Odia
Ofeimun, poet and public affairs analyst, rips up Chinua Achebe’s There
Was A Country. He speaks with ADEMOLA ADEGBAMIGBE and NEHRU ODEH
You have read Achebe’s There Was A Country. What does it say to you about the man?
Let
me start by saying the overreactions to Chinua Achebe are attempts to
demolish the book. And sometimes, you can see that people are attempting
to demolish Achebe himself. At 80, Chinua Achebe cannot be demolished.
He has done enough work for any criticism of him to be fair because
seriously, it is strong enough for us to do even unfair criticisms. It
is helpful to a country to be able to take on one of its icons in the
way people are doing. I have said in an earlier response that I like the
overreactions because they touch on some of the most important issues
in our history. Let all of us take the issues from whatever perspective
we choose, but from the standpoint of correcting what he should have
said but did not say, ensuring that his misdescriptions of Nigeria and
of Nigeria’s history are corrected and, at the same time, providing some
kind of leeway farther from what certain psychological constraints
prevented him from dealing with it. I mean, the worst thing that can
happen to any country is to have an idol that you are only allowed to
worship and you cannot allow even your sputum to touch while you are
doing the worshipping. Achebe has been one of the luckiest writers in
Africa. We loved him so much for what he wrote that we hardly ever
challenged some of the most contentious positions in his novels and in
his non-fiction writings. Achebe said many things that are thoroughly
wrong and that we ought to have contested very sharply and strongly. He
is too important to be allowed to think badly and there are so many
areas in which Achebe thought badly that we all should have contested
before now. But the worshipful approach to him enabled us to raise to
the level of a philosophy many things we should have dismissed as trite.
I believe what he has done for the rest of us by writing this book is
to help create a level playing ground. Very many young people, who could
not have dared to look him in the face, are going to engage the facts
of this book and say: ‘Haba! This is not true, this cannot be correct,
this is overdone.’ We could not do this with his fictional works. And
except for a few of us who did not like his The Trouble With Nigeria,
many people think that The Trouble With Nigeria is a great book. It is a
very bad book; a bad book that did not understand Nigeria’s story,
which is embarrassing for some of us. He did not know Nigeria’s story
enough to have such authoritative views about what he talked about. And
the embarrassment is extended by the fact that all around, you see so
much respect for those views. And because of the respect we all have for
him more and more people are buying into these bad views. In my view,
it is dangerous for a country.
Odia Ofeimun.
What did you find wrong with The Trouble With Nigeria? The theme seems to be principally on bad leadership, isn’t it?
The
Trouble With Nigeria is not just bad leadership. That is the first bad
point. It is about the values a people uphold. And when you reduce it to
simply a question of values, it means it is only the protagonists, the
entrepreneurs, who are allowed to have power and authority. You tend,
when you overplay the role of the leader, to deprive the rest of us of
the responsibilities we owe in whatever we do in our various ways of
living to be the moulders and the defenders of our society. The emphasis
that is placed on leadership is rather dangerous for a society, which
brings up the question of how you create values. In every society of the
world, the creators of values are usually in the areas of the
religious, the artistic, even before the political. We tend to overplay
the role of the political leader and devalue the role that families and
communities play in bringing up children. And when I talk about
communities here, in most cases, it is not about a particular leader. It
is about the collective ascension to certain values – we don’t do
things like this. It is that which prescribes whether a man can emerge
as a leader because if the values of the basis on which a leader emerges
are wonky, the leaders that emerge would be wonky. And those values, as
I said, are created largely by artistes and religious leaders. And that
kind of way in which the language that you use in your society is in
itself what in modern times you call parliamentary, a language that is
not based on a necessary reduction of the value of the next human
being. If all of us are trained to use that kind of language and we
adhere to it, there is a tendency in which when things are going out of
turn, the education you have received simply tells you that is not the
way it is supposed to be. But if you must wait for that particular
leader to show us the way, then that society is already losing the way.
So when you look at the overconcentration on the leader, the search for a
leader, it misleads. It misleads because the very writer who is
demanding leadership is a leader. If he gets his presentation of values
wrong, he misleads more people than the political leader. We do need to
take a hard look at what our writers say; we need to debate them more,
we need to argue about the things they say and do because those are the
elements, the building blocks that help make up the values upon which
leaders emerge in society. I say this because the overemphasis on these
things in The Trouble With Nigeria plays out in certain forms that could
be embarrassing. I give you one example. We are told in The Trouble
With Nigeria that Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe had this grand aim
of building themselves up financially before they entered politics. And
that they worked very hard at it. And Achebe is angry that our leaders
wanted to be financially strong before they moved into politics. That is
a bit odd. Odd that you want leaders to move into leading their own
people without building themselves up, educating themselves, ensuring
that they don’t turn the public space into an area where they merely
just go for the means of self-aggrandisement or turning themselves into
super citizens. Any time I get to that part of that book, I have always
asked myself what made Achebe criticise Awolowo and Zik for saying
Before we go into politics let us be strong, let us be disciplined? The
route taken by Azikiwe and Awolowo in their pre-political struggles are
different. I mean the kind of discipline Awolowo acquired is different
from the kind of discipline Azikiwe acquired. You can say Awolowo was a
one woman man. Everybody knew that Zik was a man of the world. He loved
women and never hid it. I remember when we were doing the PPA
(Progressive People’s Alliance) negotiations in Maiduguri and all those
Kanuri girls were dancing with their backsides really throbbing. Azikiwe
nudged Waziri Ibrahim, who was on his right, and said: “That is life!”
