FEATURE ARTICLE


Prof. Herbert Ekwe-EkweWednesday, January 14, 2004
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YEAR 33: OBASANJO, BIAFRA AND IGBOLAND


t is now 34 years since the end of the Biafra War. Biafra was a war of genocide, a war that was waged in its totality (with all the annihilative indices that this particular war strategy connotes) in a very limited expanse of territory (Africa's most densely populated area outside the Nile valley) where the defenders did not have access to a "neutral" or friendly contiguous state for refuge and respite.

The 1967-1970 war was waged by the federal Nigeria military government led by General Yakubu Gowon to overwhelm and destroy the corporate ability of the Igbo people to resist an aggression triggered, in the first place, because they were simply expressing their inalienable fundamental human right to freely decide to belong or not to belong to a political relationship, in the wake of the most horrendous spate of massacres the previous year. During the months of May-October 1966, about 100,000 Igbo were hunted down and killed in several northern towns and cities and elsewhere in the federation in a pogrom that was planned and executed by the northern Nigerian political, military and religious establishment. Most were killed in their houses, offices, businesses, schools, colleges and hospitals, as well as those who were attacked at railway stations and on trains, bus stations and buses, airports and in cars, lorries and on fo! ot as they sought to escape the pogrom for their homeland in eastern Nigeria. Thousands of others sustained horrific injuries, several of whom were maimed for life. No known safe passages for the Igbo (victims or would-be victims) for flight or escape to their homeland from northern Nigeria or elsewhere in the country were planned, nor adhered to, by any of the prosecuting forces involved in the pogrom throughout the course of this tragedy.

In the Biafra War itself, three million Igbo were killed. This figure is much higher than the casualties recorded in each of the following four wars: Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, Angola and the Sudan. To underscore the brazen brutality of the war in Biafra, we should stress that the duration of each of the former conflicts mentioned was in fact much longer than Biafra's. The three million dead represented a quarter of the Igbo population then. No Igbo family in the world escaped the immediate or long-term impact and consequences of this holocaust.

The Igbo, who 20 years earlier had been in the vanguard for the liberation of Nigeria from the British conquest and occupation, had suffered an incalculable catastrophe - the second in 100 years since their defeat by British imperialism. No other African nation had suffered such a grand-scale holocaust and impoverishment in 200 years. King Leopold II of Belgium, "The Rapist of Congo", had in the 19th century killed three million Africans in the Congo as his troops ravaged the country in search of ivory, diamonds, and the like - enormous wealth that would soon transform the nascent Belgian state into a modern European country. But that scourge at least included peoples from several nations and nationalities that make up contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Central African Republic and Angola. Equally reprehensibly, those who ordered and sustained the war against the Igbo had the une! nviable record, not to talk of responsibility, of literally clearing the undergrowth from which the gruesome killing fields that have since littered Africa expanded almost inexorably. The haunting milestones of Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire testify to this. These latter wars have resulted in the death of nine million people.

As I show in my African Literature in Defence of History: An essay on Chinua Achebe, no post-Biafra War Nigerian head of state has been so obsessed with the subject of Biafra and the Biafra War as Olusegun Obasanjo, the current president of the country. Equally, no post-Biafra War Nigerian head of state possesses as vindictive a pathological anti-Igbo disposition as Olusegun Obasanjo - a condition apparently developed in the 1960s prior to the pogrom when several of his fellow officers, mostly Igbo, often questioned his intellectual competence. On these two counts, not even six previous leaders centrally associated with the Biafra War (Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Abdulsalami Abubakar), all northern Nigerians whose involvement impulses in the conflict were dictated and driven largely by their support for, or indifference to the perpetration of t! he first phase of the Igbo genocide in the north (May-October 1966) or a desire to safeguard (in the long term) the north's hegemonic political and military leadership of Nigeria, have been so transfixed by Biafra and the Igbo people. Indeed one or two of the surviving sextet of leaders just mentioned have shown more reticence over their involvement in the war, and a third has in fact offered what amounts to an unqualified "apology" over his own participation in the war. More generally in northern Nigeria, presently, there are steadily, openly expressed views of revulsion, remorse and apologies among members of the political elite and others on the region's planning and execution of the Igbo genocide - both in its initial pogrom phase in the north and in the war in Biafra.

