The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. — Sun Tzu
Fifty years ago, this past January, the short-lived country called Biafra came to a very humiliating end. To say that the Igbo people and some of their cousins in the old Eastern Nigeria passed through a meat grinder in the preceding three years would be a great understatement.
However, that history is largely lost on the majority of Igbos living today for they were not alive during the war. But they must have seen enough television evidence of the carnage from other wars in this century alone to be able to imagine the trauma children like me suffered during the Nigerian-Biafra war. For about five years after the war ended, I was having nightmares, especially when I was ill with malaria, and febrile. And the same applied to other children who went through the same ordeal. For me the horrifying dreams were about air raids by Nigerian jet bombers and fighters, and sometimes they were about our people fleeing on roads as refugees.
The greatest mistake any group of people can make is not learning lessons from their past. The travails Igbos are undergoing today in this place called Nigeria are nowhere as terrible as the atrocities that were committed against innocent Igbos from 1966 to1967, which directly provoked our people into seeking protection that the military government of General Yakubu Gowon was unwilling to provide. But then as now, the way out is not to seek secession. Then as now, we have more invested in Nigeria than any other ethnic group. Indeed the Igbos can make a strong case that we have more right to ownership of Nigeria than any other ethnic group, and there is absolutely no reason we should think about abandoning Nigeria to others. We made that mistake last time, and we will not make that mistake again.
There are valid reasons to say that the British created Nigeria for the Igbos. Starting with the fact that when the British were departing after granting Nigeria her independence, they handed the administration of Nigeria to the Igbos.
Consider this: We Igbos are in a stronger position, more suited, to kick people out of Nigeria than the other way round. We have always had that capability, but were not just thinking in that direction. There are valid reasons to say that the British created Nigeria for the Igbos. Starting with the fact that when the British were departing after granting Nigeria her independence, they handed the administration of Nigeria to the Igbos. This applied to the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Police, the Railways, the Federal Civil Service, even the Northern Nigerian Civil Service. This did not occur by chance. It happened because the Igbos joined the colonial governments in droves, in their region and outside their region; they were willing to go anywhere. That’s what took them to the North and West in the first place. I will use individuals to illustrate how all this came about.
Sir Louis Ojukwu observed that the fast-growing inter-regional travel by rail was heavily dependent on Igbo customers and set up his transportation company, Ojukwu Transport Ltd., to move passengers and cargo, which made him the richest man in the country.
The father of Gen. C. Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Sir Louis, started out in the federal civil service in the North, which was where Gen. Ojukwu was born. He retired early as an agricultural produce inspector in Ibadan. The Igbos flooded the Railways finding that it was mostly their people that were traveling by rail across the country, and eventually began providing virtually all the train drivers, technicians and clerks. Sir Louis Ojukwu observed that the fast-growing inter-regional travel by rail was heavily dependent on Igbo customers and set up his transportation company, Ojukwu Transport Ltd., to move passengers and cargo, which made him the richest man in the country. My mother once told me that in those days it was either you went by train or you went by Ojukwu Transport. The father of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was a civil servant in the North’s original capital, Zungeru, in today’s Niger State, which was where Zik was born, and Gen. Ojukwu as well, by the way. Closer home, once out of secondary school, my father landed his first job as a clerk in the colonial district office in Kano, joining his much older brother. My maternal grandfather served with British colonialists in Maiduguri in the 1930s, and later worked in the Railways. This story repeats in thousands of Igbo families.
Who disputes that Igbos made up at least 75 percent of all commissioned Nigerian Army officers as of 1965, with the same applying to the Navy and Air Force?
Who disputes that Igbos made up at least 75 percent of all commissioned Nigerian Army officers as of 1965, with the same applying to the Navy and Air Force?
Indeed the Igbo people worked side by side with the British colonialists, they were hands-on partners with Britain in the nation-building of Nigeria. One can extrapolate that Igbos exhibited high competence and a high work ethic, which the British valued and rewarded. The British rewarded people on the basis of individual merit and not by a quota system. And this was all before 1960, before the NCNC led by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe entered a ruling alliance in Parliament with the Ahmadu Bello-led NPC, which gained the Igbos top political appointments.