He pointed his thumb at Awolowo, who said he didn’t understand. I mean,
there was fun in it. But it was good that these were leaders who
prepared themselves well before they became leaders of their own people.
But who did Achebe praise in that very section? Aminu Kano. He is
praised for not being a money-oriented leader. And we are supposed to
forget that this man who wasn’t money-oriented was obliged to have to
depend on his opponents, literally, to get things done. Now, anybody who
knows about Aminu Kano’s career will realise that in all moments of
crises, he moved rightwards. Awolowo always moved leftwards in crises.
That is to say he voted for the masses rather than voting for himself.
But in crises, Aminu Kano voted for the right. You can explain it by the
lack of preparedness. In fact, what Achebe blamed Awolowo for is
precisely what makes leaders strong in moments of crises because they
have something inside them to stand upon, built over years of a certain
sense of self-reliance. It sustains them and eventually sustains the
movement of which they are about, which is why even when the whole
weight of the federal authority, intelligence and security was brought
to pound Awolowo, it never worked. He always managed to emerge better
than those who pounded him. Now, it is good never to forget it that what
saved Awolowo was not just leadership. It was because of the values he
had ensured percolated throughout his own organisation. Because it was
not enough for you to have a leader; it was the kind of values on the
basis of which your leaders did things. We need never to forget that.
That is what builds societies. I mean, a leader may be all powerful;
some use force, others use persuasion. Those who use persuasion have to
learn to depend on those values because if they don’t exist,
irrespective of the forces that you deploy, you are wasting your time.
It
is important that in responding to The Trouble With Nigeria, we take a
hard look at untruths, terrible untruths that in my view are
philosophical lapses. One of them that I responded to immediately the
book was published was what Achebe said about the1951 elections in the
Western Region. I mean Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot reported
after that election that Azikiwe’s party, the NCNC, had 25, the Action
Group had 15 and Independents 40. Anybody who knew the Western Region
knew there was something wonky with that way of presenting the results.
Because that particular election was run on the basis of very many
ethnic organisations. People ran on the platform of Otuedo in the
Benin-Delta area, Ibadan Peoples’ Party in Ibadan, Ondo Improvement
League and so on and so forth. The only part of Nigeria where political
parties existed properly was Lagos. NCNC swept all the five seats in
Lagos. But it was because the NCNC swept all the five seats in Lagos,
and journalism and communication was strong in Lagos, that almost all
the Lagosians and, therefore, supposedly Nigerian public opinion came to
believe that Azikiwe won. The truth is that if you win in Lagos, you
did not win in the Western Region. But that belief that Azikiwe won, in
spite of what his own newspaper reported, became folklore. And people
forgot that among the 40 people, whom Azikiwe’s paper regarded as
independents, were people who said they owed allegiance either to the
NCNC or the Action Group.
The Action Group was just being formed
as a party and the NCNC was entering regional party politics for the
first time. So you have these big political parties on which platforms
candidates did not run because their people did not know them. So it was
after the election that many of them were coming out. But something had
happened. Before the election, the electoral officer insisted that the
two political parties that were claiming candidates should bring a list
of their candidates. Only the Action Group published a list of their
candidates before the election. And it was on the basis of that list
that the Action Group was claiming that it had won. So because the NCNC
apparently did not present a list, it could claim seats that it did not
win. That was where the problem is. And what was interesting is that Zik
never stopped repeating it that he won, but that it was on the floor of
the House that people cross-carpeted. No, it was not on the floor of
the House. Between November 1951 and January 1952, when the House
actually met, where all the candidates belonged to had become well known
and obvious. But you know political parties never stop asserting
strengths that they may not possess. So you had a situation where the
newspapers were wrangling over who had moved to this side or who was
moving to the other side. Many of the candidates moving this way and
that way, of course, were being lured by many things. Some of them had
been members of Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Naturally, they were close to the
organisation that Awolowo led. There were those who did not care about
any ethnic organisation. The individual party members were simply
looking for their own deal.
The six members who came from the
Ibadan People’s Party were shifting this way and that way, as the wind
blew them. Most of the people who won on the platform of the individual
parties wanted to know which of the two parties was likely to form a
government. Akinloye, after zigzagging, stood with the Action Group
because the Action Group was particular about one thing: it wanted the
brightest and the best. Akinloye had just come with a first class degree
from Europe and, therefore, they wanted him at all costs. Awolowo just
wanted the best in the place and offering Akinloye a job was one easy
winner. And by the time Akinloye was offered a job, it was already clear
that the Action Group had more seats in parliament than the NCNC. On
the day the parliament actually met, the Action Group – and anybody who
knows how Awolowo organises would understand that – moved to the House
of Assembly as one team. They worked as one team, all of them
brandishing Action Group plaques on their chest. Awolowo was their head;
they followed him. When Awolowo got to the door and discovered that all
the NCNC members were scattered all over the place, he said: “No, we
shall not enter until they move to one side.”
