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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
“Because he was involved”
About four weeks ago, Chief Emeka Ojukwu, Biafran rebel leader and presidential candidate of APGA, told the BBC Network Africa programme that because elections in the former Biafran enclave were neither free nor fair, the only alternative to the Igbo “is a separate existence” from Nigeria . The interview took place on July 7 against the background of the 40th anniversary of his declaration of the Republic of Biafra on July 6, 1967.
Never one to let false logic get in the way of his vaulting political ambition, Ojukwu could obviously not see that the Igbos were not the only victims of the ruling party’s massive electoral fraud of last April. Even more to the point, he could not apparently see, as former army chief, Lt General Victor Malu, pointed out in an interview in Leadership of July 8, that, as victims of the April fraud, Igbos were indeed their own worst enemies. President Olusegun Obasanjo may have been the grand master of the rigging, but Professor Maurice Iwu, an Igbo, was his principal and most willing tool.
Besides it was Igbos who perpetrated the rigging of the elections among themselves at the state level. Again, before the elections, many Igbo leaders like Dr. Ojo Maduekwe, recently rewarded with a ministerial job for his exertions, and Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, featured prominently in promoting Obasanjo’s self-perpetuation agenda.
Since Ojukwu received an unconditional pardon for his rebellion by the NPN government under President Shehu Shagari in 1982, I have, like most journalists – indeed like most Nigerians – found his politics quite fascinating, especially for its essentially negative character. Since his pardon I have written about him at least four times, the first time in the New Nigerian of December 17, 1982. In that article I argued that his unconditional pardon was wrong on grounds, at least, that Dr. Michael Okpara, the premier of Eastern Nigeria who has played a lesser role in the Biafran rebellion, was given only a conditional pardon by the same federal authorities.
Going through all the articles I have written about the ex-rebel leader I could not think of a better way to respond to his latest outburst over his failed Biafran project than the one I wrote in the rested Today weekly newspaper of September 3, 1989 under the title “Because he was involved.” The title was a play on his autobiography of sorts, Because I am involved, published that year by Spectrum Books, Ibadan.
At the risk of sounding like a cracked record album for those who may have read it, permit me, dear reader, to reproduce the article because it seems to me as relevant today as it was nearly 18 years ago. Here it is: Some six years or so ago, Frederick Forsyth the best-selling British novelist and an Ojukwu confidant, wrote in Emeka, an Ojukwu hagiography, that the ex-rebel leader was an “ambitious, highly intelligent, courageous and controversial man.” Because I am involved does bear the unmistakable stamp of ambition and controversy, but I am afraid, little, if any, of courage and high intelligence.
Though this is not a review of the book, I shall make extensive references to it because you can judge an author by his book and Ojukwu as a phenomenon in Nigeria’s history and politics is what we are talking about this morning. To say that Because I am involved, as a testament of Ojukwu’s political philosophy and insight into the Nigerian problem is a great disappointment is to make the understatement of at least the decade; as a political statement, the book is not only terribly incoherent – the chapter titles alone, so full of inappropriate Greek and Classical expressions, give the author away as a man of little original thought and clarity; as he himself says “I am not myself an easy person to understand … I have very peculiar way of using the English Language (The Guardian’s August 8)” – it is shallow, dishonest and a bundle of contradictions.
“I know I was a dynamic force”, Ojukwu boasts to Amma Ogan, The Guardian’s deputy editor, in a recent interview, referring to his return from self-exile. He was returning, he said, to close the chapter of the civil war. Since that return, Ojukwu has, by words and deeds, persistently made it clear that the civil war chapter cannot be regarded as closed until an Igbo man occupies Dodan Barracks. By the same token, he has left no one in doubt that he is the most eminently qualified Igbo man for the job. “People who aspire to the occupancy of Dodan Barracks,” he boasts again to Ogan, “still look upon me as a very, very potent rival. Of course, they are right to do so.”
Throughout Because I am involved, Ojukwu leaves no one in doubt that he regards himself as the true Igbo leader. First, he insinuates negative qualities against Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, universally regarded as the veritable Igbo leader. “For where is the pride,” he says in a thinly veiled reference to the Owelle, “in having leaders who publicly claim they are not Igbo leaders who have gone to preposterous lengths in their bid to prove that they are culturally different from Igbos. There is no pride whatever, in having leaders who have constantly turned their backs on the Igbo people in their hours of need and distress.” The Owelle is an Onitsha man and Onitsha people traditionally trace their ancestry to Benin Kingdom. Too, the Owelle’s switch to the Nigerian side during the civil war has always been seen by the rebels as a betrayal of the Igbo cause.
Secondly, not only does the attempt to make the Owelle, presumably the usurper of what rightfully belongs to Ojukwu, a straw-man, he (Ojukwu) puts himself forward as the best thing that can happen to Nigeria. “I am” he says in his book with the now characteristic immodesty, “perhaps of all Nigerians, the most misrepresented and I hasten to add perhaps the most irrepressible.” (Page 39). Elsewhere, in the book, he says of himself “My hands have proven vitality and competence and I offer them to the service of my country and the interests of my compatriots…” (Page 86). In the closing chapter of the book, Ojukwu is even more categorical. As a result of his role in the civil war, he argues, he now considers himself more equipped “to work for the country, serve her and even lead her.”