We Igbos simply failed to use our power and position wisely and strategically. First of all, we were blindsided by a few mid-level Igbo military officers upturning the apple cart in an unwise coup in January 1966 that we didn’t ask for, simply because they could no longer bear Ahmadu Bello’s oppression of the Tivs. To add to which was their knowledge that Ahmadu Bello had approved the military invasion of Yorubaland slated for January 17, 1966, designed to crack down on the ongoing bloody political revolt in the Western Region. But that’s the Igbo nature, they hate to be oppressed, and they also hate to see other people oppressed. Then, when our people were massacred as a result, we didn’t pause and have our known, tested leaders get together and craft a good strategy for us to use to fight back, always keeping the prize of ownership of Nigeria in mind. But instead our people let one single man without political experience decide our fate: Eastern Nigeria’s military governor, Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu.
After successfully crushing the January 1966 coup led by the junior officers, it was wrong for Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi to now seize power.
The situation was the same with the top Nigerian military commander, Gen. Johnson T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi, an older Igbo officer. His brief rule and his actions while in power were all taken by our fellow Nigerians as the responsibility of the Igbos; ironically, people he was not even consulting. I dare to say it here: After successfully crushing the January 1966 coup led by the junior officers, it was wrong for Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi to now seize power. It would have been infinitely better if he had restored the civilians to power immediately, and in the same vein carried out a quick court martial of the failed coup plotters. He further compounded his errors by not protecting himself adequately. As my father Dr. Basil Nnanna Ukegbu once remarked to me, if it had been Col. Ojukwu that was in Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi’s position, the Northern revenge coup would not have succeeded. Once given the information that a coup was afoot, Ojukwu would have arrested the coup plotters and shot them.
When my dad, who had recently been a Member of Parliament, came over from the University of Ibadan to visit him, bringing along a 14-page advisory, Ironsi brought in his Private Secretary Mr. Hamzat Ahmadu to sit in. [Later, a long-serving high-ranking ambassador, Mr. Ahmadu had served President Nnamdi Azikiwe and General Yakubu Gowon in the same position.] Ironsi was trying to prove that he was not planning anything untoward with his fellow Igbos, while at the same time individuals such as Northern Region governor, Lt. Col. Hassan Katsina, whom he had recently promoted, were openly boasting about the revenge coup the Northern officers were planning.
But most amazingly, when Col. Hillary Njoku, the new commander of the Second Brigade, in Lagos, privately asked for permission to quickly recruit and train a new infantry battalion made up of Igbos, Ironsi declined. Col. Njoku was basically the Igbo officer closest to Ironsi, and had recently been the commander of the Second Battalion at the Ikeja Cantonment. Njoku accompanied him to Ibadan, but narrowly escaped from the Western Government House, although he sustained gunshot wounds. Col. Njoku told my dad that he reminded Ironsi that although Igbos comprised most of the officers of the Nigerian Army, conversely most of the infantry soldiers were from the North. Col. Njoku said he needed a new battalion of Igbo infantry troops that could provide protection for Ironsi. It would not have been a difficult project, because the Igbos comprised over 70 percent of the Nigerian Police at the time. And he could have quickly recruited Igbo members of the Mobile Police. My father said they [the politicians] had formed the Mobile Police, a paramilitary unit, principally to protect the politicians from the Army soldiers.
There are, I suspect, a great number of people who believe that Igbos unlike their fellow Southerners, the Yorubas, are not much of strategic thinkers.
There are, I suspect, a great number of people who believe that Igbos unlike their fellow Southerners, the Yorubas, are not much of strategic thinkers. Facing the seesaws and vagaries of life Igbos are often thought to be too emotional, oft ready to leap without looking carefully—once they feel seriously affronted. This alleged characteristic of Igbo men goes back centuries of recorded history. And many a time their hubristic exuberance ends in failure. In my view, this usually happens when Igbos fail to use their God-inspired democratic mores and they let one or two individuals seize hold of their destiny. Many in the Igbo nation today are keeping quiet when groups such as IPOB and MASSOB seize the mantle of leadership that nobody appointed them to, much as Igbo people of old allowed General C. Odumegwu-Ojukwu to seize the Igbo destiny and do as he wanted; at the time because it was a military government, and they also thought they had no answer, no other recourse, for General Yakubu Gowon and his blood-drenched backers.
When in 1994 General Sani Abacha seized power from the renowned corporate executive Mr. Ernest Shonekan, the retired CEO of the iconic United Africa Co. plc, and jailed Mr. Moshood Abiola, the presumed winner of the 1993 presidential election, the reaction of Igbos was to flee the North and the West, most grabbing what personal possessions they could carry and running back to the East, and some fearing danger on the roads fleeing the other way across the border into the Republic of Benin. To their amazement there was no conflagration, the Yorubas basically did nothing, didn’t go to war with Abacha and his cohorts.