The pattern in any
serious parliament, as per the traditions of the House of Commons, is
that parties stay on their side of the House. So, he insisted they must
do so before they would enter. The traditional rulers came there and
begged, saying: “Please, not in this new dispensation. Don’t let’s spoil
it with rancour.” Awolowo never listened to such debates. He told them
that until they moved, he and his men would not enter.
It is
possible that Chinua Achebe was actually there on the spectators’
gallery and so he must have seen it when all the NCNC members moved to
one side. Maybe that was what he saw because, as he later said, he was
there on the floor of the Western House of Assembly when all the NCNC
members moved to the AG. No, it’s wrong. It was not NCNC members that
moved to the AG; it was the NCNC members being asked to clear to one
side so that the AG can enter and sit down. Now, this is how folklore
has always overridden history in Nigeria. The truth is that the Hansards
of the House showed that after the two parties had positioned
themselves and sat where they were supposed to, those who discovered
that the AG had more seats started moving to the Action Group side. Only
three people cross-carpeted on the floor of the Western House of
Assembly. The first carpet-crosser in Nigeria’s history was Kensington
Momoh. He was representing Kukuruku, what is now Etsako/Afenmai. There
was Awojorisha Remi and G.G. Ako, who represented constituenties in the
Delta. Ekuyasi was Igbo representing the Otuedo, a Benin party, in the
House. I need to bring him in because many people who talk about how
liberal Nigerian communities were need to know that at that time, one of
the representatives of Benin in the Western House of Assembly, was an
Igbo man. It is important that we know these things so that you will see
the climate within which that thing took place. But forever and after
the NCNC, that is, Zik’s followers, and especially the Igbo across
Nigeria, were made to believe that Zik was swindled. They believed their
leader’s story. And Zik was, therefore, encouraged from that moment on
to go claiming he was swindled.
As late as 1953, he could still
tell people that he had 43 seats and that overnight, they cross-carpeted
and he had only 18 left. It never happened that way because I can also
tell you that if you read Bola Ige’s book, Politics, Parties and
Politicians you’d see that where the problem worsened was over how to
send parliamentarians to the central legislature in Lagos. You will
discover that even Bola Ige was critical of his own party because Ige
believed that the Western House of Assembly, which was the Electoral
College, should have voted for Azikiwe as their party leader. Ige said
that out of a certain liberal House of Commons approach to politics that
the leader of the other side should just have been voted for by the
whole house. But this was what happened. Azikiwe had cobbled together a
number of associations – political groupings, Christian organisations
and debating societies – so that the NCNC, properly speaking, was not a
party. It was what political scientists call a congress. And one of the
political organisations that was part of the NCNC was represented by Dr.
Olorunnibe. That man wanted to be Mayor of Lagos. But Azikiwe had
sympathies for Mbonu Ojike. And as far as Olorunnibe was concerned, he
was the only proper Lagosian among the five parliamentarians voted for
by Lagosians. Zik himself came from the East and the others came from
various parts of the Western Region. TOS Benson was from Ikorodu which,
at that time, was not part of Lagos. And that man just felt he had a
right to be the mayor. But if his party leader did not support him, he
did not see why he should support his party leader in the business of
going to the Federal House.
When Zik put his name on the ballot,
he too put his name on the ballot. And when all the other people
discovered what was happening, they too put their names on the ballot.
Bola Ige told the story of how they went to the Oba of Sagamu to ask the
man to convince his own son to step down for Azikiwe. Bola Ige, like
most young Nigerians, was a Zikist activist. He said the Oba asked Zik
if the place he wanted to go – for which he wanted his son to step down –
was a good or bad place. Zik said it was a good place. That man looked
at Zik and said: “You are not my friend. How can you see a good place
and you say I should tell my son not to go there?” The Oba had no
interest in party discipline or party politics. It was a new order and
many people did not know by what rules you had to play. And so Adedoyin
put his name on the ballot and when the Western House of Assembly voted,
Azikiwe lost. Azikiwe was bound to lose if you consider the fact that,
although he was well known as a big newspaper man in Lagos, all the
other candidates came from particular communities in the Western Region.
Sagamu people or Remo people would vote for Adedoyin and the people
from Ogbomosho would vote for their man. Ikorodu people or whoever was
close by would vote for their man.
