The President in Civil War

By 

Dele Shobowale

History has always been written by victors and invariably they attribute all the fault to the vanquished. And it is probably asking for too much to expect General Olusegun Obasanjo (rtd), who accepted Biafra’s surrender in 1970 to be magnanimous enough not to blame the Igbos who were the victims of that conflict. But Obasanjo rarely demonstrates magnanimity where and when it counts.

The "no victor; no vanquished" pronouncement of General Yakubu Gowon (rtd), was the outpouring of , at least, a half-noble soul who was anxious to reintegrate the Igbos into the Nigerian society. His field commander, we now know haboured no such generous feelings. In fact, Obasanjo still habours a deep resentment of Igbos, which he very thinly conceals. Otherwise, how else does one interpret two recent events: the Presidential visit to Bayelsa and the visit to Imo. On each occasion, if Obasanjo had left Aso Rock with the sole purpose of insulting the Igbos, he could not have achieved his objective better, and he did it in the crudest manner available to him thereby laying to rest any doubts that the charges made against him by majority of Igbo people that he hates them.

At Bayelsa State, the issue was resource control, now a matter before the Supreme Court. Obasanjo’s response was a total falsification of history and a deliberate insult to Igbos. According to Obasanjo, who is no historian, but cannot be too forgetful of recent history, the Civil War was fought because of resource control. Specifically, it was fought to prevent Igbos from seizing the oil wealth of the people of Bayelsa. He went on to declare that mass genocide would have occurred if Ojukwu had won. Finally, since the rest of Nigeria went to war to prevent Biafra from seizing the oil wealth, then the rescuers are entitled to determine the fate of that oil wealth.

The last point needs to be disposed of the first because it demonstrates a philosophy peculiar to this particular President which most people should find shocking. Aparently, the gallant fellow who saves a lady from a would-be rapist automatically has earned the right to ravish her according to this Presidential principle. Surely, Obasanjo speaks for himself on this matter because as a leader, he would discover that a sizeable percentage of Nigerians have withdrawn their followership. If the President with those utterances demonstrates all the ethics of an alley cat, his senses of history is even more disturbing; for no other reason than the fact that it was based on a colossal lie. Everybody over the age of forty knew that the civil war was fought following the pogrom in the North as a result of which over 500,000 Igbos were slaughtered in cold blood by their "Allah-fearing" Northern neighbours, while the government of Gowon looked unconcerned.

Igbos were forced to flee to the Eastern Region, many with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Furthermore, the attempt to obtain a peaceful and amicable settlement through the Aburi Accord was frustrated by Gowon who reneged on the Aburi Agreement forcing Igbos to declare an Independent State of Biafra. At no time in the events leading to the civil war was oil a major issue. In fact, oil had not yet become the nation’s largest revenue earner; neither were Nigeria’s vast oil and gas reserves apparent at the time. Granted Biafra struck the first blow when its soldiers stormed the Mid-West (now Edo/Delta States) racing to Ore in Ondo State, in a determined effort to reach Lagos before being checked. Still, Biafra was the victim forced to take the war to its assailants. It would have been suicidal for Biafra’s military commanders to allow all the war to be fought on their own territory.

They needed a buffer zone between them and the federal forces and the minority areas of the South-South provided that buffer zone. Considerations on the Biafran side were mostly military because it was a fight for survival. Whatever economic advantages oil would have provided could not have been gained while the conflict was on; it could only accrue after the successful completion of the war. That goal, however, was frustrated. Furthermore, there was no evidence that the Biafran army committed more atrocities against people in the areas occupied however, briefly than the Nigerian troops who came later to dislodge them. In fact, anybody reading Emma Okocha’s "Blood on the Niger" must conclude that for the people in the minority areas of South-South the difference between Biafran and Nigerian soldiers in their lives was one between six and half dozen. Either way, their youngmen were slaughtered; their women and girls were raped. Additionally, the portrayal of Chief Emeka Ojukwu as a blood thirsty villain who would have killed Obasanjo is not only uncharitable, it is uncalled for, thirty-one years after the end of that unfortunate episode in our history. Ojukwu is no more blood-thirsty than Obasanjo himself, and had the Ikemba been caught by federal forces, he certainly won’t be alive today to celebrate his native wedding with Bianca.

For the President of the whole country to deliberately set one group against another; that is, South-South versus South-East, as that deplorable statement by Obasanjo to Bayelsans attempted to do, reveals one side of the President which is becoming clearer everyday. Two years after the return to democratic rule, the President we elected in 1999, has not grown in stature. Not contented with setting Bayelsans against the Igbos, President Obasanjo took his annoying road show to Imo where he proceeded to heap direct insult on the people for daring to request that Imo State Airport at Owerri be elevated to the status of an international airport. Now, the Igbos of Imo/Abia had set an enviable example in self-help by taxing themselves to construct their own airport. They are Nigerians. And having gone so far on their own, they merely asked the federal government to contribute its own quota.

Obasanjo is not the first Head of State who had received this request. All his predecessors have declined the request, but they have done so using the most polite language while acknowledging the contribution Imo State Airport is making to the economy of the East in particular and Nigeria in general. Obasanjo’s approach was different. He told the people off in a language so crude, many of them might have choked on their banquet dinner. His choice of words was unstatesmanlike and unnecessarily combative. He lays claim to a higher form of patriotism than all those poor folks from Imo State who had trooped out to give him a rousing welcome, yet, Obasanjo gives patriotism a bad face and sometimes reminds me of that quip by Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784): "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel". Not that the President is a scoundrel, mark you, but why does he sometimes make us doubt it.