By

Max Siollun

The fashionable political theory being bandied about in Nigeria today is "Sovereign National Conference" (SNC). According to the advocates of an SNC, if we held yet another constitutional/national debate – all our problems will be solved. Implicit in the SNC argument is that some at most, want to use the SNC to break up the Nigerian federation, and at least, use it to derogate powers from the Federal Government to such an extent that Nigeria’s constituent regions would become autonomous albeit under a figurehead central government.

What we tend to forget is that Nigeria has already had half a dozen constitutional debates – none of which has ever resolved the nagging problems which have dogged Nigeria from independence till today (corruption, ethnic factionalism, indiscipline, profligacy). Given that we have already wasted billions of Naira on constitutional debates, and constitutions that are no longer in use, I do not really see how an SNC could discuss anything that has not already been covered in the previous constitutional debates. Rather than wasting more money on another rancorous conference, which will yet again be hijacked by the same people who produced the constitutions which we are all now unhappy with, I think we should go back, to the "SNC" which Nigeria has already had.

On January 5^th – 7th 1967, the members of Nigeria’s then ruling military junta, the Supreme Military Council (SMC), met for the first time at Aburi in Ghana under the auspices of the Ghanaian Head of State: Lieutenant-General Joe Ankrah. It was the first official meeting of all members of that SMC. Following two bloody army coups in 1966, the military governor of the eastern region of Nigeria: Lt-Colonel ‘Emeka’ Ojukwu, had refused to attend any SMC meeting outside the eastern region of Nigeria due to concerns over his safety. The massacre of tens of thousands of Igbos in northern Nigeria only heightened Ojukwu’s sense of isolation and insecurity. In turn, Ojukwu’s public belligerence towards the FMG (whom he suspected of tacitly supporting, or having a hand in the massacres) served to antagonise the FMG, who began to suspect that Ojukwu planned to announce the secession of the eastern region from the rest of Nigeria.

The military governor of the north: Lt-Col Hassan Usman Katsina, dismissed Ojukwu’s inflammatory public remarks as attempts "to show how much English he knows". As far as Katsina was concerned, Nigeria’s problem was a stand-off "between one ambitious Colonel and the rest of the country". Throughout the six months following the coup of July 29^th 1966, Ojukwu repeated his mantra that "I, as the Military Governor of the East cannot meet anywhere in Nigeria where there are Northern troops". That virtually ruled out an SMC meeting inside Nigeria’s borders. Ojukwu had even turned down offers to attend an SMC meeting on board a British (whom Ojukwu, and Igbos in general did not entirely trust) naval ship, and at Benin, but was finally convinced to attend in the neutral territory of Aburi in Ghana. Ojukwu’s aides were not without doubt. Some warned him that the Aburi meeting could be a trap set by anti-Igbo members of the Federal Government to arrest or kill him. Ojukwu brushed aside their concerns by pointing out that he had received a guarantee of safe passage from Lt-Col Gowon, and that he had to trust Gowon’s word as an officer and a gentleman.

Virtually everything discussed at that Aburi conference is relevant till today. So much so that a reader would be tempted to believe that the discussion was on Nigeria’s problems as at 2002, rather than 35 years earlier, in 1967. It is probably the best recorded constitutional debate in history. Aware that something momentous was occurring, the Ghanaians had the conference tape recorded. The tape of the discussions were later released by Ojukwu as a series of six long playing gramophone records. In attendance on the Federal Military Government (FMG) side were Lt-Col Yakubu Gowon (head of the FMG), Commodore Joseph Wey (head of the Nigerian navy), Colonel Robert Adebayo (military governor of the western region) Lt-Col Hassan Katsina (military governor of the northern region), Lt-Col David Ejoor (military governor of mid-west region), Major Mobolaji Johnson (military governor of Lagos), Kam Selem (Inspector-General of Police), Mr T Omo-Bare. Ojukwu was in attendance as the eastern region’s military governor.

The federal delegation came "wreathed in smiles" (see Akpan: The Struggle For Secession) and anxious to mollify their former brother-in-arms Ojukwu. Colonels Adebayo and Gowon even offered to embrace Ojukwu. Ojukwu for his part, was still stung by the terrible massacres of his Igbo kinsmen in northern Nigeria the previous year and was in no mood to embrace his former colleagues. The contrast in the demeanour of the participants was in itself a microcosm of what took place over the course of the next two days. While the federal delegation behaved as if the Aburi conference was a social gathering to reunite former friends who had fallen out over a tiff, Ojukwu saw the conference for what it really was: a historic constitutional debate that would determine Nigeria’s future social and political structure.