To a certain extent, you may be
right to say that tribalism was what cost Zik his seat, but the truth
is that it was a peculiar form of tribalism. It was not the kind of
thing that we talk about in these general terms today. And besides,
there was a lot of bribery involved, plenty of money. Adedoyin started
bragging in public, and he was quoted in newspapers, as saying he
doesn’t take peanuts. One had to respond to The Trouble With Nigeria by
telling this story, and I must confess in my own response, I try to be
nice about it without pushing so many issues. But it was just one part
of the cloudy and clouded way of looking at the Nigerian history that
messed up our story. Because a whole nationality, the Igbo nationality,
was fed on this lie and because they bought it and many other Nigerians
bought it, it corrupted their approach to politics for generations.
The
fact that people cross-carpeted became an issue in Nigerian politics.
Very few of the academics, who studied the Western Region, had the
gumption to narrate it properly. But even while they were narrating it,
they threw in their own dislocating views, which hurt the truth. And in
my view, Nigerians have lived under the burden of such falsehoods. There
are very many. In 1941, before Awolowo became a personality to talk
about, he campaigned for Ernest Ikoli. Azikiwe campaigned for and voted
for Akinsanya. That should have provided the finest fibre for national
politics; that is, the fact that Awolowo voted against his own brother
in favour of an Ijaw man and Nnamdi Azikiwe voted for a Yoruba. But that
was turned by Azikiwe and the Western African Pilot into an ethnic
issue and it was that 1941 issue that was added up to the 1951 issue to
build up this goblin of tribalism as the nether hub of Nigerian
politics. It was all lies and our people have functioned under the
weight of these lies for too long. It was necessary for somebody to
puncture it. My response to The Trouble With Nigeria is part of that
attempt. Ever since, I have tried wherever I had an opportunity, to deal
with it. Because you actually meet a lot of Igbo young people brimming
with progressive ideas, but the moment you mention a cooperation with
the Yoruba for a serious project, you start hearing all sorts of
distracted and distracting views. They have been made to believe – in
fact even children in the womb are poisoned with the idea – that between
the Yoruba and the Igbo, there can be no meeting ground. I can assure
you that Nigeria would have been a much better country if those views
were not planted and sustained over the years by, in my view, horrid
propaganda. The propaganda has been worsened by a big man like Achebe; a
leader in a way that Azikiwe was not because more children have read
Achebe than have read any line by Azikiwe.
If you ask me, the
first issue to deal with in order to understand the issues that are
being raised in There Was A Country is an appreciation of how much
Achebe is part of the debilitating falsehoods that ruined Nigeria in the
first place. In almost every chapter of Ezenwa Ohaeto’s biography of
Chinua Achebe, that 1951 crossing of the carpet is made an issue. And
the hatred for Awolowo was promoted on a grand scale by ethnic unions,
political parties, debating societies, you just name it.
Now, what is your take on Achebe’s There Was A Country?
Part
of the problem with There Was a Country is that the book was written at
different times and patched up. Therefore, if you can feel it, there is
a certain lyricism in the earlier chapters, which you lose as you move
on. Achebe became a mere reporter. Although he did plenty of reportage
in the initial period, you could feel it that what he was doing was a
different kind of job. But those were the moments he sowed the very
seeds through which we should not only critique this book. I mean the
early parts provide the moments that should help us to not only do a
critique of this book but all Achebe’s earlier books. Because there are
three positions that come out in those early pages. One is about
Achebe’s love of Igboland and his apparent, not inability, lack of
motivation to learn about other people. His personal make-up as an
individual, his love of, as he said himself, making change gently. That
philosophy is played up in Things Fall Apart, where Obierika is supposed
to be the philosopher. Obierika is a very bad philosopher and Achebe
has now fully identified with Obierika. The philosophy Obierika pushes
is the philosophy of middle of the road, and the middle of the road is
latched upon as a matter of principle, not contingency. It chimes with
something that Achebe later wrote in an essay. He said the one in front
sees nightmares, the one behind develops crooked fingers, the one in the
middle is a child of fortune. And if you take such a position as a
matter of principle, you are actually in advance opposing all the
progressives in the society. Because all progressives had to move in
front, they are intiators, the creators of new positions, the people who
fight for great things, the people who get hurt, who actually see
nightmares. And nightmares are imposed on them by the society because
where the road is blocked, they want to unblock it. If you accept this
position and you now take it like a broomstick for going through all
Achebe’s books, you begin to understand a lot of things – why Okonkwo
had to commit suicide. I mean suicide was not such a common thing among
our people. But the point is this: Okonkwo was a man with a very
personal zeal and there is a sense in which he was the kind of man who
would have been a freedom fighter in any society. But the freedom
fighters are usually those that the middle of the road people oppose.
I
am going to sound a bit out of tune if I try to put Achebe and Zik
together in this regard. If you read Azikiwe’s An Ideology for Nigeria,
you will find that the African nationalists whom he criticised most
vehemently were the ones who took up arms to fight against colonialism.
It was probably a way of defending the Nigerian approach which got
independence on a platter of gold. But it is one of those ways in which
those who like the middle of the road always oppose the more progressive
people who move in front and are prepared to die.
