Once again, Biafra irredentists find a new way to raise another grudge that sustains Biafra, a country that once was. I do not consider this habit good or bad. What interests me is their intrinsic value. Put bluntly, will a new grudge give the Igbo a seat at the table of decision-making in Nigeria? And, ultimately, a seat at the head of that table?
I struggle to build enthusiasm for the most recent grudge, the agitation by IPOB and other responsible Igbo groups to memorialise Biafra through its war veterans. Before anyone protests my reading of their motives, it is well to remember that no Biafran veteran, alive or dead, was recruited or conscripted into the Biafran Army on May 30, 1967. The more appropriate dates to honour war veterans should have been July 6 (when the first shots were fired in 1967 to officially kick start the Civil War) or January 15 (when Gen. Philip Efiong signed the instrument of surrender at Dodan Barracks, Lagos, in 1970). The beauty of it is that any of the two dates makes a veterans day inclusive and potentially acceptable to everyone, Igbo and non-Igbo alike, who lost loved ones during the Nigerian Civil War.
Nigeria chose January 15 while Biafran separatists say they want May 30.
Separatists should wake up and smell the coffee. There was a country that Ojukwu proclaimed on May 30, 1967, but this country died the day its soldiers capitulated on January 15, 1970. No sane government in Nigeria can allow a defeated Biafra to be surreptitiously immortalised in the guise of memorialising war veterans. Although the message we hear is that Nd’Igbo deserve to honour the memory of those who died in the war, the subtext, as usual, is that “Nigeria does not care for us and we must, therefore, return to Egypt.”
It is ironic that Biafra war veterans, including the wounded that we mistreated, are the reason for the latest grudge. The war veterans were the thousands of young men who voluntarily enlisted or were forcibly conscripted into the separatist army, given a crash course on soldiering, and hurriedly deployed to battle. Unsurprisingly, tens of thousands did not survive in the frontlines. Quite a number of lucky survivors returned with missing limbs, internal injuries, and broken spirits. Unfortunately, many of them received the sort of welcome that makes the current agitation for memorialisation appear like shedding crocodile tears.
In the 1970s and much of the 1980s, wounded Biafra war survivors were a sorry sight in eastern big cities where they flocked to beg for money and food, thrusting their unhealed limbs in our faces to rouse our sympathy. To his credit, East Central State Administrator, Ukpabi Asika, eventually gathered thousands of them at a makeshift rehabilitation camp in Oji River, Enugu State, where succeeding governments, sadly, abandoned them to suffer and die in abject distress. Remember those veterans who camped at the roadside along old Enugu-Onitsha highway to solicit for alms to buy crutches, clothes, food and drugs? Biafra separatist agitator, Ralph Uwazurike, once said that he was so moved by the sight that he was compelled to relocate and resettle about 126 of them from their Oji River punishment camp to his Okwe hometown.
Beyond the dead and wounded soldiers, the world counted millions of civilians who died as a consequence of the Nigerian civil war. I was a mere lad at the time but not a stranger to the multiple tragedies that echoed in many households. In my father’s house, this began with the death of my mother a few months after Nigeria launched hostilities against Biafra. With neither drugs nor medical care, my mother succumbed to haemorrhage less than three months after giving birth. The memory of my mother literally bleeding to death haunts me to this day. My little sister, the baby girl she had, also passed away due to poor nutrition and lack of medical care. Other deaths followed in quick succession in my family between 1968 and 1969, including my grandmother and two uncles. Mercifully, my uncle who detached from the Nigerian Army to enlist in the Biafran Army survived the war and returned without a scar.
Years later, these memories of the civil war followed me to Lagos as a journalist and stayed with me through my newsroom journey. Biafra and the Igbo problem featured often in our news conferences to spark animated conversations, including on occasion forceful and bitter attacks. The catalyst for reasoned debate and diatribe could be someone innocently wondering why the typical Igbo person nurses a victim mindset that they have sustained many years after the war.
I remember one particular diatribe where the image of my mother in the throes of death flashed through my mind and I nearly lost it. Without a thought, I lashed out viciously at an editor that I thought was totally lacking in empathy for survivors of what I considered Nigeria’s version of the holocaust. Everyone was shocked but not me. You could say that, at that point, I relished my victim mentality. And why not, after the war made me lose the dearest person in my world? I wasn’t going to allow anyone to reduce the impact that the war had on me, or anyone else that bore the brunt of that war. I derived almost a perverse pleasure from tightly hugging my victimhood.
My perspective radically changed the day that Eluem Emeka Izeze and I flew to Enugu to interview the principal actor of that war, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. One particular question made Ikemba flare up. We wondered why he wouldn’t apologise for the war for the sake of the many people who died because of his decision to pull the Eastern Region out of Nigeria. We never expected the iron hot rage that poured on us for daring to insinuate that he may have thoughtlessly instigated millions of deaths inside Biafra. Ojukwu’s anger on that day was, however, not the high point of the interview – and the turning point – for me. Rather, it was the conciliatory tone that he struck throughout the interview, a noticeable anxiety to pass on the message of ozoemena (may it not happen again) to Nd’Igbo.
Angry young man that I was, I walked away from that interview wondering why he was so anxious, almost obsessed, with the desire to pass on a message of peace to his people. If anyone paid careful attention to Ojukwu after his return from exile, he stuck to this conciliatory tone until the very end. His message appeared to be that, without forgetting their past, Ndigbo should put Biafra behind them and mount a new political, non-violent struggle to regain their respect and freedom in the Nigerian sun. Years later, I thought it was ironic that Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe canvassed the exact same position during the war but nearly paid for it with his life.
Subsequently, I saw that not only Azikiwe and Ojukwu but also Ekwueme, Mbakwe, Okadigbo and almost all top Igbo politicians and intellectuals that I met in the course of my journalism journey during the Second Republic bought into the message that Nd’Igbo should return to Nigeria and mount a strategic battle to regain their pride of place. As I have often written, this struggle paid off, given the numerous strategic positions that they occupied in the Second Republic (less than 10 years after the war) and in the PDP years between 1999 and 2015. Significantly, Ikemba quietly mentored Ralph Uwazuruike during his own version of the Biafran struggle, possibly to prevent the separatist from acting in ways that could instigate another round of bloodletting of the Igbo.
Unlike Uwazuruike, however, everyone knows that Mazi Nnamdi Kanu neither had a mentor like Ojukwu nor ever gave the impression that he needed one. Idolizing Ojukwu is different from learning at his feet, which explains why Kanu’s supporters stumble from one calamity to another. This is also how I read why, in the midst of multifarious challenges facing the Igbo in the hands of APC-led Federal Government, IPOB chose to latch on to a new grudge that is now leading to another round of bloodletting for innocent Igbo people.
The reality is that the demand for memorialisation of Biafra war veterans is as misguided as it is very dangerous, as I shall demonstrate next week in this column.