As per usual, western perspective were focused on image, rather than on the genuine problems of the protagonists. Documents recently de-classified by the United States’ State Department depicted the FMG-eastern region stand-off as a personality clash between Ojukwu and Gowon. According to the American perspective: "many Americans admire Ojukwu. We like romantic leaders, and Ojukwu has panache, quick intelligence and an actor’s voice and fluency. The contrast with Gowon – troubled by the enormity of his task, painfully earnest and slow to react, hesitant and repetitive in speech – led some Americans to view the Nigerian-Biafran conflict as a personal duel between two mismatched individuals" (Airgram from US Embassy in Nigeria to the Department of State: Lagos A-419, February 11^th, 1968). As they were busy fighting in Vietnam and fighting a "cold war" against the USSR, the Americans did not become militarily or politically involved in the dispute. Instead, treating the conflict as one falling within Britain’s sphere of influence.

Although Commodore Wey played an avuncular role, it was obvious that the discussion revolved around the younger Colonels: Adebayo, Ejoor, Katsina, Ojukwu and Gowon. Ojukwu showed from the beginning that he was prepared for serious business. He arrived at the conference armed with notes, and an army of secretaries. The other debaters should have realised at this point, that something serious was going to occur. The Ghanaian host Lt-Gen Ankrah made a few introductory remarks and reminded his guests that "the whole world is looking up to you as military men and of there is any failure to reunify or even bring perfect understanding to Nigeria as a whole, you will find that the blame will rest with us through the centuries". Ankrah added that although he understood that the eastern region/rest of Nigeria stand-off was an internal matter for Nigerians, they should not hesitate to ask him for any help should they feel the need. After the hostility and bitterness that preceded the Aburi meeting, the civilian observers were stunned at the camaraderie displayed by the military officers. The debaters threw off formality and addressed each other by their first names: "Emeka", "Bolaji", "Jack" (nickname of Lt-Colonel Gowon) were thrown around as if addressing each other in at a social gathering.

Ojukwu decided to show his good faith, and to test the good faith of the others by asking all present to renounce the use of force to settle the crisis. Ojukwu’s motion was accepted without objection. While this request by Ojukwu may sound very noble, he was in fact playing a cunning soldier-politician. Ojukwu (despite his boasts of the eastern region’s military prowess) realised that he could not succeed in a military campaign against the far more heavily armed FMG. By getting them to renounce the use of force, Ojukwu was trying to negate the FMG’s military advantage. For he knew that if the political situation eventually got out of control, the FMG would find it difficult to resort to a military campaign having already given their word that they would not use force. This may have been an influential factor in Gowon’s reluctance to engage the eastern region in a fully fledged war. Gowon was even accused by some of his own men of treating Ojukwu with kid gloves. The fiery Lt-Col Murtala Muhammed had unleashed his famed volcanic temper on Gowon during an officers’ meeting prior to Aburi. Muhammed threatened to march into, and sack the eastern region unless Gowon stopped being so soft with Ojukwu. Murtala was eventually posted away from Lagos up to the north. Despite the leading role he played in the coup that brought Gowon to power, Gowon felt Murtala had been making a nuisance of himself by turning up uninvited at SMC meetings.

The assembled military officers struck a chord in unison on the subject of politicians. All of them voiced their contempt for the behaviour of civilian politicians whom they blamed for the wholesale bloodletting of the previous year (ignoring the fact that more Nigerian civilians had been murdered by politically motivated violence, in the one year of military rule so far, than in the preceding five years of civilian democratic rule). Commodore Wey slammed the point home rather forcefully when he declared that "Candidly if there had ever been a time in my life when I thought somebody had hurt me sufficiently for me to wish to kill him it was when one of these fellows (politicians) opened his mouth too wide".