One of the
reasons I found Awolowo a stronger intellectual, a better philosopher
than almost all of them is that Awolowo realised how much unity came to
society as a result of whatever nature of communalism there was. But he
was quick to also let us know the danger imposed to generalised
well-being, popular welfare of everybody, which is precisely why all
through his life he insisted upon an enlightenment programme for his own
people. From his first book, Path To Nigeria Freedom, you could see how
critical he was of the traditional system and how he felt he could
change it. The point is that what Awolowo meant to do with his own
ethnic group as they themselves wrote in their manifestoes was something
they wanted for all ethnic groups. The proper way to have dealt with
the African situation, the African problem, was to ensure that all the
knowledge in the English alphabet was transferred to the indigenous
languages and that all the knowledges in the indigenous languages were
transferred to the English. We would equalise with the white man and
would be able to stand up to them in almost every area. That project was
knocked sideways by the charge of tribalism against the Egbe Omo
Oduduwa, which corrupted our attitude to our own indigenous society.
Chinua
Achebe talked about how the zeal of the Igbo has not been properly
harnessed as it should have been done. It is the intellectual frailty of
the class that was educated at that time that contributed to it. I said
so in Taking Nigeria Seriously that Awolowo should have been the leader
of the Igbo, a people with a lot of energy and ebullience, who needed a
man with a focused vision of how to make a society work and change.
Awolowo always thought that he would be leader of a country that would
be so forward-looking. He needed a people with that kind of energy and
he never hid it. But since they have ruptured the political space by so
much talk of tribalism, which did not exist, it was impossible for them
to have any clear view of how to move on. I mean, you still find a lot
of Nigerians – Igbo, Yoruba and others – talking around Awolowo. People
are afraid to mention Awolowo’s name when they are pursuing progressive
causes. They are afraid that if you tell them the idea is Awolowo’s own,
people will run away from it. But that has been the pattern in Nigeria.
People are prepared to murder their own children because they don’t
want to do the right thing. People opposed free education because it was
Awolowo’s view; because the lie that has been sown over the years that
Awolowo was not a man you could do business with. But they were
purposely told lies, aimed at ensuring that in the struggle for power he
was disabled. Frankly, it disabled Awolowo a lot; it disabled Nigeria.
But look at our intellectuals and see how they were disabled by the
ethnic factor, as I said in another essay which some people may have
read. Even our own Wole Soyinka said it after Awolowo died; he said if
he had come out to identify with Awolowo when Awolowo was alive, people
would have said he was merely praising a tribesman.
What do you think is wrong with the book?
There
are facts he just mixed up. And when a man of Achebe’s stature mixes up
his facts and puts a very strong opinion and life view on the basis of
those mixed-up facts, he sends out a very dangerous message, one that
can confuse nations and destroy people.
Let’s have the facts that he misrepresented.
Start
by remembering in the book what you would have regarded as simple
typographical errors. It tells you Aguiyi-Ironsi became a Head of State
in May 1966. You and I know it is not true, but it is repeated more than
once. But if you say it like that, it enables you to commit other
errors and they are dangerous errors because if you remember, May of
that year was when the pogrom began. If you put Ironsi becoming a Head
of State in that month, the implications are too varied to even
consider. But more than that, is this: In the narration, we are not told
anything about that first coup in a way that can help you understand
what may have led to the pogrom. You don’t get that picture of what may
have led to that incendiary position taken by many northerners. The
truth is that it was not an Igbo coup. It was a coup by some hot-headed
Nigerians who believed that their country needed to be better run. It
just so happened that many of them were Igbo-speaking. Ademoyega was not
Igbo-speaking, but they couldn’t have gone on looking for a rainbow
coalition to plan a coup. That is the surest way to ensure a failure of
the coup. They spoke to only those who they could work with. They knew
that if Nzeogwu was on your side you were on your way to success.
Nzeogwu was the first properly trained intelligence officer in the
Nigerian Army. He was sufficiently disciplined; one of the few
non-drinking, non-smoking, non-womanising soldiers you had in Nigeria.
And so they got him. That group was a very naive group, but they also
said they themselves did not trust that they could govern well. They
knew one man who they believed had the gumption and the capacity to run a
country properly and that was the man the NCNC-NPC coalition had put in
jail – Awolowo. At the point of that coup, Awolowo had successfully
engineered a response to the take-over of the Western Region by that
coalition. He had vowed before he went to jail that if they took over
the Western Region by untoward methods, he would make the place
ungovernable.
