FEATURE ARTICLE

By Sam C. Okudah  (EMAIL) New Jersey, USA Wednesday, August 22, 2001

Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu and the Igbo leadership question

fter reading Rudolph Okonkwo’s “An Exclusive Interview with Chief Emeka Ojukwu” of 07/23/01, and Ogalanya Uju Afulezi’s “The Forlorn Echoes of Ojukwu’s Thought”, I began to wonder whether Ndigbo have not somehow, lost their senses of objective analysis of history, when it comes to Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu and his thought on the leadership of Ndigbo, and our destiny with Biafra. I find it quite interesting that Uju Afulezi, whom I have, through his writings, come to respect a great deal, is the only person so far that has respectfully come out to set the record straight, concerning the issue of baton passing. Many of us did not have the privilege of knowing exactly what went on during the days of Biafra. However 99.9% of Biafrans would have sacrificed -- and indeed did sacrifice -- their lives for Gen. Ojukwu, in the days of Biafra. I, too, believed in him with all my heart. Although I was very young at that time, I still remember a lot of the things that went on in the Biafra. But after the war, as we began to read about what actually happened, how our well-trained senior army officers, of the ranks of major and up to colonel, who were commanders of armored corps, divisions and various commanding units in the Nigerian Army, were not put to use in the war effort, but were left to be playing cards at the officers mess in Enugu, while the war was raging at Nsukka sector. As I read that the reason for that was because Gen. Ojukwu did not trust them, and perhaps was scared of them, since some of them were senior to him, I began to lose much of the respect I had for Ojukwu. He let his arrogance and selfishness get in the way, and rejected the much-needed inputs of these capable and highly trained officers, so much so that out of frustrations, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, had to force himself into the war, and lacking the support he needed, we lost him early in that sector. As I read that there were only three people making decisions during Biafra for Biafrans, and that those three people were Odumegwu, Emeka and Ojukwu, I had to comfort myself that Nigeria did not defeat Biafra, that Biafra simply lost the war. On the Nigerian side, you had all hands on deck. Even the Yoruba senior officers had to swallow their wounded pride, as they yielded their commanding posts to lower-ranking northern officers, for the sake of their survival and a united front against Biafra. I started to wonder how Gen. Ojukwu, a highly educated four-star general, could have assigned Col. Banjo, a Yoruba man, the task of capturing Lagos. It had taken our daring soldiers a few days to cross over to the Mid-West and advanced -- with confidence and in the can-do spirit of Biafra -- up to Ore, deep in Western Nigeria. But as soon as Col. Banjo took over the command, things started to fall apart. Our soldiers started to be ambushed from every nook and cranny. Suddenly, our soldiers became mentally and physically wounded, and retreat became their survival strategy. I can still see the thick smoke that engulfed the entire town of Onitsha, on that afternoon in February 1968, after our soldiers had retreated to the town, running back to Biafra for their dear lives, and the bridge across the Niger had been blown up after them. If the troika had not decided to send Col. Banjo to Oduduwaland, Lagos could have been captured in a matter of days and the war could have ended in February 1968, before any Biafran could spell "kwashiorkor" or "ogbunigwe." We would not have had the so-called Black Scorpion rampaging through Biafra with his 3rd Marine Commando. Neither would we have had Col. Olusegun Obasanjo doing the same thing after he replaced Col. Adekunle. The Mid-West had already fallen and the military governor, Lt. Col. David Ejoor had escaped to Lagos on a bicycle, or so he had told his superiors in Lagos. While some of our best army officers were relegated to the background, charlatans like the idle civilian named Achuzia were being given command. Achuzia, who was an engineer before the war, was made a colonel, as I recall, and later a brigadier. That was all the commissioning he needed to be going around slaughtering our soldiers with impunity. Even when it had become obvious, after we had given the survival of Biafra our best shot, [or had we?] in the midst of every conceivable obstacle, that we were not going to succeed, one would have thought that a war general worth his four stars, who knew what he was doing, would have called members of his war cabinet and told them the truth. That way, our sensitive documents would either have been destroyed or hidden at a secure vault somewhere in the countryside. But that did not happen. Again, the war cabinet was made up of Chukwuemeka, Odumegwu and Ojukwu. Instead the troika slipped out in the middle of the night, without even the courtesy of telling Gen. Phillip Effiong, his second-in-command, that it was all over. The result of that despicable act was that many of our senior war commanders were captured and slaughtered, and our war documents and that of Biafra were captured, while the troika and his family were in the safe haven of Ivory Coast. How could this guy that we worshipped have done this to us? As I got to know about all these acts of commission and omission, I found them very hard to accept. And then as we were trying to get over the pain of our loss of Biafra, here returned Odumegwu Ojukwu to Igboland in 1982. As I recall, he had attended an NPP rally at Owerri, and the Owelle, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe had welcomed and introduced him to that gathering of “who is who” in Igboland and NPP. He was asked to take a well-deserved rest while watching