Despite agreeing to attend the conference, Ojukwu was still refusing to recognize Lt-Col Gowon as Nigeria’s Head of State. Ojukwu had defiantly continued to address Gowon as the "the Chief of Staff (Army)" (the post which Gowon occupied before the July counter-coup) in his public statements. Ojukwu was alarmed at the ascension of Gowon to the highest office in the land despite the presence of several other officers who were more senior than him (Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, Commodore J.E.A. Wey, Colonel Adebayo, Lt-Cols Hilary Njoku, Phillip Effiong, George Kurubo, Ime Imo, Conrad Nwawo and Lt-Cols Ejoor and Ojukwu who were promoted to Lt-Col in the same week as Gowon). Ojukwu almost prophetically warned that allowing a man backed by coup plotters to become the Head of State, would create a dangerous precedent which Nigeria would find difficult to emerge from. He told Gowon that "any break at this time from our normal line would write in something into the Nigerian army which is bigger than all of us and that thing is indiscipline.....How can you ride above people's heads purely because you are at the head of a group who have their fingers poised on the trigger? If you do it you remain forever a living example of that indiscipline which we want to get rid of because tomorrow a Corporal will think....he could just take over the company from the Major commanding the company…". Ojukwu’s warning was of course not heeded and his prediction that junior officers would in future overthrow their superior officers proved to be correct. The NCOs and Lieutenants that shot Gowon to power graduated into the Colonels that overthrew him exactly nine years later. As Brigadiers, they overthrew the elected civilian government of Shehu Shagari on the last day of 1983, and removed Major-General Buhari from power in 1985. Ojukwu’s impassioned monologue at Aburi could serve as an anti coup plotter thesis. He continued "you announced yourself as Supreme Commander. Now, Supreme Commander by virtue of the fact that you head or that you are acceptable to people who had mutinied against their commander, kidnapped him and taken him away? By virtue of the support of officers and men who had in the dead of night murdered their brother officers, by virtue of the fact that you stood at the head of a group who had turned their brother officers from the eastern region out of the barracks they shared?".

When Ojukwu expressed his disgust over the murder of Igbo army officers by their northern colleagues in July 1966, Lt-Col Katsina interjected by asking Ojukwu why he had not reacted with the same revulsion when senior northern military officers were murdered by Igbos seven months earlier. Ojukwu reasoned that in January 1966, soldiers from every region of the federation (Nzeogwu: Mid-West, Ifeajuna-East, Ademoyega: West, Kpera: North) had staged a coup in which soldiers and politicians from every region of the federation (Akintola: West, Balewa: North, Unegbe: East, Okotie-Eboh: Mid-West) were also killed. Whereas when northern soldiers staged a revenge coup in July, soldiers from one region of the federation only (North: Danjuma, Murtala, Martin Adamu et al) singled out soldiers from one region in the federation as their targets (East: Okoro, Okonweze, Ironsi etc). Katsina took this opportunity to remind Ojukwu of the effort he had put in to prevent the murder of Igbos. Katsina told Ojukwu that "I have seen an army mutiny in Kano and if you see me trembling you will know what a mutiny is…..I saw a real mutiny when a C.O. of northern origin commanding soldiers of northern origin had to run away".

It was obvious to the non military observers of the Aburi conference that Ojukwu "was clearly the star performer. Everyone wanted to please and concede to him" (see Akpan). Using his "skillful histrionics and superior intellectual adroitness", (Kirk Greene: Crisis and Conflict), Ojukwu managed to get the other Colonels to understand, and share his reasoning: that in order to keep Nigeria together as one nation, its constituent regions first had to move a little further apart from each other. A paradox maybe, but the Colonels accepted the logic of Ojukwu’s argument.

On the federal side, only the military governor of the Northern Region: Lt-Col Hassan Usman Katsina, seemed to realize the significance of what was going on. Anxious not to allow Ojukwu’s domination of the proceedings to continue for too long, he at one point dared Ojukwu to "secede, and let the three of us (West, North, Mid-West) join together". Alarmed by talk of a possible break-up of Nigeria, Ankrah quickly interjected and told his guests that "There is no question of secession when you come here (Ghana)". Although the FMG delegation were keen to mollify and make concessions to Ojukwu, Lt-Col Katsina was more blunt than his other colleagues. He preferred to declare matter of factly to Ojukwu: "You command the East, if you want to come into Nigeria, come into Nigeria and that is that".

Ojukwu envisaged a titular Head of State that would act only with the concurrence of the various regional governments: "what I envisage that whoever is at the top is a constitutional chap – constitutional within the context of the military government. That is, he is a titular head, but he would only act where, say when we have met and taken a decision". Amazingly Gowon accepted Ojukwu’s thesis without really understanding the constitutional implications of what he was agreeing to. Gowon was effectively sanctioning measures which would paralyse his own powers. To signify the limited powers that would be exercised by the Head of State envisaged, Ojukwu proposed that the watered down phrase "Commander-in-Chief" should be used to address the Head if State as opposed to "Supreme Commander" (a phrase signifying immense power). The title "Commander-in-Chief" has been employed by every Nigerian Head of State subsequent to Aburi.