But that was not the end of the story. The Yoruba leaders, activists young and old, secretly mobilized. Overtly they formed NADECO, an international political pressure group with a then heavy presence in Washington DC. They also formed more covertly an armed militant wing called the O’dua People’s Congress (OPC), under the leadership of the now late Dr. Frederick Fasehun, which spawned younger firebrands, notably Mr. Ganiyu [Gani] Adams. Eventually the OPC began operating in plain sight, not hiding from Abacha. In Washington NADECO was very active, and largely through its work, Abacha ultimately became a pariah in most of the world.
At home in Nigeria brave journalists at TELL magazine, and other publications such as The Sunday Magazine, etc., tackled the Abacha government in what became known as “guerrilla journalism,” aided clandestinely by the Intelligence agencies of some Western powers, who may have also helped to physically dispatch Abacha in mysterious circumstances, allegedly using a female Indian agent posing as a prostitute. When it was all over, the Yorubas got their presidency without a fight. Of course there were some casualties, most notably Mrs. Kudirat Abiola, Mr. Alfred Rewane, and Mr. Alex Ibru.
Quite often, it has to be admitted, Igbos have a ridiculously overblown sense of their capabilities when it comes to big confrontations. I note the case of Nat Turner, a black slave in America, a young religious preacher whom I believe was of Igbo ancestry, who organized the most notable slave rebellion in American history. He gathered some fellow slaves together in the State of Virginia in 1831, collected weapons, and attacked the whites. Some early successes fizzled out as the whites gathered from plantations in nearby counties and counter-attacked. Turner was eventually captured, drawn and quartered, and his head cut off and used for sport. There was also the case of King Jaja of Opobo, the Orlu native, from today’s Imo State, who became a formidable leader, king of a coastal trading territory with Opobo as his capital, who dared to confront the British Empire, and was tricked into detention and exiled to the West Indies. King Jaja wanted to retain all upcountry trade for himself, but the British wanted in. Remarkably, King Jaja started out as a slave boy at one of the Ijaw ruling houses in Bonny.
Fast forward to 1967 in Nigeria. The Igbos had the misfortune of being led by a young man who was politically inexperienced, militarily inexperienced, yet full of self-confidence and panache, who rapidly segued into a military dictator. He came to truly believe that he was more patriotic than everyone else and could righteously make decisions for the Igbo race single-handedly. To him, it appeared, the Igbo people’s republicanism and tradition of consensus decision-making be damned. Not so fast, my man. That was all wrong. The Igbos were largely a fragmented collection of villages and towns until the 20th Century, but all had one thing in common—they were democracies, where the elders, the ndichie, set and oversaw policies and regulations, and youths and women (separately) were all allowed to make inputs in debates prior to decisions being taken. It was always rule by consensus. Igbo enwegh eze. The Igbos have no kings. That has always been our modus operandi, that has served us for centuries.
In the runup to secession, Eastern Nigeria military Governor Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu shunned the advice of his military elders and mates alike—Col. David Ogunewe, Col. Hilary Njoku, Col. Ime Imo, Col. Patrick Anwunah (recently head of the Nigerian Army’s Military Intelligence), Col. Henry Igboba, Col. Conrad Nwawo. He pushed aside and sidelined the known Igbo and Eastern Region political leaders of the day, notably Dr. Michael I. Okpara, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr. Francis Akanu Ibiam, Dr. K. O. Mbadiwe, Dr. A. Nwafor Orizu, Barr. Raymond Njoku, Senator James K. Nzerem, Dr. Uzoukwu Nzeribe, Dr. Jaja Wachukwu, Dr. Aja Nwachukwu, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, Mr. H.S.K. Osuji and his brother Mr. T.C.K. Osuji, Mr. Matthew Mbu, Mr. Frank Opigo, Mr. Wenike Briggs, Mr. N. U. Akpan,…the Eastern Region’s Police Commissioner, Mr. Patrick Okeke. These, among others.
He worked hard to suppress all the Igbo military officers who were senior to him and more experienced than he was.
Col. Ojukwu saw little need to involve fellow Igbo and other supportive Eastern military officers in pre-planning and decision-making for any future war. The processes of such strategy pre-planning, something akin to what the U.S. military calls “war games,” could directly and accurately predict victory or defeat. This was basically ignored by Ojukwu who very early as the military governor of Eastern Nigeria set about neutralizing anybody military or civilian whom he deemed important or popular in the minds of the ordinary people. He worked hard to suppress all the Igbo military officers who were senior to him and more experienced than he was.
