THE LIES IGBO HAVE LIVED WITH FOR 53 YEARS: AN EVERGREEN REFLECTION ON THE JANUARY 15 IN NIGERIA

Story by Razaq Adedeji Jimoh

IN a book work by a footloose researcher thematically entitled Feasibility Studies on Political Tendencies of the Igbo in post 2015 General Elections; the Lagos State Governorship Elections as Case Study, a Lagos based author, Razaq. A. Jimoh observes thus: “There is nothing to suggest that the future elections could be different from the 2015 experience in so far the Igbo find a political platform for its Biafran iconoclasm. Nine out of ten Igbo hold the world view of antagonism to the Nigerian State and they hold the Yoruba in enmity for whatever made or makes the failure of Biafra yesterday and today respectively. It is the reason any Igbo leader that seeks favour from the people of his nation would first gleefully exhibit open contempt and disdain for Bola Ahmed Tinubu as successor to Obafemi Awolowo in leadership of the Yoruba. Such is as found in Rochas Okorocha's tendencies toward Tinubu as successor to Chinua Achebe's angst for Awolowo in his last memoir – “There was a Country”.

From this view, it could be deduced that a part to the problem of relentless Igbo revisionism against the Yoruba should become discernible. To address this problem, the end questions this edition of Civics Journal would be deemed to have answered are these: First, that from all the path of the Igbo history in the evolution process of Nigerian State from creation to modern day post-colonial nation state – as akin to the Yoruba's path either, where did the Yoruba offend the Igbo to warrant the revisionism? Second, that with truth as a furious bullet that hit to heal and not to kill, would this generation of the Igbo accept to be tied to a stake to receive a firing shot of it as a sacrifice for the living ghost of the Biafra to be interned for eternity?

The latter question evolved from a recent commemorative conference of post 50years of Biafrian War, organised in Lagos by the “Ndigbo Lagos” in conjunction with another Igbo organisation – Nzuko Umunna – described as a think-tank of Igbo professionals in Nigeria and Diaspora. The theme of the conference held on 13th January was “Never Again: Nigerian Civil War 50Years After”. Among the eminent guest speakers at the occasion were the living legends of and stakeholders in that war. This included the former Nigeria Head of State at the time, Gen Yakubu Gowon (rtd); Professor Wole Soyinka, a victim of the woes of the war and a host of others.

The consensus of their opinions was that Nigeria is yet being tormented by the ghost of Biafran war to date. They therefore concluded that for Nigeria to move forward in the spirit of oneness of its geographic entity, the ghost must be buried deep beneath the earth crust.

Gowon in a recorded video for the event observed that in spite of the Biafra War ending 50 years ago, it remains yet a major reference point in the country's history. He therefore suggested the need “to create enabling platforms to dialogue and proffer ideas on how we can live together in peace and harmony”. Soyinka bandied the fatality figure of 2.5millions for a part of the war's causalities. And further from that, he stated that “there are many ways of saying never again (to experiencing such civil war); some of them direct, some of them not direct”.

Connecting that reasonably, Professor Anya, Chairman of the conference, said the country would do well to learn from the mistakes of the past. He mentioned leadership failure as one example of those mistakes. He also added what speech experts would describe as a Freudian Slip of holding the Igbo Nation responsible for the living ghost of the war with their acts of sustained revisionism against other ethnic nations, particularly the Yoruba. This was deduced from his admonishing statement to his Igbo brothers that “losing (the war) does not make you a failure”.

Professor Pat Utomi could be described as being more pragmatic in bringing forth the need to state what actually led to the war in the first place. Proffering his own candid assessment of the war, he noted that it was rather a consequence of dishonest engagement among the component ethnic nations' leaders at that early time of Nigeria’s birth. He said: “The Civil War was completely unnecessary. It was something that honest conversation would have taken care of”.

Among all this, the part that many thought to have struck the right cord was the Utomi’s conclusion that dishonest engagement among the leaders led to the civil war. Those who held this in high esteem however used it to raise a new poser: that if association by falsehoods was the cause of the war, have the successful leaders ever charted the path of truth, fifty years, after for succeeding generations to inherit?

Another observation derived from the Gowon’s advocacy of a dialogue platform by some analysts was the view that any dialogue that would be devoid of a true self realisation by the respective peoples of the different ethnic nations with respect to their political origin through the evolution of Nigeria to the contemporary post-colonial nation would simply remain their self-entrapment in bondage of crisis.

From the research work of this magazine, experts are of the belief that the dreadful living ghost of that civil war is embodied in the denial of a fundamental truth about the cause of the war. It is a common sense of law that all act of justice flows from establishment of facts about any issue in dispute. And since it takes two to tango, a party in the dispute would always be responsible for the acts of omission or commission that leads to it. The rife of the dispute will cease and justice would deem to have prevailed only if the culprit so established by the course of justice is willing to accept and take responsibility for origin of the dispute.