And he set out to train people to do that job. It
was that sending out of people to do that job that the ruling coalition
regarded as a plan for a coup. To be very honest, if you are planning to
make an area ungovernable, you couldn’t, properly speaking, say that it
could not lead to a coup. But Awolowo did not plan to overthrow the
federal government in the sense which the charges in the court presented
it. At that time, every political party in Nigeria was training people
for the purpose of fighting the other party. The NPC had their own
thugs, but they were even smarter. They even had people specially
trained within the Nigerian Army that they meant to use as their own
personal thugs when the time came because they sent people into the Army
for that purpose. The NCNC was doing exactly the same and they were in
coalition with the NEPU, which was already helping the Sawaba party in
the Cameroun to train guerrilla fighters in Eastern Europe. Nigeria had
reached that point where violence was what all the political parties
were thinking about. So what the Action Group was doing was just in line
with what all the other political parties were doing. But because it
was an opposition party, a treasonable felony charge was foisted on it. A
treasonable felony charge was something the NCNC did not mind because
the plan of the NCNC was to take over the Western Region and, as they
thought, they would then confront the North with a southern solidarity. A
southern solidarity built upon the destruction of the Action Group
would not have made sense, but that was what the NCNC wanted to do. The
NCNC first wanted to form a coalition with Samuel Adegoke Akintola’s
party, but Akintola wanted the NPC. They knew what they wanted. Just as
the minorities in the East, after the AG leaders had been thrown into
jail, they realised that a proper coalition was not with the NCNC or
whatever but with the NPC. They preferred to form a coalition with the
NPC rather than with the NCNC, which was the oppressor party in the
Eastern Region. I mean, people should always remember that when you make
a move, other people have the right to defend their own move.
Unfortunately
for the 15 January boys, the coup failed. The coup failed because the
Eastern arm of the execution was not carried through. Those who would
have treated the coup as the very first popular coup, therefore, started
having second thoughts. The coup was hijacked by a clique of Igbo
officers who thought that those 15 January boys were bastards. Ojukwu
and Madiebo, in all the stories they have told, confirmed it. As for
Ironsi, he should never have been allowed to be Head of State because he
did not have the breadth of mind to govern a multi-ethnic society and
he did not have the personal discipline to learn about what was
happening in his own government. So when things were happening, he knew
next to nothing about them. Even when information was presented to him,
he never had time to look at it. People have said it was because he was a
drinker. But many officers were drinkers and they never let any of such
things pass. And that was why he did not know about the seriousness of
the northern resentment to the 15 January coup. And what he thought was a
solution – going on tour – was the last thing he should have imagined
at that time.
Achebe did not know that it was NEPU which
galvanised the North against the 15 January coup. The truth is that you
need now to piece the information together from several sources. Aminu
Kano’s autobiography, The African Revolutionary, already explains what
he called the smouldering anger, which Aminu Kano viewed as what
happened in the coup. The NEPU had supported the coup; they were happy
that Ahmadu Bello was dealt with until they realised and were being
jeered by Igbo traders in Kano and in several other places that it was
no longer a matter of political ideological difference with Ahmadu Bello
but a matter of regional difference between those who hijacked the coup
of 15 January and those who were about to be punished by the coup
makers. And I used the word hijacked very advisedly. Many northerners
refused to see that there was a distinction to be made between the 15
January boys and those who took over the coup. That refusal was what
helped to stamp it that this was an Igbo coup. But it was not an Igbo
coup. Those who took over the coup behaved as if the only Nigeria they
wanted was a Nigeria based on the falsehoods on the basis of which they
had been operating. In fact, the 15 January boys, as I said, were very
naive. Awolowo went to jail partly because he was fighting for the
creation of states across Nigeria and was, therefore, seen as
destabilising the other regions, including his own. Awolowo made sure
that the Western House of Assembly voted for the creation of Midwest
Region because that was one of the conditions – the region from which a
state is to be created needed to vote for it. He made sure that by 1955,
his region had voted for it and it was actually on the basis of that
vote that Midwest was eventually created in 1963. And he was asking the
two regions to do exactly the same: vote for the creation of minority
states out of your own. If he succeeded in doing it, the North would
have ceased to be a hegemony. And there was no chance in hell that they
would accept that. The NCNC, obviously, could not accept it at the time
Awolowo went to jail because oil had been discovered in the minority
areas of the East. And anybody asking for creation of states at that
time was like saying, Let us take the money-making part away.
So
the issues were gruelling. To be honest, looking at it from this
distance, the Action Group argument threatened the whole structure of
the federation. If they didn’t send him to jail, probably there would
have been a way of arranging it. But the other side had decided from as
early as 1958 that the proper way to do it was after independence; to
put Awolowo in jail, share his region and move on. But there was no way
you could move on because the people of the West were among the most
educated Nigerians and the free education that had gone on for about six
years had so changed the environment. The West was only a small part of
Nigeria. But the policy that Awolowo had pursued had turned that part
of the world into the kind of thing we now see in Gabon. And clearly,
there was a line to be drawn between the hardworking Igbo people, who
had no government but their individual zeal, and the Western region
where your individual zeal was extensively supported by the policies of
your state.
It became the case that you could hardly convince any
Igbo man that that was a proper way to do it because of the old
tribalism that their leaders had helped to sow. I mean, people will tell
you that the reason free education failed in the East was because there
was no money. It wasn’t so. It was unplanned. Zik attacked free
education in the West and then went to the East and attempted to do it.
There was no way it could have worked because he never studied what the
West did. And he was not democratic. Everybody always said Awolowo was
the undemocratic leader, but Awolowo never started any project without
getting the people involved. All the owners of schools in the West knew
five to six years in advance what Awolowo was going to do. And he kept
talking to them. When there were riots against the free education or
free health levy, Awolowo sent policemen to the area to beat them to
submission. He told them, “You may abuse me today, but I am sure your
children will pray for me.” And today, everybody is praying for Awolowo.