Clearly, Because I am involved, has the unmistakable stamp of Ojukwu’s vaulting ambition. It may sound harsh but I fear that the book also shows him up as being very economical with the truth and someone who is superficial of thought. The evidences for all these are many in the book but a few are sufficient. Hardly, for instance, does Ojukwu develop his positions on key national issues with the thoughtfulness and discipline that scholarship, Oxford – his alma mater – scholarship in particular, demands. He argues for example that the main source of our national problems was that our past colonial leaders believed independence was an end itself. He offers no evidence that this was true – of course it was not – and what little attempt he makes at developing this thesis of failed leadership is so full of meaningless stereotypes – “client-rulers” in the North, “castrated authority” in the West and “watchdogs of imperialism” in the East – that the attempt offers little insight on how to resolve the leadership question.
Yet another evidence of his superficiality is that he contradicts himself in the book, as elsewhere, all too often. He says in one breath that part of the leadership problem arises from “sectional elitism” supplanting “national elitism”. Yet everywhere he goes Ojukwu preaches the primacy of the Igbo race and of course his uncontestable leadership of that race. It is, for instance, only the Igbo who have been “intensely loyal” to the ideal Nigeria. Others are “realists.”
Ojukwu moralizes in his book about the cancer of womanizing among the elite but is himself escorted to the launching of that very book by a beauty queen, Bianca Onoh, who indeed he eulogises in the book – itself the trivialization of what is supposed to be a book on matters more serious than beauty contests. Again in his interview with The Guardian’s Ogan, he says that he merely “postured secession”, but then avers that “right to the last minute I continued believing that we would win in spite of everything.” In the same interview, he says in one breath that “the whole notion that the army is the only federal institution and all that is very facile, meaningless,” but the next minute he rationalizes his joining the army on the grounds that it was “the only viable federal institution.”
The greater sin of the authorship of Because I am involved, is its deceit, and lack of courage to admit the truth. Ojukwu begins with the big lie that General Ironsi’s was not a coup but a legitimate taking over of government. Yet we are not told on whose authority acting President Nwafor Orizu, Ironsi’s kinsman, handed over the government to the general. The reason for the handover, we are told, is for Ironsi to restore law and order. Yet Ironsi did not contemplate punishing those who, on Ojukwu’s own admission, breached law and order.
Secondly, Ojukwu argues quite correctly that the military has no business in politics. But the dishonest thing about Ojukwu, the born-again democrat, is that once upon a time he believed the army was the only vehicle to power and that was why he joined it. At least that is what Frederick Forsyth tells us in Emeka and Forsyth should know.
But far and away, the greatest sin is Ojukwu’s equivocations regarding his role as the rebel leader. Tai Solarin, has since written (Vanguard August 12, Tribune August 16) on this matter to accuse Ojukwu of being a “liar” a “cad” and a “reed” by his denial that he jumped the sinking Biafran ship. Those are strong words, but it is hard to take exception of them when Ojukwu speaks from both corners of his mouth on the issue of the civil war and cannot seem to make up his mind whether to say he is sorry or not. “I have no apologies to make” he says in his book on the issue. But he goes to Kano to launch the book and offers what looks like and yet does not look like an apology.
We should make no bones about it. Ojukwu and others in Biafra’s highest policy making body owe this country an apology. Of course, Ojukwu alone could not have made a rebellion. Not even the collective leadership alone could. Yet given his apparent ambition to lead Nigeria, which was the main reason for his antipathy towards General Gowon, it was not as if Ojukwu merely acquiesced to the need by the Igbos for security following the July 1966 pogrom.
Ojukwu, like the rest of us is, of course, entitled to entertain grand delusions about his worth and his destiny, but the rest of us are not in the least obliged to humour him. Tragically, the Second Republic politicians did so and the press continues to do so against all wisdom and against the evidence of history the world over. The politicians humoured him because they were desperate for votes. They humoured him as if there were no more politically astute and more intelligent and honourable Igbo leaders. As if without Ojukwu, or any Igbo leader for that matter, the Igbos cannot fend for themselves. Such thinking is of course utter rubbish.
Ojukwu is not a political comic relief like Kingsley Mbadiwe or Sabo Bakin Zuwo of blessed memory. Ojukwu was not merely involved in a rebellion. He led it and still does not have the courage to state unequivocally that he made a mistake and that he is sorry. Such a person forfeits his rights, certainly the moral right, to aspire to the highest office in the land, even to stand in the public eye. It is time that the authorities and the public treated him accordingly.
CORRECTION The Daily Trust of July 17 published a letter from one, Mallam Yusuf Haruna Dangadi, on my last article of July 11 on these pages. In my article, I accused Senator Kanti Bello of misrepresenting the constitutional provisions for appointing ministers. Dangadi’s rejoinder said it was me, and not Senator Bello, who has misrepresented the provisions.
Privately my good friend and a former attorney general of Kaduna State, Barrister Aliyu Umaru, sent me a text on the same day the article appeared to say my interpretation of the provisions was wrong. The combined effect of sections 65(1) and 147(5), of the Constitution, he said, is that “a person cannot be appointed a minister unless he is a member of a political party.”
I have my doubts about Senator Bello being a “focused” politician as Dangadi claims in his letter – the senator has changed his political stripes several times in the course of his political carrier. Dangadi was, however, right that I, and not the senator, misrepresented the Constitution.
I therefore stand corrected and apologize to the senator and to my readers for the misrepresentation.
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