Ojukwu: Matters Arising...

Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu

Igbo nation without him
Culled from the Sun, Tuesday, November 29, 2011
It is very hard to contemplate an Igbo nation without Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the Ikemba Nnewi and Eze Gburugburu of Igboland.

But death, the great leveller, had made such contemplation not only a possibility but also a reality. After all, the Holy Book said that there is time for every thing; a time to be born and a time to die. For Ikemba, it is time to exit the secular stage. This is, indeed, the last Ofala for the people’s General and leader of men. The type of Ojukwu comes once in a while for a race. The possibility of another Ojukwu in our time is very remote.

How did Ojukwu describe himself?

“I am a Nigerian. But I am also an Igbo. It is my being Igbo that guarantees my Nigerianness as long as I live. Consequently, my Nigerianness shall not be at the expense of my Igboness. The Nigerian nation must therefore work for all ethnic nationalities in Nigeria.”

Ojukwu’s demise in a London Hospital following a cardiovascular accident otherwise known as stroke has robbed the Igbo nation one of its most idolized and cherished leaders. The Ikemba came into national reckoning following the January 15, 1966 military coup de tas that introduced the first military rule in Nigeria under the leadership of Major-Gen. JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi. As a result of that coup, Ojukwu, then a Lieutenant Colonel was appointed the Military Governor of Eastern Region, comprising the present South East and parts of the South South geo-political zones.

The coup came when the politicians failed to hold their acts together and acted in flagrant disregard of the laws of the land. The civilian regime was accused of corruption, nepotism and ineptitude amongst other ills by the coupists led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu. The counter coup of July 29, 1966 which brought Lt-Col. Yakubu Gowon to power led to the death of Nigeria’s first military ruler Major-Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi and many senior military officers of Igbo origin and mass massacre of Igbo civilian population in Northern Region thrust on Ojukwu’s shoulders the challenge of safeguarding his people in the East.

The sight of headless and disemboweled victims of the pogrom and genocide carried out by Northern officers and their civilian collaborators stirred rage and anger among the peoples of Eastern Region that most felt that their security cannot be guaranteed by government outside the Eastern Region.

Following the failure of diplomacy and some peace talks to settle the Nigerian crisis of 1966 between Ojukwu and Gowon and their followers, Gowon unilaterally divided the country into 12 states in May 1967 which Ojukwu followed some days later and declared Eastern Region an independent Republic of Biafra. Due to the impasse, Nigeria went into a thirty months bloody civil war with its debilitating consequences from 1967-1970. The rest is now history that it is needless recounting the entire grueling events here again. Over time, the eloquent and charismatic leader had risen to the Igbo consciousness by fate as well as by dint of hard work. He was like the proverbial child that had washed his hands clean and dined with the kings and elders of the land.

It was the war that brought out the sterling qualities in Ojukwu and it was the war that undeniably made him so popular and very important in Nigerian and Igbo history. No chronicler of Nigeria history can deny the Ikemba a chapter or more. He saw an opportunity and made good use of it. He stood by his people and fought for their cause. Ojukwu was one leader that the Igbos don’t joke with. Any attack on Ojukwu is an attack on all Igbos. To the Igbos, Ojukwu was a god, a superhuman, an enigma. No wonder, he was lionized by the Igbos. The numerous titles bestowed on him can testify to this assertion.

There is no doubt that Ojukwu was the quintessential leader of the Igbos. Before him were Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the foremost nationalist and first President of Nigeria, Dr. Michael Okpara, the former Premier of Eastern Region, Dr. Akanu Ibiam, former Governor of Eastern Region, and other notable Igbos.

At the end of the civil war, the Ikemba went on self exile in Ivory Coast. After 13 years, he was granted state pardon by former President Shehu Shagari. Ojukwu came back and plunged headlong into Nigerian politics and in the bid to bring the Igbos back to the mainstream of Nigerian politics. His outing then was not so impressive; he continued and finally founded the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and became its leader and presidential candidate.
All his life, the Ikemba championed the cause of the Igbos and defended them` whenever their rights are trampled upon by other Nigerians. He urged the Igbos to think home in their investments after witnessing the massive investments Igbos heaped outside Igboland.
When the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Anambra State wanted to force Andy Uba after the Supreme Court had nullified his election, through another ingenious means, Ojukwu rose to the occasion and warned of the danger ahead. According to the Ikemba, “In my mind what we are playing at is not anything short of playing with the possibilities of another civil war. I say this because whenever the term civil war is used everybody remembers me. Well, I am still alive. I don’t want to be part of a second civil war but sadly I see us playing this children’s game, ‘koso’ with our affairs in Anambra State.”
On Igbo marginalization, Ojukwu expounded thus: “Compounding the Igbo predicament are the after-effects of their post civil war political and economic emasculation by the Federal Government of Nigeria. Their shrill cries of marginalization were ignored by others and by the Nigerian government, and they have come to terms with the reality of their present position in Nigeria.”
But on a note of optimism, the Ikemba charged, “But we Ndigbo will never give up. It is not in our character to succumb to inequality. Being a very major ethnic group in Nigeria, we will not accept our present marginalized status as permanent and we shall continue to seek and struggle for justice, fairness and equity in the Nigerian politics.”

