DEMOCRACY
AND FAIRNESS
Even
late dictator Sani Abacha deemed
it fair to appoint an Igbo into
Nigeria's security council, why not
President Olusegun Obasanjo?
Pix/Obasanjo
By UZOR MAXIM UZOATU Special to USAfricaonline.com and USAfrica The
Newspaper
THE best-selling thriller writer, Frederick Forsyth,
summed it all up: "Victors write history, and the Biafrans
lost.'' The "no victor, no vanquished'' sing-song is quite
simply a very funny way to run the mouth. In his book, My
Command, General (now President) Olusegun Obasanjo
talked of how he won the civil war for Nigeria. Obasanjo has
never hidden his hatred of Biafra and Biafrans in his
much-advertised war of unity. The sad matter is that in his
new incarnation as a democratic president, he does not
appear to know the difference between civil war and civil
rule. This article ought to have been really trenchant, but far
be it from me to be used as a tool to derail our inchoate
democracy. But the truth, of course, is that
Obasanjo is leaving his flanks too wide open for the
taking. Only one zone in this country is not included in the
nation's security council. He also cannot appoint from the
same zone just ONE of Nigeria's 36 Commissioners of Police.
And people want me to sing the praises of Obasanjo! And
Nigerians want me to believe that the Nigeria-Biafra war is
over! They should learn from what happened when, in South
Africa, Nelson Mandela, asked his sworn enemy, Mangosuthu
Buthelezi, to act for him as president. The country did not
end. No. The millennium is still far away in Nigeria. As the world knows, most Generals never believe a war is
over until they are consumed themselves. They keep hitting
away at windmills, like Don Quixote, even when no enemy is
in sight. This recalls the pathetic case of the General who
was recently caught naked firing away at imaginary enemies,
screaming that his enemies were coming to grab him.
Nigeria's leaders, especially those who fought against
Biafrans during the civil war (such as retired Gen.
Obasanjo, now President) should really have to convince
themselves that the Biafrans are not coming or it will
continue to lead us into schizophrenic, irrational behavior.
Nigeria's leaders are behaving in such a way that makes
Nigeria look like a phantom flung into suspended animation
by the specter of Biafra. The village has this saying: "The man who holds another
man down also holds down himself.'' Nigeria, as a nation,
can only prosper when all the creative forces in the country
are allowed full bloom. Parochialism and bigotry are the
worst forms of corruption, so let no idle praise-singer feed
me with the tale of Obasanjo's much -parroted
anti-corruption crusade. The issue is not Obasanjo per se. He only happens to
represent a trend that is at once messianic and
wrong-headed. It is not for nothing that Obasanjo ran his
presidential campaign as the leader who can be trusted. The
erstwhile power-owners in Nigeria who trusted him and
brought him out of prison and gave him power are now
complaining against his government, stressing that he is
biting the finger that fed him. To make their complaints
look real, they are now dragging in the total
marginalization of the losers in the Biafra war for effect.
To that extent, the winners of the Nigerian civil war are at
war with themselves and they are using the treatment being
meted out to the quondam Biafrans
to gain the moral high ground. The issue hit Obasanjo in the
jugular and the big man has been replying with nebulous
effusions that can best be summarized thus: When in doubt,
mumble. During the Cold War era, all it needed for the most evil
regime to get the support of the United States was to shout:
The Russians are coming! To get the support of the
powers-that-be in Nigeria, simply shout: The Biafrans are
coming! During the Jos PDP primaries, it was the clinching
cry. Any talk of the restructuring of Nigeria brings with it
the echo of the Biafran confederation dictum: On Aburi we
stand! Somehow the winners of the Nigerian civil war must
always find a way to band together despite personal
differences to stop this feared reality. Note Babangida
courted Obasanjo... According to Chinua Achebe in The Trouble with Nigeria,
"Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve
consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of
the Igbo.'' The Nigerian civil war provided the opportunity,
to borrow Wole Soyinka's words in Jero's Metamorphosis, "in
time of trouble it behoves us to come together, to forget
old enmities and bury the hatchet in the head of a common
enemy...'' The winners of the war not only nullified the
bank accounts of the losers but also launched an
indigenization program that effectively shut out the hapless
race. But as my friend, Dennis Brutus; would say, "somehow
we survive.'' Even the so-called minorities who supported the federals
had tales of woes to tell at the end of the war. These
despatches from Ikom and Calabar published as appendices in
Wole Soyinka's The Man Died are quite revealing:
"When in 1976 the civil war broke out we rose up as one man
and fought side by side with the Army of Liberation.
