Over five decades ago, no fewer than three million people needlessly died in a brutal war carried out with genocidal intentions against the Biafran people by the Federal Government of Nigeria. Since then, Nigeria has continued to make consolidated attempts to erase the scar of that bloody moment from its ugly history and these attempts have remained perpetually futile.
By the reckoning of successive governments who have managed to lead Nigeria after that war, those bloody thirty months are nothing but an unfortunate episode that should be forgotten or best swept under the carpet, however, the story is not the same for the people of Eastern Nigeria who fought against all odds for survival. It was surely a defining moment that cannot be dismissed by mere words or soothing rhetoric.
One thing the people running Nigeria are yet to get used to is that Nigeria cannot expunge the history of that genocide from its battered history because that bloody episode has become part of the history of Nigeria. If the country must make sustainable progress on the issues surrounding it, then a conversation on the country’s most weighty calamity since her hard-fought independence should be held nationally. If successive Nigerian leaders were smart and forward-thinking, they would have come to the realisation that the continued avoidance of a national discussion on Biafra was recklessly stupid as doing so would amount to sweeping under the carpet, a significant portion of its national history.
Nigerian leaders have ignored the fact that whenever a society is caught studiously pretending that part of its colossal and catastrophic history did not happen, it is safe to assume that such society is merely investing on the repeat of same in a mindless effort to hide it from its younger generations.
It is high time the Nigerian government realised that behaving like ostriches in the face of obvious abnormalities is not the way to go. Rather than making bold attempts to discuss the bloody war and how to resolve the issues that led to it, the federal government has erroneously continued to make itself believe that hiding its head in the sand and thinking that the system is fair to everyone is the way to go. This clearly shows not only obvious stupidity but mindblowing recklessness.
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In 1967, against the backdrop of two coups and a fracas that led to about a million Igbos returning to the South-East of Nigeria, the Republic of Biafra decided to break out of Nigeria with 33-year-old military officer Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu at the helm. The response of the Nigerian government was to declare war on them which provided genocidal maniacs within the Nigerian Army an opportunity to unleash terror on civilians and vulnerable children.
This nightmare was finally brought to an official end on the 15th of January 1970 with the Yakubu Gowon-led federal government declaring that the ‘conflict’ ended on a ‘No victor, No vanquished’ note. The sad reality that everyone had to grapple with was that indeed, there were victors and there were the vanquished. The victor was the Nigerian state. The vanquished were the Igbos, and Biafrans generally.
In an obvious act of self-deception, General Gowon tried to heal the wound with the three Rs; Restoration, Rehabilitation, and Reconciliation. But these Rs merely left the paper on which they were written. Nothing was restored, nobody was rehabilitated and till today, no real reconciliation has happened between the people of the region and Nigeria.
The people of the Eastern region have for the past 53 years been subjected to state-sanctioned marginalisation by the Nigerian state. It took forty-two years for the region to produce its first Chief of Army Staff in Azubuike Iherijirka and his days in office were stormy which eventually culminated in his ouster. For the post of the Inspector General of Police, the people have suffered the same fate, as no one from the Eastern region has had a taste of the post. The position of the Presidency seems off the cards as the people of the region are not even considered worthy to fly the flags of major political parties.
The truth that no one can challenge is that post-war Biafra was not rehabilitated or restored by the Nigerian Federal Government either. The ingenuity and striving spirit of the Igbo people were responsible for the fast-paced recovery efforts. No state-sponsored scheme either by the federal or state government was carried out in the region after the war. None of the devastated communities was fixed, none of the destroyed houses was rebuilt, and none of the schools, hospitals, etc was reconstructed or given any sort of assistance. The people of the region did all that by themselves and through Community Efforts. When the federal government even went on to announce that only twenty (20) pounds were going to be given to the people of erstwhile Biafra regardless of how much they had in their banks, it was indeed a mortal blow. The big question is, what efforts then did the federal government make to implement any of her 3Rs in the face of its No Victor, No Vanquished slogan? The answer is a resounding Nothing!
The bloody war ended over 53 years ago but since then, Nigeria has not stopped fighting. As a consequence of her mismanagement of the country’s diversity, the Nigerian state has seen itself constantly being engulfed in another kind of battle to keep the country together. It has refused to tackle the myriads of socio-political and economic problems that initially created the environment for the conflict and the country has known no peace ever since.
The huge statement to this is the renewed ethnic agitations across the land which the movement by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) is a vivid example of. The reaction of the Nigerian state to these agitations has clearly shown that the country has not made appreciable progress in the fight to address the major issues that led to the war which was fought over 5 decades ago.
The failure of the federal government to implement the post-war reconciliation programme which it deceptively announced without any form of pressure is the reason Nigeria is still struggling to attain anything with the semblance of unity.
During the war, Nigeria’s main objective was to preserve the country and keep it one. To carry this out, the military had to coin a saying that ‘To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done.’ But one will ask, to what extent? To end up marginalising a section and glorifying the other?
What the Nigerian government has failed to realise is that the military defeat of secession only achieved that goal in half. The other half is the war of reintegration, which can only happen in the battlefields of policy-making and implementation where the most effective weapons are the soft tools of reason, justice, and fairness. Sadly, the Nigerian government has arrogantly refused to allow common sense to prevail.
In conclusion, the Nigerian government must come to the realisation that its refusal to implement the planned 3Rs is doing more harm than good to Nigeria. The country has continued to fight systemic battles to keep the people of the Eastern region away from power while still striving to keep them in the abusive union by all means. They have a choice to continue to wage the war till the country expectedly implodes or bring the war to an end by simply implementing its promise of the 3R post-war effort. The choice is evidently theirs.