His mission: “My commitment, because I am seriously involved, is to work with all well-meaning Nigerians to bring about the Nigerian society as promised by the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. When this happens, and all glass ceilings and other unwholesome practices designed to keep Ndigbo, or any other ethnic groups in Nigeria marginalized are dismantled, I shall feel fulfilled. When this happens, Ndigbo shall regain their political and economic relevance in a fair, just and egalitarian Nigerian society.”

During the last gubernatorial election in Anambra State, Ojukwu made one request to his people to return Governor Peter Obi to power for a second term. This he regarded as his last wish. And the people religiously complied because such came from the revered Ikemba.

Igboland without the Ikemba can hardly be the same but life must go on. Another Ikemba may come again in Igboland but I do not know when and how.

Let Igbos do a rethink on everything Ojukwu told them and make necessary amends. There is the urgent need for the Igbos to unite and pursue their common destiny within the Nigerian federation. It is time to bring Igbo wealth home so that the impact will be felt on the homestead. The greatest tribute the Igbos should pay the revered Ikemba is to imbibe all his virtues and his numerous words of exhortations on various issues and problems that plague the Igbo nation.
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Ojukwu is gone, but Biafran literature is alive

Written by AKEEM LASISI

The death of Biafran leader, Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, invokes roles played by some leading Nigerian writers during the civil war and many books it inspired, writes AKEEM LASISI

IF dead people do meet in the other world, only angels can tell how first generation poet, Christopher Okigbo, will receive deceased Biafran lord, Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. Among other writers caught in the clouds of the civil war, Okigbo took a particularly extreme position. The author of acclaimed Labyrinths and Path of Thunder, enlisted in the Biafran army and actively fought against the ‘federal’ soldiers. Unfortunately, the poet of poets died at the warfront.

The fact is that with the passage of the Ikemba, as Ojukwu is fondly called, literary pundits are bound to remember the roles played by various writers in the events that surrounded the civil war. Perhaps in the spirit of ours is ours and mine is mine – a proverb echoed in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease – the legendary writer (Achebe) also decided to serve as an ambassador of the Biafra.

In his own rather ‘dramatic’ intervention, the Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, made ‘dangerous’ moves to stem the tide of violence, especially as he believed it was more of a war of egos than that of love for the fatherland. He paid a price for this when the Yakubu Gowon-led Federal Government arrested and imprisoned him without trial.

But what seems to be the greatest legacy of the Biafra to Nigerian literature lies in the avalanche of books it bequeathed to the country and the world in general. The pogrom had hardly ended when various pen merchants began to respond in poetry, novels, plays, essays and other genres. So phenomenal has been the ‘Biafran Literature’ that many studies have been done on them. Indeed, award-winning writer and lecturer at the University of Lagos, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo, did her PhD research on it. She has developed this into a book she published about three years ago.

Says Ezeigbo, “A lot of interesting works have come out of the Biafran saga. In many cases, our writers capture the agonies that people went through during the war. But some also document the noble things that some people did even during the difficult time – although some failed to recognise the contributions made by women when the war lasted.”

On the roles the Okigbos played during the war, their revered contemporary, Prof. J.P. Clark, attempts a poetic post mortem in his popular poem, Casualties. In the poem that has been on and off study lists for years, Clark describes all the writers that participated in the war, one way or the other, as ‘casualties’. Writing ironically, he notes that the casualties are not those who died, got wounded or lost loved ones in the war. Rather, they are the creative workers who lost the sense of restraint – and reasoning, perhaps – and could no more hear one another’s voices. The casualties, he adds, are the emissaries of rift, suggesting those who served as mouthpieces of the warring soldiers.

Some of the major works on Biafra are Chukwuemeka Ike’s novel Sunset at Dawn and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes.