Revealing the sacrifices the soldiers made for our sake, we
had never had any ill-intention towards them. But the
high-handedness of some of these soldiers has astonished us
and left many gasping for breath... it was never so in the
(Akwa -Ibom and Cross River States) even during the
so-called oppressive era of the so-called Ibo (Igbo)
regime.'' We are recalling all these because of the "us and them''
mentality that has been built into the Nigerian system. The
question has to be asked: Is the East a part of Nigeria?
When Senator Udoma Udo Udoma proudly walked away from his
cabinet post, he made a statement steeped in the history of
bad faith. Incidentally, President Obasanjo is making it all
look curiouser and curiouser. It is as though we are still
in the trenches of Biafra, given the gaping divide in the
country. The abject neglect of the Eastern South of Nigeria
is a slap on the face of our so-called new-democracy. It
clearly shows we are muddling our future with a fratricidal
past. There are so many wrongs to redress. For instance,
Emmanuel Ifeajuna who won this country's first Commonwealth
Games gold medal cannot be inducted into the Sports Hall of
Fame, yet the cooks and mai-guards who went to the same 1958
games in Vancouver, Canada were honored. Nothing apparently
is beneath the winners of the Nigerian civil war. They want
everything for themselves! Today's conduct of the winners of
the civil war reminds me of an incident during the war. I
was hunting rats with a friend of mine when my younger
brother joined the hunt. We had actually killed a rat before
my brother came. We did not make any other kill, and when it
was time to share the booty, I told my partner that my
brother deserved a share. The guy's eyes turned red as he
shouted: "divided it into two!'' Whether the Nigerian rat is divided into two or not, the
fact remains that we are making a terrible mess of the
promise of this country. The winners of the Nigerian civil
war have been ruling this country amongst themselves since
the end of that war, and they have been going round in
circles making no progress at all. Even beyond the elitist
gambit of dividing posts, they have done next to nothing for
the common people of this benighted country. When a gaunt and miserable Obasanjo got out of Abacha's
gulag, he said there was need to have a sanity test on any
aspiring leader of Nigeria. Even Abacha in all his madness
saw the need to have a man from the accursed zone in his
security council - no matter how short a while it lasted!
Obasanjo is yet to even scale that height. ODUMEGWU
EMEKA OJUKWU:
"It was simply a choice between Biafra and enslavement! And,
here's why we chose Biafra"
Obasanjo is leaving his flanks too wide open for the taking.
Only one zone in this country is not included in the
nation's security council. He also cannot appoint from the
same zone just ONE of Nigeria's 36 Commissioners of Police.
And people want me to sing the praises of Obasanjo! And
Nigerians want me to believe that the Nigeria-Biafra war is
over! They should learn from what happened when, in South
Africa, Nelson Mandela, asked his sworn enemy, Mangosuthu
Buthelezi, to act for him as president. The country did not
end. No. The millennium is still far away in Nigeria. As the
world knows, most Generals never believe a war is over until
they are consumed themselves. They keep hitting away at
windmills, like Don Quixote, even when no enemy is in sight.
This recalls the pathetic case of the General who was
recently caught naked firing away at imaginary enemies,
screaming that his enemies were coming to grab him.
Nigeria's leaders, especially those who fought against
Biafrans during the civil war (such as retired Gen.
Obasanjo, now President) should really have to convince
themselves that the Biafrans are not coming or it will
continue to lead us into schizophrenic, irrational behavior.
Nigeria's leaders are behaving in such a way that makes
Nigeria look like a phantom flung into suspended animation
by the specter of Biafra. The issue is not Obasanjo per se.
He only happens to represent a trend that is at once
messianic and wrong-headed. It is not for nothing that
Obasanjo ran his presidential campaign as the leader who can
be trusted. The erstwhile power-owners in Nigeria who
trusted him and brought him out of prison and gave him power
are now complaining against his government, stressing that
he is biting the finger that fed him. To make their
complaints look real, they are now dragging in the total
marginalization of the losers in the Biafra war for effect.
To that extent, the winners of the Nigerian civil war are at
war with themselves and they are using the treatment being
meted out to the quondam Biafrans to gain the moral high
ground. The issue has hit Obasanjo in the jugular and the
big man has been replying with nebulous effusions that can
best be summarized thus: When in doubt, mumble. The
abject neglect of the Eastern South of Nigeria is a slap on
the face of our so-called new-democracy. It clearly shows we
are muddling our future with a fratricidal past.
Uzoatu, former senior editor and correspondent at
ThisWeek magazine and The Guardian newspapers in Lagos, is
an author and poet. He plans to contribute editorial
commentary on Nigeria and literature issues.
Biafra-Nigeria
war and history to get fresh, critical look from a
survivor
'Biafra:
History Without Mercy' - a preliminary note by Chido
Nwangwu
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