We will not think about separation
The truth is, a good number of Nigerians, in the privacy of their own homes, have sometimes found themselves ‘thinking the unthinkable’. When news came that Arab and Tuareg terrorists had occupied the northern part of Mali, not a few cynics in our country hoped that Boko Haram would declare their own Shari’a Republic in […]
The truth is, a good number of Nigerians, in the privacy of their own homes, have sometimes found themselves ‘thinking the unthinkable’. When news came that Arab and Tuareg terrorists had occupied the northern part of Mali, not a few cynics in our country hoped that Boko Haram would declare their own Shari’a Republic in the North. It would have been such a big relief to the rest of the country, they reasoned. Their political logic was based, if you like, on a fusion of Orkar’s Reason and Occam’s Reason.
On this matter, I am at one with President Jonathan: We will not think of separation. Not only do I not believe in divorce; I affirm my deepest convictions about the sacred inviolability of a one united, indivisible and eternal Nigeria.
To affirm this belief in a united and indivisible Nigeria is not to lose sight of the failures of nationhood that continue to haunt our republic. We have been one united country for virtually a century and an independent republic for over 52 years. The irony of our situation is that we are less united as a people today than we were in 1960. The constituent nationalities that make up our country have been drifting apart, year-in, year-out, eyeing one another with the ominous silence of ships that pass each other in the infernal darkness of the Atlantic Ocean. We have witnessed upheaval upon upheaval – coups, counter-coups; a bitter civil war and ethno-sectarian conflicts that have claimed the lives of millions. Our people have become prisoners of ruling elites that are lacking both in vision and in civic virtue. Our young people have been robbed of a future; taking refuge in cultism, criminality and a whoredom that outdoes anything the ancient Babylonians have ever known. The spirit of the once proud Nigerian people has terminally been broken. And we have become a by-word among the nations.
I have found myself confronting these demons of my nightmare when I got my hands on Chinua Achebe’s controversial book, ‘There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra’ (Allen Lane 2012). In-between cups of Earl Grey tea, I could not put it down, rummaging through all its 300 pages in less than ten hours.
When it came out in September last year, it was greeted with so much brouhaha that I instinctively resolved to keep out of the controversy. While Achebe loyalists such as the novelist Chimamanda Adichie poured kudos on it to the point idolatry, others, notably my dear friend the poet Odia Ofeimun, took the author to the cleaners. The debate centred on the blockade of Biafra by the Gowon administration and the ensuing starvation and suffering that accompanied it. Chief Obafemi Awolowo has been much reviled in Igbo land as the mastermind behind this use of hunger and starvation as weapons of war against the political misadventure known as Biafra.
Chinua Achebe is one of the most venerable literary figures in our continent – indeed one of the colossi of world literature. I have met intellectuals from different regions of the world – from the highbrow Quartier Latin of Paris to Dacca in Bangladesh and Tonga in the Pacific – who speak his name with great reverence. He is Nigeria’s greatest Ambassador. I was on friendly terms with his daughter Chinelo. But that’s perhaps beside the point.
There Was a Country is Chinua Achebe’s worst book ever. It is indeed a strange beast, reminiscent of the mythical unicorn of a bygone age. At first, he gives you the impression that he is writing an autobiography, and then he goes into historical narrative and political-science disquisitions about ‘state failure’ laced with footnotes intended to give the impression of scholarship. At the end of the day you find in your hands a product that is best characterised as ‘faction’ – a combination of fact and fiction. It is neither scholarship nor fiction but a hydra-headed beast that does neither Achebe nor his readers any good.
In 2011 Chinua Achebe rather noisily rejected the national honour of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR). The reason he gave was that he could not come to terms with the corruption and irresponsibility that characterises rulership in contemporary Nigeria. Personally, I felt the honour was well below him. Among the Brazilians, a writer of Achebe’s or Soyinka’s stature would be given the highest national honour – equivalent of the GCFR in our own case. So much do they respect excellence that they have enshrined it in their laws, that any Brazilian who wins the equivalent of a Nobel Prize would be entitled to the pension of a Head of State for life. We could have done better in trying to honour such a revered figure.