Others are Girls at War and other stories (Chinua Achebe), Never Again (Flora Nwapa), Divided We Stand (Cyprian Ekwensi), Sunset in Biafra (Elechi Amadi), The Siren in the Night (Eddie Iroh) and Destination Biafra (Buchi Emecheta).

But the story has been so intriguing that younger writers still return to Biafra one way or the other. While Obu Udeozo have poems on this in his collections of poems, Compassion and Stimulus, high-flying Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie scores a heart trick when she recreates the accident of history in her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.

Now that Ojukwu, author of Because I am Involved, has thus passed on, some Nigerian writers are very likely to soon bury their own dead in the earth of words by writing new works on him. 
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Ojukwu: He electrified the stage
By Pini Jason

A GREATER part of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu's life was full of drama and the man himself filled and electrified his stage in a way only he could. Born into one of the wealthiest families at that time, with onomatopoeic names that evoked awe, he brought panache to whatever he did.

He, it was, who brought our attention to graduates in the Army and removed its starchiness. He made the trademark feathers on his peak cap look like it was specially designed for him.

He walked with his arms folded behind him as if he was born that way. When we first heard him speak, he seduced us with his Queens English delivered with enchanting oratory and seductive sonority. When he stood up to Yakubu (he called him Jack) Gowon, the nation held its breath. When he dragged the Supreme Military Council to Aburi Ghana, another enchanting scene was added to the drama.

When he said "no force in Black Africa can defeat Biafra" and that he would litter the shores of Biafra with the debris of Nigeria "Navy of fishing trawlers", the drama was getting to its crescendo. It was from him we heard of "shore batteries". When the going was getting tough in Biafra, he raised the morale of the fighting forces by promising that "every grass in Biafra will fight". When he left for exile, it was "in search of peace".
And when he returned from exile he took chieftaincy titles with onomatopoeic effect more resounding than the military rank stripped off him by Nigeria: Ikemba Nnewi; Dikedioranma; Dim; Ezeigbo Gburugburu! He excavated a clichéd ordinary statement: The best President we never had, penned it to Awolowo's condolence, and an all time profound statement was born! Ojukwu, indeed was drama and charisma personified!

Frenetic and effusive elegies

It is not surprising that his death has generated frenetic and effusive elegies. The immediate post-independence crises and the civil war, for me, IS NOT history gleaned from literature.

It is current affairs which I still live through. I read in a newspaper that some people were opposed to giving Ojukwu state burial because, according to them, he tried to break Nigeria. Such people are simply living the illusion that makes Nigeria walk backwards while we pretend that it is "moving forward" or that it can "move forward". Nigeria is still broken up not by Ojukwu or because of him but by Nigeria's persistent and consistent pursuit of injustice, obsessive corruption and promiscuous national indiscipline.

In his beautiful article: “We Loved Him, We Hated Him”, in Thisday Tuesday 29 November 2011, my brother Simon Kolawole, SK, wrote that "we went to war in 1967 because our leaders were too young, too immature to manage the crises that followed the failed coup of 1966".

Well, well, what I have always reminded Nigerian youths is that some of those who gave this country incredible leadership did so when, in our estimation today, they would have been considered "too young, too immature". Check the ages of Zik, Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, Tony Enahoro, Mbonu Ojike, Bode Thomas, Dennis Osadebe, Alvan Ikoku, Aminu Kano, Ernest Ikoli, Herbert Macauley, etc, when they played leading roles in the independence of this country. Compare that with the performance of Nigerians of similar age today.

More important than being "too young, too immature" is that at that time, there were enough elders to guide the young men away from the impending doom. And some of them did.

Nigerians went to war because others who were in a position to advise the actors or raise their voices against injustice, simply exploited the moment, the vacuum and vacancies created by the exit of Easterners to promote personal and group interest. Some of the elements who became the new boys on the power block, have since come full circle to fight the same injustice Ojukwu stood up against, even nudging the nation to extreme ethnicity!

Nothing has changed because politicians have found those fissures in our national life as first class ticket to power. Let us not forget that before the war, Nigeria operated largely on merit.

As Ojukwu once said long before the advocates of "resource control", the war "is a struggle for freedom and equality among Nigerians. It will end whenever Nigeria is able to accept the equality of all Nigerians to share in the control of and running of the affairs of this country".

As usual, many commentators, especially his opponents during the crises that led to the civil war, wore blinkers or deliberately put a veil of deceit on themselves and their listeners by insisting that Ojukwu went to war because of an inordinate ambition for a Republic of his own. Such a spin discounts the duplicity of the time: the pogrom, and that it was Nigeria that attacked Biafra when it fired the first shot at Gakem on July 6, 1967.

