heartland peoples of old Biafra, it is certain that in a referendum today, these groups will promptly vote themselves out of Biafra.
As already noted, Ojukwu’s last wish was to keep Nigeria one. Even in another account as recorded in an online article titled: “Biafra will be realised without war …” Petrus Obi recounts Ojukwu’s statement, made in 2009 as he (Ojukwu) installed Col. Emmanuel Ossai – a Midwestern Igbo, Commander of the Biafran Legion. This was as recorded by Ossai himself: ‘You have to use this opportunity (of commanding the legion) to do good things. … anything you do must be taken to remember me; … as you go out remember that you are my followers; wherever you go I am there. …you are scattered because of greediness but if you are united nobody can scatter you;…”
Finally as earlier noted, there is nothing to show that the Easterners, not even the Igbo, will be united in a new Biafra. Biafra in Ojukwu’s heart represented equality of all persons, unity of all, free enterprise and above all, peace based on social justice. All these are achievable in Nigeria. An enclave Biafra (definitely without non-Eastern-Igbo groups) will only stifle the Igbo especially in terms of business landscape, and yet would not guaranty them the absence of greed and the presence of the philosophical ideals of Biafra as conceived in Ojukwu’s larger-than-life heart. The Igbo must remain wise.
Keshi (D.Phil/PHD) is the Principal consultant at Core Business Consulting Associates