It did not happen in the East because their leaders did not care enough
for their people to take care of them. And the pattern is still going
on.
Leaders from the East do not do it. And they have supported a
national confluence of such leadership traits. If you ask me, that is
why Nigeria is in a backward state; that the people with the zeal to
industrialise started supporting governments that pursued policies which
had nothing for them. It is a long time we have heard about Aba, Nnewi
and places like that as areas where individuals on their own were
pursuing industrialisation. They never had governments on their side.
The Eastern regional government did not know how to do it, even till
today. Due to pure brazen, unguarded tribalism, those who would have
supported Awolowo and moved Nigeria forward did not do so. They are
still playing the game till tomorrow. To the extent that they always
managed to oppose Awolowo’s position, they are actually teaching their
people how not to develop because the positions Awolowo took yesterday,
today and tomorrow are still the correct positions.
What is your take on the most contentious aspect of the book: the genocide accusation?
There
was genocide in the Nigerian civil war. Don’t let anybody deceive you.
The pogrom was pure genocide. Once the war started, were you thinking
that the hatred that led to the pogrom had suddenly dissipated? Of
course, not. That hatred was still very much there. Just mention that
you were a saboteur, whether in Biafra or in Nigeria, and you were gone.
The way both sides went after their opponents did not abide always by
the Geneva Convention. Don’t let anybody sing to you that it was just
Nigeria against Biafra. The Biafrans committed genocide against their
own people and against Nigerians. Nigerians did the same. The reason the
case of Nigeria is the one that is being played up was because Ojukwu
managed to do two things. He built up a propaganda machinery, serviced
by very well-known writers like Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi, which
successfully painted a picture that made genocide look one-sided. It
was certainly not one-sided. When Biafra invaded the Midwest, were they
coming there to give us a party? When Achebe in his There Was a Country
says he does not accept the testimonies that Biafrans did terrible
things in the Midwest, who is he deceiving? Me? I was a reporter in the
Midwest after the Biafran civil war. I know many stories he cannot
imagine. There are some of those stories we need to tell because if we
don’t tell them enough, we will begin to have the impression that our
people are angels and good people.
No people are good; it is the
way you manage them that turns them into good people. The more you go on
presenting this view that it was a one-sided thing, the more you end up
giving a very false picture that empowers the devils on the other side.
The genocide on both sides of the war was unbelievable. But if you ask
me, the greater genocide took place in Biafra and it was not the federal
government genocide. First, in acceding to the idea of Biafra, the
central leadership committed pure genocide. They knew their people were
not ready for war; they themselves did not make proper preparations for
the war. I am not a soldier. I merely read insurgency and
counter-insurgency in my Political Science class. I know that when a man
wants to win a war there are things he must do. Ojukwu did not do any
of those things. People worried about supply – where would your
ammunition come from and where would your food come from? Awolowo never
allowed us to forget that soldiers moved on their stomachs. If you don’t
feed them, you are asking for trouble. And in this particular case,
they knew very early in the war that there would be no food. The
entrance into Midwest was negotiated in order that Biafra might have
food. That was one primary reason and, of course, they needed hard
currency with which to do a lot of things. That must not be forgotten.
The Midwest State cabinet under Ejoor voted six to three – the six were
Igbo-speaking – for Biafra to move into Midwest. So when you hear some
people make it look like it was a capture, it was no such thing. They
were invited to enter. They entered, it was very peaceful. And in
Achebe’s book, you hear it being said that Ore is part of Midwest. Ore
was not part of Midwest and is not part of Midwest. Ore was already in
Western Region. But I can tell you something: Banjo was either a very
good soldier or a great lover of his own Yoruba people.
Once he
got to Ore, he obviously realised that he was carrying an army to take
over the region that was not ready for them. All the Yoruba senior
officers in the army wanted nothing to do with Biafra. Those who thought
that you could oust Gowon, oust Ojukwu and recreate a new basis for
action knew they had very fragile, very brittle ground for it. Soyinka
helped very hard to help build that kind of position. Awolowo had told
them that they had a virtual army of occupation in Western Nigeria. He
told Ojukwu that. And if Ojukwu thought he was going to use a ramshackle
army to take over the West, he certainly wasn’t talking like a General
because the army that moved into Midwest was like a group of attack
traders. They did not come like soldiers. They came like people who
wanted resources and were going to mop them up. Anybody who had observed
that movement can tell you that it was not a group that could have
faced Lagos by any chance, because although the Federal government at
that time was not even well-positioned to fight a proper war, they still
needed to buy more ammunition. The group that was sent just wasn’t in a
position to do anything that was viable towards the military might of
the Federal side. And if Awolowo was a serious leader, as everybody
believes he was, he would not have supported that kind of hair-brained
project. There was no way he would have supported it because he had told
Ojukwu when they met that they were not ready for war. Awolowo also
said Ojukwu was not prepared for the war he was about to embark upon.