While the other delegates arrived at a Aburi with a simple, but unformulated idea that somehow, Nigeria must stay together, "Ojukwu was the only participant who knew what he wanted, and he secured the signatures of the SMC to documents which would have had the effect of turning Nigeria into little more than a customs union" (Kirk-Greene). Ojukwu managed to get virtually everything he wanted, and was so pleased by his success that he even declared that he would serve under Gowon if he (Gowon) kept to the agreements reached. At that point, Gowon arose from his table position and embraced Ojukwu.

The fulcrum of the agreement at Aburi was that each region would be responsible for its own affairs, and that the FMG would be responsible for matters that affected the entire country: simple concept. Afterwards the officers tasted their agreement with champagne. The federal delegation’s jubilation was such that on his plane flight home, Ojukwu asked one of his secretaries whether they had fully understood the implications of what had been agreed. Hindsight tells us that no one at Aburi (other than Ojukwu) really understood the constitutional implications of what had been agreed. Ojukwu was obviously delighted with this – hence why he was in such a hurry to implement the decisions taken, and why the Federal Government had to renege on them.

Some have argued that Ojukwu took the FMG for a ride by using his superior intelligence to trap the FMG officers into an agreement they did not understand. This argument ignores the fact that Ojukwu was engaged in a constitutional debate by himself against five military officers, a police officer, and an FMG civilian, yet still got his way. Surely it is the FMG members of greater numerical strength who should be criticised for allowing Ojukwu to secure such substantial concessions from them.

Back then, as now, each region of Nigeria was petrified of domination by other regions, no region of the federation was keen to adopt a course which would concentrate too much power at the hands of Nigeria’s central government. Even Gowon acknowledged this (and unwittingly played into Ojukwu’s hands) by admitting that he would "do away with any decree that certainly tended to go towards too much centralisaton". Ojukwu pounced on the central powers theme and remarked that "Centralisation is a word that stinks in Nigeria today. For that 10,000 people have been killed (this figure was later revised up to 30,000, and then 50,000). The clash, and ill defined relationship between Nigeria’s central and regional governments has been the greatest source of political bloodletting in the country’s history. It led indirectly to the gruesome "religious" clashes that resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians over the introduction of Sharia law in some northern states in 2000. It led to the civil war in which over a million civilians died. It led to the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa after he agitated for greater self determination for his Ogoni people.

I am of the opinion that with the failure to implement the Aburi decisions, Nigeria missed a golden opportunity to find a constitutional arrangement acceptable to all of its constituent parts. Had even half of the Aburi accords being constitutionally ratified, Nigeria would have been in a much better shape today. It is a sad commentary on the lack of progress that Nigeria has made since Aburi that the issues discussed then (35 years ago) are still being argued over today. Back in 1967, the Aburi decisions were not implemented for one primary reason: oil. Nigeria’s greedy power brokers did not want a loose constitutional arrangement that would deprive them of the vast revenues which Nigeria earns from its crude oil exports. Hence the Nigeria is glued together under a powerful central Government of a type more suitable to a country with contiguous ethnicity.

It is clear that Nigeria is quite simply too large, too diverse, and too fractious a country to have an all powerful central government of the type we have today. Everywhere you look in Nigeria, there are groups agitating for greater devolvement of federal power to the regions. Although the mantra of these groups is "restructuring" of the Nigerian federation – what they really intend is what Ojukwu wanted to achieve at the Aburi conference in 1967: a constitutional arrangement that would devolve so much power to the regions that the entity known as Nigeria would exist in name only. Each ethnic group in Nigeria believes that their interests can only be looked after if their man is the president of the country. Hence the uncompromising manner in which some Yoruba politicians refused to recognize any non-Yoruba presidential candidate for the 1999 presidential election, and the argument of some northerners that the political leadership of Nigeria is their "birthright". Yet northern Nigerians are generally poorer than their southern counterparts despite the fact that northerners have ruled Nigeria for 36 out of Nigeria’s 42 years of independence. Conversely, nobody has noticed a sudden increase in the number of Yoruba millionaires since a Yoruba (Olusegun Obasanjo) became Nigeria’s president in 1999.

Rather than engaging in another constitutional drafting/conference exercise at which will waste more taxpayers’ money, and serve as a means for corrupt "big men" to get even richer, we should dust off the Aburi record, and learn from the debates and mistakes of the past in order to ensure a better future for ourselves. What we need in Nigeria is a constitutional arrangement that convinces each Nigerian that their interests will be taken care of regardless of the ethnicity of the Head of State/composition of the. What we need is a "constitutional chap" of the type envisaged by Ojukwu back at Aburi.

June 2002