what was happening in the land. But instead of respectfully accepting the incontestable and dignified crown of the kingmaker that God had made him in Igboland, Chief Ojukwu decided out of arrogance that here was a golden opportunity to settle scores with Zik, to show him and the world, once and for all that he was the God-chosen leader of Ndigbo. Shouldn't he have known better? Of course he went the ways of those that had challenged a similar leader in the West, Obafemi Awolowo. A politically astute person would have taken his time to know where the hearts and souls of his people were, and then if he concluded that where they were would not help them to the promised land, would tactfully plan a strategy for leading them out. May I submit that it would have been inconceivable and suicidal for Chief Ojukwu to join the NPP. And so he decided and joined the NPN, against the wishes and desires of the majority of Ndigbo who would have preferred him to be their kingmaker. On the day he declared for NPN, he announced that he had been asked to take a rest, but that he had taken enough rest since 1970. And so with that, he had chosen to join a party where Ndigbo were in the miserable minority, and could only eat from the crumbs that fell from the dinning tables of the Umaru Dikkos and Uba Ahmeds. Today, he is asking us to join a minority party where we would be a majority, as in the NPP and NCNC. In joining the NPN, Chief Ojukwu unleashed on Igboland, through his Ikemba Front, the type of political killings, violence and rascality that had never been witnessed among our people. We had been reading about political killings in the West, and in the North between NPC and NEPU on one hand, and NPC and UMBC on the other hand, and later between NPN and PRP, and also during the Aminu Kano and Rimi factions as had been engineered by NPN, but never in the East. Another Nkpor sector was recreated as Ikemba Front and Jim's Vanguard battled for the right of the road at Nkpor junction at the outskirts of Onitsha, with the Ikemba himself sitting on the hood of his Jeep. This rascality was translated into a "slap me, I slap you" duel between him and the then Senator Nathaniel Anah, at a political rally. Senator Anah should thank his forefathers because although the war had ended, if it wasn't for the fact that Chief Ojukwu had already shown us his nakedness, we could have killed Anah as a saboteur for daring to confront our leader. Through his Ikemba Front, Chief Ojukwu chose to do battle with Jim Nwobodo, the elected NPP governor of his state. Again, if it wasn't that he had shown us his nakedness, who was Jim Nwobodo? We could have killed him as a "bloody saboteur." If we were to believe Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu that Olusegun Obasanjo was not qualified to be a member of his war cabinet, as he had said recently -- and I thought he was right -- how could one explain our own Gen. Odumegwu Ojukwu, the President and Commander in Chief of our own Biafra, doing battle with Jim who? What a shame! He should have known that such a battle was below his dignity. Against every well-meaning advice, Chief Ojukwu decided to contest the senatorial seat of his constituency. That was ridiculous. Think about it, a guy who had been the Head of State of the whole nation of Biafra, is now contesting for a tiny fragment of what used to be his domain. NPN sent Ibrahim Tahir to Enugu as the chief rigger, with tons of naira notes, to make sure that NPN rigged the elections in the state, but on the day of the senatorial elections, he left Enugu and returned to Lagos, and the Ikemba of Nnewi consequently lost his senatorial election to Edwin Onwudiwe of NPP. I think, he lost his deposit too. That was the final nail in his coffin as far as his campaign to compete with the Zik. I could not believe my ears when I watched Chief Ojukwu saying that the NPN had used him and dumped him because they did not want him in the Senate. I could not believe that this brilliant mind, the Oxford-educated President of the People's Republic of Biafra, had displayed such naivety. How were the mighty fallen? Even a political neophyte had known all along that NPN did not want him in the Senate. In fact they had asked him not to run, but he would not listen to any one. He should have known better. When it comes to oratory, he may be the greatest that ever lived. He may also be the greatest ideologue on the face of the earth, but when it comes to leadership, particularly of Ndigbo, Chief Ojukwu still has a few things to learn. He certainly did not have it in the days of Biafra, and he sure did not have it right after his return from the exile. So what passing of baton was he talking about? I have waited for Rudolph Okonkwo, whom I enjoy reading so much, and who had been privileged to sit down and exchanged thoughts with Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu, to come out to expose the fallacy of the baton passing, as he would unto Prof. Omoruyi, but he probably did not want to be labeled a saboteur. In conclusion, I believe that if the then Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu had been a member of the Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu group, he would have had the vision and humility to deal with the challenges of power he inherited, irrespective of his tender age of 33. I believe that Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu owes Ndigbo an apology for the avoidable mistakes he made. I think that if he would humble himself and tell Ndigbo that he had -- out of youthful exuberance and the enormous burdens of war that was placed on his shoulders -- made errors of judgment, that Ndigbo, including my humble self, would unconditionally forgive him. After all, he was for us what Biafra had been for us, and could still be for us what Biafra might still be for us, either in the mind or as a physical reality.