Still on the Centennial Awards

By

Tochukwu Ezukanma

maciln18@yahoo.com

 

 

The Nigerian centenary celebration was to honor hundred persons, some, post-hummus. The number of the award recipients was deliberately pegged at one hundred so that it will conform exactly to the number of years of Nigerian existence.  A number of questions ran through my mind. First, what are the criteria for bestowing these national awards? Ordinarily, national honors are given to a distinguished few that exceptionally excelled in different areas of human endeavor. But in the vast scene of confusion and intractable anomaly that is our beloved country, who knows what the criteria for these national honors will be. Secondly, what of if less than one hundred persons, based on the criteria, qualify for the awards will unqualified individuals be added to make up the number? And what of if more than hundred persons meet the criteria; will some of them be denied the awards, so, as to, still keep to the number at hundred?  

 

The list of the awardees omitted a number of outstanding Nigerian achievers and included some undeserving individuals. Hogan Bassey should have been on the list. He was the Nigeria’s first world boxing champion. He won the feather weight champion of the world in 1957. Thus, he was a hero of “global sports competition”. Again, Prof. Eni-Njoku, a distinguished and pioneering academic, should have been on it. He was the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos. Before his death in 1974, he was named the Vice Chancellor of the proposed world university in Tokyo, Japan. Also, missing from the list was Rex Lawson. He was a trailblazing highlife musician. He did for Nigerian highlife music what James Brown did for Rhythm and Blues and Elvis Presley did for Rocking Roll; he took it to new heights. And many other very successful Nigerian musicians borrowed extensively from his style of music.

 

Lord Lugard’s post-humus award was quite apropos. While the raging controversy over the appropriateness and inappropriateness of his 1914 amalgamation of Nigeria, remains inconclusive, without that amalgamation, there would not have been Nigeria (at least, as we know it today), and thus, most likely, nothing to celebrate her centennial. The inclusion of Queen Elizabeth on the list of awardees was unnecessary. She played no role in the amalgamation of Nigeria. She became the Queen of England in 1956 after the death of her father, King George V. That was 4 years before the Nigerian independence, and the process of Nigerian independence was already irreversibly in motion. The geopolitical and ideological fallouts of the Second World War made colonialism untenable, and therefore, guaranteed the colonies’ inevitable casting off the colonial yoke of Britain, an imperial power already in decline.

 

The honoring of Theophilus Danjuma was most revulsive. He is a murderous man whose hands are dripping with the blood of the innocent. Every coup, ever carried out in Nigeria, irrespective of its motivation, was wrong, illegal and unconstitutional. The issue with Danjuma is not that he plotted and executed a coup and in the process, spilled human blood. After all, there are many other coup plotters in Nigeria whose hands were also soaked with human blood. These include Chukwuma Nzogwu, Emmanuel Ifeajuna and Muritala Mohammed. The five majors of the January 1966 coup, in their idealism and messianic sense of mission, thought they could transform Nigeria into a detribalized, corruption-free and egalitarian society. According to Joseph Garba, the objects of the Mohammed/Obasanjo coup that ousted Yakubu Gowon were, among other things “to overthrow a military dictatorship and establish democracy”. Other coups in Nigeria were driven by a variety of reasons: both lofty and murky.

 

The inspiration for the July 29th, 1966 was fiendish and macabre.  That coup that brought Yakubu Gowon to power was led by three majors (Danjuma, Mohammed and Kyari). It is the only coup in Nigerian history actuated solely by vengeance and tribal hatred. Not surprisingly, it was the bloodiest coup in Nigerian history. And, even after they successfully targeted the centers of powers and seized power, the coup plotters still encouraged the mass murder of the innocent: unarmed and defenseless civilians whose only crime was their ethnicity. And by the time this deliberate and conscientious mass murder of Igbo civilians in Northern Nigeria ended, it had been, in the words of a British reporter in Nigeria, “a pogrom of genocidal proportions”. Still impelled by this profound vengeance against, and hatred for, the Igbo, Muritala Mohammed, after his 2nd Division of the Nigerian Army overran Asaba, went on a murderous binge: again murdering helpless and defenseless Igbo men, women and children. 

 

However, Muritala Mohammed, at some point in his life, by his actions showed some remorse for his violent and sanguinary past. He worked assiduously to make Nigeria a better country. He took bold, decisive and courageous decisions and actions aimed at the betterment of all Nigerians; he died in the process. As such, even some of his harshest critics and most ardent detractors can accept that his selfless and committed work, in his later years, to advance social justice, equity and the rule of law in Nigeria atoned, to a considerable extent, for his brutal and bloody past and partially cleansed his blood drenched hands.

 

On the other hand, there is nothing, either in words or deeds of Theophilus Danjuma that indicates any compunction for his vengeful and murderous past. There is no indication that he ever had a twinge of the conscience for having directly contributed to the murder of tens of thousands of Nigerian (Igbo) civilians. The honoring of Theophilus Danjuma was tantamount to the extolment of abhorrent qualities and behaviors that Nigerians, if we aspire to a decent society, must repudiate.