An example is Col. Hilary Njoku. The acrimony that developed between the two men got so out of hand that Ojukwu went and laid a complaint to the then Catholic Bishop of Owerri, The Most Reverend Joseph B. Whelan, whose diocese at the time included the old Owerri and Orlu provinces and Port Harcourt. Col. Ojukwu complained that Njoku, the Chief of Staff of the Army, wanted to remove him from office. After the Midwest debacle in October 1967, he put Col. Njoku, who played no role in the disastrous affair, under house arrest, saying that Col. Victor Banjo, Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Mr. Phillip Alale and Mr. Sam Agbam and their co-conspirators had penned a decision to replace Ojukwu with Njoku and make peace with Col. Gowon.
But Col. Njoku claimed he knew nothing about the planned coup against Ojukwu. And he told his family friend, my dad, Nnanna Ukegbu [a former MP and Chief Whip of the NCNC in the Nigerian Parliament before the crisis], when my dad visited him in Enugu during the period, that Ojukwu froze him out of the planning for the Midwest Invasion. Col. Njoku was officially the Biafran Army’s Chief of Staff, but Ojukwu mistrusted him. In truth it is known that one reason that Ojukwu gave the command to his Yoruba buddy, Col. Victor Banjo, was to say to Yorubas it was their fellow Yoruba leading the invasion. But that ploy backfired horribly. Banjo turned out to be a traitor.
Only an insignificant few of the Igbo political leaders of the day, one of which was my dad, who had no iota of military experience, supported secession and the inevitable war. Indeed, of all the senior Igbo and other Eastern military officers, as many as 95 percent of them, told Ojukwu not to declare secession, bluntly warning him the East would lose. Police Commissioner Okeke (later to become the Inspector General of the Biafran Police) excoriated Ojukwu at a meeting, making it clear to him that Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon was the head of state, whether by hook or crook, and that if Gowon ordered his arrest, he would carry it out. Mr. Okeke told Ojukwu to look for another strategy instead of secession to fight Gowon.
Ojukwu called the second meeting of the “Eastern Leaders of Thought,” an assemblage of the political, traditional, business, and administrative leaders of the Eastern Region, in early 1967, and his intention was to inform the people he was ready to declare secession. But what he met once he started to speak was thunderous opposition. Pandemonium broke out, and prolonged shouts of “No! No!” rent the air. Ojukwu was shocked speechless, and he stood there flustered. My father jumped from his seat and went to the high table where Ojukwu was and seized the gavel. My father: “I started banging on the table and banging on the table. Eventually people there took notice, stopped shouting, and gradually began to laugh at me. I’m sure people there were thinking I was mad. Then I told them ‘please let us hear this young man out.’ [My dad was three years older than Ojukwu.] Then Ojukwu continued speaking.”
The mandate the assembly gave to Ojukwu was that he could declare secession under appropriate circumstances and at the appropriate time.
According to my father, in the end, a compromise was reached. The mandate the assembly gave to Ojukwu was that he could declare secession under appropriate circumstances and at the appropriate time. A few days later back in Owerri a member of that meeting, an Owerri luminary Mr. T.C.K. Osuji and my dad ran into each other. Mr. Osuji was furious with my father, asking, “What were you doing at Enugu? Do you people want us all to get killed?” Years later after the war, recounting this story to me, my father added, “This tells you that Aro people are so smart.” The renowned Osuji family in Owerri are known as Owerri Aro [that is, originating from Arochukwu/Arondizuogu].
To make matters even worse, Ojukwu now engaged the Federal forces in a conventional infantry war. Presumably, it was the only way of fighting that he knew and had been taught in military school.
It was the young people, principally undergraduates at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, outraged by the massacres of Igbo military officers and an estimated 30,000 innocent Igbo and other Eastern civilians, who gave then Lt. Col. Odumegwu-Ojukwu support to declare secession. Young neophytes, tyros who had no notion of what all-out war entails.
To make matters even worse, Ojukwu now engaged the Federal forces in a conventional infantry war. Presumably, it was the only way of fighting that he knew and had been taught in military school.
Very bitter when we lost the war in 1970, my dad, who fought in the bush as a BOFF guerilla commander, lamented of Ojukwu: “He is a historian, people don’t get into this type of revolution and lose. He should have had a sure-fire plan that we win.”
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♦ Hector-Roosevelt Ukegbu, an Economist, Financial Consultant and Business Analyst, is based in the United States.
Read “Igbos and Folly of Biafra (Part 2)” >>
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