The
thing is, to return to the genocide picture, people did terrible things
to one another. Once you called somebody a saboteur, he was dead before
people found out what was the matter. If you heard people talking about
genocide, it was everywhere. Biafrans shot at houses and buildings as
they were retreating. It didn’t matter whether there was a Nigerian
soldier there or not. And so don’t let anybody overstretch this matter
of genocide. On both sides, there was genocide. In Asaba, you’d hear of
people being lined up - people who could just have been arrested, put
in lorries and sent to either a prison house or camp – and shot. On the
other side, in the way that Benjamin Adekunle’s Black Scorpion was
shooting down people in the South East, Achuzia was shooting down Igbo
people just like that on his side of the war. He is very much praised in
Achebe’s book for resisting the Federal onslaught. But on both sides,
there were just murderers doing their jobs. When there is a war in a
multi-ethnic society and you shoot a guilty person from another ethnic
group, you can be accused very easily of genocide. If you kill a soldier
from the other side you can be accused very easily of genocide. And in
most cases when you hear about the genocide, what it talked about, and
what Achebe is emphasising, is the starvation business, which is where
Awolowo’s own statement that starvation is a weapon of war is turned
into a case for which very many would want him taken to a Nuremberg-type
trial and dealt with.
Food was at the heart of the Nigerian civil
war; the lack of it and the need to supply it was at the heart of the
civil war. Anybody who pretends that it was otherwise cannot explain or
deal with the issue of genocide as it is being described. The truth is
that if you had no food you could not continue with the war effort. And
if you were deprived of food, you were actually being deprived of
weapons. The Biafrans fought valiantly as any people would fight who
believed that they had moved to their citadel, as Achebe says, and
needed to defend themselves. They fought valiantly; even without weapons
they held the Federal forces at bay. The Federal forces, frankly,
always did not fight like an army out to smash the other side. There are
stories that can be told of the dereliction of duty on the federal
side, which would make you wonder whether we were fighting a foreign
country. On the Nigerian side, there were those who just thought it was a
means of making more money. When you are fighting a war, there are two
issues involved. First, do you want to feed your opponents to kill you?
You have to decide how to balance it; how a welfare programme or a food
programme for your opponent can amount to suicide for you. You need to
work it out, what is correct about it. And you do need to constantly ask
yourself why is the other side, short of food and ammunition, refusing
to surrender. People will say it was because the Biafran side was
totally committed to the war effort. It is not true. It was bad judgment
on the side of the generals in Biafra because most of the dead did not
come from the shooting, most of the dead came from starvation,
kwashiorkor and the general incommoding of people that takes place
during a war situation. You would have thought that they would be
negotiating a way to reduce it. But Ojukwu did not want to negotiate; he
actually wished to use the starvation in Biafra as an international
propaganda weapon and it worked.
Let us not deceive ourselves.
Ojukwu’s propaganda worked; it was effective. I mean I was a sympathiser
of the Biafra cause as a reporter. I did not want Biafra to exist
because I can tell you a personal story and it is the story by which I
have judged many things in relation to the East-West struggle. There
was a classmate of mine, John Ezike, who joined us in Primary Three. He
was first in Primary Three till when we got to Six. I only beat him in
one exam, an entrance examination to the local model school. I
celebrated it. John was a fantastic kid. When I entered secondary school
and I was driven away for school fees in my first year and I went to
the market to buy a pair of boxers, I met him selling in his uncle’s
shop and I said, “Joe, you are not at school?” He looked at me and just
smiled and said, “Ah ah, whether we go school or we no go school, na
money all of us dey look for. Small time, money go come.” He just
laughed. That image never left my mind. Any time I met an Igbo
politician or intellectual who did not support free education, I saw
him as a personal enemy. I mean, the brightest kid in my class didn’t go
to school? And then the war came. I never heard of John Ezike after
that. I don’t want anybody coming here to tell me rubbish stories about
genocide. They were not ready for war and they went for it. They killed a
lot of people in the process and all they want to do now is point at
the other side. The truth is that the Igbo were not prepared for war.
All the generals in Biafra who knew how to fight a war told Ojukwu that.
He locked up some, killed some and did whatever he thought was right to
continue.
When you read Achebe’s story, the first thing that hits
you is that he never describes what happens in Biafra except in terms
of his personal effort. He was part of the decision-making structure,
yet he never describes the quality of decision-making that was coming
out of Biafra. Why did he do that? Why did he shield the power
structures in Biafra from actual decision-making that would have
reversed all that harm being done to the people. The book is very
painful to read along those lines. In Chimamanda’s review, she said
Achebe did more of telling rather than showing. A novelist ought to do
it well, ought to show. But if Achebe tried to show, he would have
painted a picture of an Igbo society that he would not be proud of. What
he would have presented of the Igbo society would have been a story of
pure betrayal of the people of the East. But Achebe does not want a
system of which he was a great apparatchik to be laughed at.
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