Not so for Olusegun Obasanjo are these dynamics of revulsion, remorse and apologies felt, nor remotely played out. On the contrary, Obasanjo, who commanded the notorious federal 3rd marine infantry division in the latter stages of the war and which committed widespread atrocities in the southern front of the so-called Igbo heartland, is still waging a war on the Igbo - albeit an Obasanjo-version of a "low intensity conflict", even though the end of hostilities in Biafra was declared 34 years ago. In this context, especially, Obasanjo's principal focus for now is to disrupt the profound economic and industrial transformation underway in the crucial northwest Anambra region of the Igbo country. He has literally laid siege on the local administration in the region by raising clusters of fiendish officials on presidential payroll and other patronage whose main task is to eventually overthrow the governor. In the pursuance of t! his programme, Obasanjo has flagrantly utilised the security forces and the judiciary contrary to clearly stipulated constitutional provision.

Obasanjo does not really believe that the Igbo lost the war on 12 January 1970. The "evidence" on the ground does not convince him otherwise. Despite the fact that successive central governments since 1970 have adhered strictly to a policy of no development in Igboland, a programme which Professor Nnaemeka Ikpeze has categorised succinctly as an "atrocity," despite the fact that Igboland with a population of 30 million (about a quarter of Nigeria's total) continues to receive the lowest annual fiscal resource transfers from the central government to the regions since 1970, despite the fact that Igbo experts and officials have been barred from key state appointments in defence and security and the position of head of state, despite the fact that Igboland has the worst communication infrastructure in the country and that power stations and other major industrial enterprises destroyed during the war still lie in ruins! , despite the fact that the central government has scandalously ignored the extensive erosion of cropland across the north-western stretch of Igboland (Anambra region) which poses a long term danger to the ecology of the area and far beyond, and despite the fact that Obasanjo's rigging of the 2003 presidential elections was carried out largely in the electoral districts across Igboland, the present Nigerian president believes that the continuing stubborn resilience and ingenuity of the Igbo shown in the steadfast reconstruction of their lives and homeland, without evident central government support, cannot be indicative of a people who lost so catastrophically in a war of genocide just a generation ago.

On the Igbo therefore, Obasanjo still subscribes tenaciously to the composite amalgam of the infamous federal Nigeria war strategy enunciated by Obafemi Awolowo (deputy chair of the war cabinet and minister of finance) during the Biafran confrontation - the "starvation as weapon/quick kill", which accounted for 80 per cent of all Biafran casualty in the war, and its post-war variant, the "financial/economic strangulation of Igbo assets across the country" which, in effect, is the policy guideline that has been in vogue in the past 34 years and whose striking features we sketched above. Just as Awolowo, Obasanjo exhibits a virulent streak of Igbophobia which explains why the president's own implementation of the anti-Igbo post-Biafra War state policy in the past five years has been remarkably undisguised, quite often aggressive, if not crude. In not too infrequent bouts of rage and angst, Obasanjo often boasts of "! teaching the Ibos a lesson," or "crushing these Ibos who. don't seem to have learnt the lessons of 12 January 1970" or "I will ensure that these Ibos never rule this country in my life time" .

It is against this background that one should understand the current highly-charged dramatic quest by Obasanjo to remove Chris Ngige, the governor of the Anambra region from power, even though the latter, as well as the other governors of the east were imposed on the people by the president when he rigged last year's poll. Since the election, Ngige has somehow become his "own man," much to the consternation of the president. The groundswell support that Ngige has received from the region and across Igboland has been tremendous particularly from women's organisations, businesses and from the youth. Last week's widely publicised press conference in Awka (regional capital) by Mike Balonwu, the speaker of the local legislature, was undoubtedly poignant for its frankness when the lawmaker charged:

We the honourable members of Anambra State House of Assembly would hold President Olusegun Obasanjo responsible for any outbreak of anarchy in Anambra state as a result of his unflinching support for this band of treasury looters and rascals of known pedigree.

More such calls have been made and similar positions taken across varying shades of political opinion across Igboland. Ironically, the Anambra crisis has had an unintended result that Obasanjo could never have reckoned with when he embarked on his course of action. More conservative sectors of the Igbo "political class" who have since Biafra treasured the mantra of "marginalisation" as the flag of convenience to fly in their politics vis-�-vis the rest of Nigeria, have suddenly realised in the last few weeks and months that the Igbo "self-determination" that sustained the resistance against the forces of genocide 34 years ago did not dissipate on 12 January 1970. It decisively moved to another level of contemplation - and realisation. To that extent, these sectors were catching up with the rest of the Igbo, particularly the intellectuals, who have no doubts about the seminal meaning of Biafra in their history and t! heir lives. But perhaps more surprisingly, these Igbo "conservatives" were also catching up with what Matthew Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo has always thought of the subject - namely that the Igbo have never really accepted defeat.

Professor Ekwe-Ekwe's new book, Beyond the "failed state": Reconstituting Africa, will be published in 2004.