It is true there was once a civil war in Nigeria. It is also true that the war was caused by a schism that emerged along the ethnic fault line of the three component major tribal nations – Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa/Fulani – lumped together in making the geographic entity called Nigeria. It is equally the truth that the ghost of the civil war has continued to torment Nigeria with threat of total disintegration. But what has been consistently denied to pass for the fundamental truth is that the war was indeed a case of two armed robbers of common blood origin that went into a battle over disagreement in the sharing of loots acquired from their victims – worse enough that the victim was their third sibling. Putting it more succinctly, the war evolved in cause out of a broken accord that consequentially invoked a fatal rift in a conspiracy of two brothers to decimate the life of their third sibling from growing into full independent adulthood in order to hold him in perpetual political subordination.

TO an average Igbo man today, the Biafran War did not succeed because the Yoruba betrayed Igbo by taking side with the Hausa/Fulani in the Nigeria’s resistance to the birth of the BiafraN Country. This is the whole basis of the sustained Igbo revisionism against the Yoruba. But what could have been the truth from the narrative of history? History seems to point at Igbo as the original culprit, whose original sin of morbid territorial ambition of her founding political fathers invoked a backlash that led to the civil war. As some experts of the history have observed, it followed her (Igbo) attempt to outwit the Hausa/Fulani in the duo’s conspiratorial struggle for the political soul of the Yoruba from which the Yoruba suffered serious persecution.

In his tribute to General Alani Akinrinade (rtd), Professor Jide Osuntokun gave a hint of the Igbo / Hausa / Fulani conspiracy against the Yoruba in the restriction of that part to recruitment in the Armed Forces of the Country. He said: “At the time the civil war broke out, the number of Yoruba officers in the Army could be counted in tense. The situation was worse in the number of troops or fighting men. The officer class was dominated by Igbo, Hausa, Fulani and Kanuri. This was because the Civilian Government formed in 1954 in which the mainly Igbo NCNC and the (Northern) NPC formed the coalition government deliberately pressed many young Igbo and Hausa boys from secondary schools in their regions into officers’ corps of the Nigerian Army” .

If that happened by a mere coincidence, the act of that Igbo/Hausa coalition government to distort the geographic history of the Yoruba region by balkanization of her component provinces soon after the Independence should speak volume about the conspiracy.

As it were and as consistent with the purported historical pedigree of Yoruba area, the Western region was divided into eight provinces comprising Ondo, Oyo, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Lagos, Benin, and Delta. Except for the Ijaw and perhaps the Urhobo in the Delta province, every other tribe that falls within the other seven provinces traced her origin to Oduduwa, the father of Yoruba people and founder of the Yoruba nation.

But soon after the exit of the British Colonial Government at immediate post-independence, the combined Igbo/Hausa Federal Government of Nigeria conspired against the Yoruba nation to reduce her own sphere of political territory and influence. The motive of the “mischief”, according to pundits, was to checkmate the leader of Yoruba nation whose political sagacity and enviable good governance profile was rising to “their envy”.

Exploiting the language difference, the non-Yoruba speaking parts of the Western Region, Benin and Delta provinces, were excised from the Region to form another smaller autonomous part called Mid-Western Region. The territorial sphere of both the Igbo and Hausa/Fulani were left intact, even despite the sustained unwilliness of the Rivers Province of the Niger Delta area to be lumped up with the Igbo.

The eventual break down of this Igbo/Hausa conspiracy accord consequential to the civil war may appear clearer in due brevity from the account of Jide Oluwajuyitan. His narrative of the arrest of Aguyi Ironsi by Theophilus Danjuma-led Northern officers would seem to reveal the mind-set that informed the two to “deliberately press many young Igbo and Hausa boys from secondary schools in their regions into officers’ corps of the Nigerian Army”. It should also suffice for how the two would later apply same for their self but mutual destruction out of the subsisting mutual suspicion and distrust.

Oluwajuyitan says: “In July 1966, when armed mob turned against their superior officers in Abeokuta and Ibadan, Danjuma, then a major in the Nigerian Army, selected the most able loyal northern soldiers… to replace Major General Aguyi Ironsi's normal guards. Thereafter, he proceeded single handedly to arrest his General. He had told Major General Ironsi with bravado: You are under arrest, you organized the killings of our brothers in January… you will answer for your action. The rest is history” To be continued

YOU MAY ALSO REACH OUT TO THE VENDOR FOR A COPY OF THE MAGAZINE FOR THE CONCLUDING PART