By Issa Aremu
The quantity and quality of spoken and written commentaries on the Nigerian civil war once again point to the groundswell of an emerging national consensus.
It’s time for some forms of closure to the grim stories of the national tragedy of the dark years of 1966 to 1970. Any war brings scars which can hardly go away. Closure is not meant to forget but to learn how to build a nation without another round of human wastage.
The “Never Again Conference” organised in Lagos on Monday January 13th particularly captured my imagination.
Many thanks to the organisers and participants for their patriotism, commitment, inclusiveness and constructive proposals on how to make peace and development sustainable.
It would be recorded to their credit that some compatriots truly rose to obey “Nigeria’s call” and “serve our fatherland with love and strength and faith” .They commendably chose not to forget.
However thanks to democratic dispensation and their democratic impulses. There were open and deep reflections without intimidation.
It would have been unthinkable that in 1995, ( the 25th anniversary of the end of the war!), some compatriots would dare to contemplate a Never-Again -kind-Conference on Nigeria’s civil war.
The 1990s was the decade of the worst military dictatorship. Nigerians suffocated under the military jackboots.
It was a decade of uncivil wars with suspended civil liberties, ouster feverish cowardly military decrees and suppressed freedom of expressions.
In a singular assault on August 18, 1994, Abacha dictatorship responded to the labour resistance and workers’ strike by sacking the executive council of NUPENG and PENGASSAN, and NLC, closed down three newspapers: the Punch, Concord group (owned by late a Chief Abiola) and The Guardian while cynically allowing for “ a partial lifting of the ban on politics, allowing individuals to ‘canvass political ideas’ but not to ‘form political parties for now’.
Politics without political parties!
Lest we forget: there was once a country!
By November 1994, Professor Soyinka, the key speaker at “Never Again conference” fled into exile due threat to life.
On October 1, 1994: the dictatorship arrested and detained Chief Gani Fawehinmi for audaciously launching a political party, the National Conscience Party,(NCP) in Lagos. There can only be closure to civil and uncivil wars, if there are unfettered full disclosures about the causes and effects of these wars.
Today it seems politically correct for the chieftains of military regimes to repeat the mantra: that military fought to keep Nigeria one!
But the point cannot be overstated that it was the senseless military coup of January 1966 that killed nascent democracy, sowed the first seed of disunity and subsequent serial carnage that followed.
Alhaji M D Yusuf, ( the third Inspector General of the Nigerian Police Force, from 1975 to 1979) commendably documented what he called “Havoc of Military Rule” (1999). He rightly observed that the military was responsible for the civil war ( “they plunged us into a bitter civil war with great cost to lives, property and natural resources.). No thanks to subsequent addictive military coups with attendant negative impact on military professionalism itself. The military ( in his words!) “…had to be saved from itself” ! I agree with Professor Wole Soyinka, that: “One of the ways to say ‘Never Again’ is to enthrone the principles of democracy,” the Nobel Laureate said.
Let’s start with the little things. First, let’s promote dialogue and compromises (without being compromised) in place of the current impulsive diatribes.
I praise the statesmanship of Chief Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for its measured and balanced intervention on the side of democracy, dialogue, inclusion, partnership and compromise over the Amotekun controversy.
It was the inability of the first Republic politicians to reason and think together (dialogue) that inspired anti-democratic forces of 1966.
Secondly let’s “democratise” the Remembrance Day to include remembering all victims of the war that include the unarmed civilians.
Wogu Ananaba (1969) writing on the impact of the war on Trade Union Movement in Nigeria observed that : “It must be remembered that a great percentage of the dead, the destitute, the refugees in their own country, the maimed, the traumatized, were workers and members of workers’ families.” The casualty figure is put at some two million, the armed combatants are some 100,000 while the rest millions were unarmed civilians who died of starvation and blockade. Books on the civil war can make a war library. But it’s time for an official objective account which must bring home the received wisdom that “when war begins, hell opens and that in war, all suffer defeat, even the victors”.
We must move away from the most romantic and agonising war accounts to the sobering. In the 1980s, as an undergraduate in Economics , I recall the romantic cliché from the compulsory Nigerian economy course promoted by our lecturers. We were made to believe that Nigeria never borrowed to execute the war! But what debt is more debilitating that squandered wealth of humans in millions? Nigeria’s current financial indebtedness had its roots in the huge financial gaps engendered by massive post war reconstruction of the willfully destroyed roads, bridges and infrastructure, industries in a hitherto promising developing nation. The theatre of war was almost bombed into Stone Age while war efforts arrested development in other regions.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo was the minister of Finance in the war cabinet of General Yakubu Gowan. He disclosed that the war cost the Federal government Nigerian pound 230 million 70 million pound foreign exchange. Nigeria’s total oil revenue in 1970 was N166.6 million, half of what was expended on war efforts. Compulsory history in school must show that all are losers in a war. The official message should neither be triumphant nor nostalgic for another strife.
My dear friend Pat Utomi at the Lagos Never Again conference reportedly said “if the Nigerian civil war was held today, there would be no Nigeria because the mood in the international community now accepts self-determination.”.
Haba! Let’s all agree that “Never Again” regardless of the mood of “international community” which is ever for “self-determination” for as long as it divides and plunders the developing countries! (Just witness South Sudan!). I agree with the recommendation of 2014 National Conference which favors Nigerian citizenship, based on residency. Residency citizenship would criminalise ethnic hatred and prejudice and its attendant hate, dismantle fortress mentality of “they” versus “us” as witnessed during the war. Chief Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu was laid to rest on the 2nd of March 2012.The then Anambra State Governor, Mr Peter Obi hit the nail on the head when he said that; “the Nigerian civil war has finally ended with the burial of in his Nnewi country home”. After the famous quotable Gowon; “no victor, no vanquished”, Obi’s remark was the most refreshingly profound and statesmanlike. Nigeria and Nigerians first invented the words; “Reconciliation, Reconstruction, and Rehabilitation (in-that-order) after the civil war ended 13th of January 1970, words we later impressed on South Africans after apartheid. Posthumous tribute must go to former President Shehu Shagari.
Notwithstanding the partisan pressures within his party, NPN and the opposition parties notably Zik’s NPP he nonetheless (with some political sagacity) navigated the delicate historic balance by pardoning in 1981 both former Lt Colonel Ojukwu and General Gowon (who later became a victim of addictive coups).
Shagari courageously struck off their names from the “wanted list” and allowed them home from exile.
Again the lesson: it took civilian democracy to rescue the military from the mess sections of it wrecked on the nation. Never Again!
*Aremu is a Member of the National Institute, Kuru, Jos.