Reading through his latest work, however, I wonder if I could still regard him as a patriot. It is a work soaked in the crimson blood of embitterment. In spite of all the revisionism, history makes it clear that the January 1966 coup was a tribal conspiracy; a conspiracy that was bound sooner or later to backfire. And backfire it did, six months down the road. Achebe tries to put Gowon in the same league as Ojukwu as two people who suffered from similar psychological hang-ups. This is one of the fictions within his faction. Unlike Ojukwu, Yakubu Gowon never harboured the ambition of leading anyone. Star athlete and exemplary College Captain at the famous Barewa College, he could have gone to Oxford or Harvard or anywhere else if he had chosen to. He elected to go to Sandhurst Royal Academy where he acquitted himself with distinction. The woman he wanted to marry was a young Igbo woman, until his colleagues warned him that it would be impolitic to do so. Gowon never harboured any hatred for the Igbo. The attempt to tag him with genocide, simply by borrowing definitions makes Achebe a rather poor scholar. In pure statistical terms, more ‘Nigerians’ than ‘Biafrians’ perished in the civil war. Towards the end, Gowon resorted to recruiting conscripts from his native Middle Belt. Many of those young men with wobbly uniforms and over-sized boots never returned. They were never used to the rainforest and were mowed down like game in those forests.
Yakubu Gowon waged the civil war as a quarrel between brethren. This was not the case with the likes of Murtala, whom he nearly court-martialled. Gowon is still devoted to his beloved Victoria; an elder statesman who spends the eve of his years praying for our country and doing good works in health and development issues. Our elders warn us never to speak ill of the dead. I shall therefore refrain from speaking ill of the late Dim Chukwuemeka Ojukwu. The simple truth is that the two characters never came from the same planet.
One closes down the book with the regrettable feeling that Achebe, like many of his ilk, remains a closet Biafran. The only ‘Northerner’ ever mentioned in any charitable sense is the late Aminu Kano. And his only reason for doing so is because during the pre-war attempt at a reconciliation conference, Aminu Kano was peering outside the window instead of following the proceedings. We all loved Malam Aminu, but not because of his absent-mindedness. We thought Achebe was a humble man, but his latest output shows a different side to him. You can just feel that he has an axe to grind with J. P. Clark and Wole Soyinka. We hope the Swedes will give him his own Nobel Prize too, so he can leave us in peace. In the book, he lets out about how many distinctions he made at Government College Umuahia and the Scholarship to study Medicine at Ibadan. On and on, it is about how he outshone everyone else among his mates. He tells how he decided to leave medicine for the combined honours in English, History and Theology. To be fair, the English in There Was a Country is flawless, but the History and Theology are lacking.
Achebe gives the impression, shared by many among Ndigbo, that, somehow, there is a conspiracy by the rest of the country to marginalise them from the mainstream of national leadership. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I believe that if Chief Emeka Anyaoku had wanted the Presidency, it would have been his for the asking. Classical scholar, world citizen and international statesman, he has the charisma, character and intellect to lead our country – indeed, any country. He did not want it. As a young man I grew up at the feet of the great Chief Akanu Ibiam; a frequent visitor to his home village of Uwana in Afikpo. Missionary doctor, statesman and President of the World Council of Churches, he belonged to a generation of Igbo leaders that are without peer in the continent of Africa. I look in vain today for people of that stature.
Having said this, the rest of Nigeria still has an account to settle with Ndigbo so that we can put to rest the ghost of the poet Christopher Okigbo and the millions of his brethren who perished in that needless war. However one looks at it, we can never rationalise away the pogrom against Easterners throughout our country sequel to the civil war. From Maitatsine to Boko Haram, since the 1980s the scattered remnants of Ndigbo throughout the north have always been the object of mass killings whenever our Northern brethren are gripped by the demons of madness. I share Achebe’s bitterness on this. It is a sacrilege for which we ought to go on our knees and repent. The head of Gideon Akaluka will continue to haunt us until we truly repent for the diabolical wickedness we have perpetrated against Ndigbo. We must continually seek the path of peace, the path of justice and reconciliation. But we must never think of separation.
Dr Mailafia, a former deputy governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, is the Chef de Cabinet of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group.