Biafrans fought back because their tormentors invaded their homeland. They fought back to defend themselves in a territory where they felt safe from inhuman treatment. They fought back because their values and beliefs were wantonly desecrated.

It is therefore wrong to even say that Ndigbo went to war because they were not getting their fair share from Nigeria. The truth is that until Ojukwu asked all Easterners to return to the East, they were very competitive in a meritorious Nigeria and did well for themselves provoking the emotive talk of "Igbo domination". The war was simply to resist callous massacre of unarmed Eastern Nigerians by fellow Nigerians!

Be that as it may, it is a measure Ojukwu's prowess and the ingenuity of his people that he ran a Republic on the run; being sacked from capital to capital and yet being able to establish his government in a new capital within 24 hours; refining petrol and diesel in every backyard; distilling red wine; manufacturing household consumables and above all, fabricating armoured cars, gunboats, rockets and Africa's first weapon of mass destruction, the Ogbunigwe.

Again, choosing to live in denial, Nigeria turned its back on the essence of Biafra, renamed the Bight of Biafra as Bight of Benin in a classic ostrich inanity, dismissed Biafran inventions as "crude" instead of building and improving on them, took over the Products Development Agency, PRODA, created by Ukpabi Asika from the Biafran Research and Production, RAP, and injected it with the Federal virus and killed it! Today Nigeria cannot refine its own petroleum needs. Nigeria is an importer of everything imaginable (including toothpicks) with waiver! You can now see that it is Nigeria that lost the civil war, not Biafra!

If you ask yourself why a "defeated" people still romanticize the war and lionize Ojukwu, the answer is that Biafrans don't feel defeated because the war was more about values held dear than mere territory. Biafran territory is in the exploits of the Biafran Airforce and Army at Abagana/ Nkpo Junction, the inventions and survival ingenuity which still live in the hearts of Biafrans.

But I must warn that in recent times, the Igbo have started a process of losing the war as all those values we held dear are being desecrated. Today money rules, giving rise to vices like kidnapping and ritual killings. These are unBiafran!
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Ikemba: 'On Aburi We Stand'

By Olisa Agbakoba

SIR: It is a significant and fitting metaphor that the death of Ikemba Odumegwu-Ojukwu has raised such a euphoria of National adoration. As a former Biafran soldier (BA338411), I feel proud that General Gowon's declaration of National Reconciliation in 1970, has finally been enacted. Ikemba has achieved an extraordinary feat, as perhaps the only Nigerian non state actor, to receive a state funeral. Ikemba's lasting contribution to motherland was his declaration in Aburi Ghana, that to manage Nigeria's diversity, we need to creatively provide enough political space to grow Nigeria as a strong and united Nation. No one will doubt that we must stand on Aburi, if we must confront the divisive forces in Nigeria.

So yes, I suggest we go back to 'Aburi'. Aburi is a town in Ghana, north east of Accra. But in 1967, it became a metaphor for Ojukwu's solution to prevent the brewing political unrest and war in Nigeria.

Aburi hosted the peace meeting between the Federal Military Government (led by Col. Yakubu Gowon) and Eastern Nigeria leaders (led by Col. Emeka Ojukwu). It held on 4th and 5th January, 1967 and was chaired by Ghana's Leader, General J.A. Ankrah. Ojukwu's memo was to form the bedrock for the "Aburi Accord". A type of loose federalism (call it Confederation), was agreed with devolved power to the Regions. It is deeply regretted that the Aburi Agreements were not followed and led to the unfortunate Civil war, with over one million dead. No other event has equalled the terrible magnitude of Nigeria's loss and pain in the Civil war.

Resource Control agitation, 13% derivation, Niger Delta militancy, MOSOP, MASSOB, OPC, IYC, Islamic Bank, Boko Haram terrorism, 3rd Term, Rotation, continuing cries of marginalization, Revenue Allocation review agitation now coming from the North, development and economic challenges, the emerging capital allocation wahala, etc show that we must very quickly restructure Nigeria.

So going back to Aburi is important. No visas, no tickets, no foreign trips at all. We don't need to go to Ghana. All we need is frank talk. I support an inclusive National Conference, sovereign or unsovereign. It may even be driven by the National Assembly. But we must talk. It is a fitting epitaph that the man who "rebelled" against motherland, now provides in death, a good opportunity for a strong united Nigeria.

Olisa Agbakoba,

legal practitioner, Lagos