PERSPECTIVE

Yes, on Bakassi we must not stand

Mohammed Haruna

A.B. Ahmed, my friend but also my sparring partner of sorts from our good old days in the New Nigerian in the 70s and 80s, has been arguing in his column at the Daily Trust, that after the recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling awarding the disputed Bakassi peninsula to Cameroun, Nigeria has little or no choice but to give it up. Our case, he says, was a weak one to begin with. Then to make it worse, he says, “our wiser-than-Solomon president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo,” flew all the way to Paris to sign a promise with Cameroun’s Paul Biya that Nigeria will abide by ICJ’s ruling. “What else”, concluded Ahmed, “is left for us to do but to accept the ICJ’s ruling with some measure of reluctant good grace and tattered dignity?”

At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, it is hard to disagree with A.B. Ahmed. And it is not just because our president may have gratuitously given his word that Nigeria will abide by ICJ’s ruling. In a democracy, a president’s word alone is not law. So his word alone without the backing of the country’s law making body ought not to be enough basis for losing Bakassi.

As such the weakness of our case is not just in Obasanjo’s promise, important as it is. It is also not in the former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon’s purported ceding of the peninsula to Cameroun during our civil war period, in exchange for Cameroun’s support against Biafran rebels. The weakness of our case lies first of all, in our pre-colonial history, as it concerns the gradual transformation of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe from a pan-Africanist into an ethnic champion.

Starting out as a pan-Africanist, Zik built the National Congress of Nigeria and Camerouns as the most nationalist party in Nigeria. However, as he saw his pan-Africanist appeal successfully undermined by ethnic oriented parties like the Action Group and regionally-oriented ones like the Northern Peoples Congress, he adopted the strategies of his adversaries more and more, and invariably began to look like them more and more. By the time we gained independence, he had apparently come to the conclusion that the Igbo hegemony of Eastern Nigeria was best guaranteed by keeping the Southern Camerounians out of Nigeria. This may sound unfair considering his decision to rise above politics, at least in principles, by accepting to serve as the country’s Governor-General at independence, and, three years’ later, as its nominal president. The fact, however, remains that Zik did not thrown his immense weight behind the campaign for Southern Cameroun to remain as part of Nigeria during the U.N. plebiscite of 1963, as Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Northern premier, did in Northern Cameroun. The result, of course, was that whereas Northern Camerouns became part of Nigeria as Sardauna province – today’s Adamawa and Taraba States – Southern Cameroun became part of Cameroun. Subsequently Zik’s National Congress of Nigeria and Cameroun became National Congress of Nigerian Citizens.

In writing this piece, I did not have enough time to consult the history books, but I doubt if at the time of the 1963 plebiscite, there was any serious doubt that Bakassi was part of Southern Cameroun. The peninsula apparently only assumed strategic importance to Nigeria when the Biafran rebels started using it as naval staging post to attack Nigerian troups in the early days of the civil war. The natural thing for Nigeria to have done at the time was to grab it. However, that would have led to opening another war front – and a more serious one at that – with a country, which, in any case, was disposed towards a unified Nigeria, inspite of its French colonial over-lordship, at a time the French were the leading supporters of the rebels. It was therefore understandable that General Gowon, with a civil war on his hands, was willing to concede Bakassi to Cameroun in return from Cameroun’s good neighbourliness. Even then he made it clear that his willingness was conditional upon ratification by the Supreme Military Council, a condition which was never fulfilled.

If Gowon’s action was understandable, the same thing can hardly be said of President Obasanjo’s commitment to abide by the ICJ’s ruling; he had no civil war – at least not yet – on his hand and in a democracy, such as we now have – as poor an imitation of the real thing as it is – his word was less a law than General Gowon’s. Even then, Obasanjo’s gratuitous promise is less to blame for our predicament over Bakassi than Zik’s and the NCNC’s indifference, if not outright hostility, to the 1963 plebiscite which led to Nigeria’s loss of Southern Cameroun. Obasanjo’s promise is also less to blame than our choice of the leader of the legal team that handled our case.

Former rebel leader, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, told a newspaper the other day that the country spent over 300 million dollars as lawyer’s fees on the case. Even for an oil-soaked country like Nigeria, that is a lot of money to pay lawyers over a piece of land even with a potential of huge oil reserve. This is assuming that Ojukwu’s figures are accurate. Even if they are not, we are unlikely to have spent peanuts, given the stakes involved and given the prestige and image of Chief Richard Akinjide, who led our team.

As a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and as a former Attorney-General of the Federation, Akinjide is no doubt a very capable lawyer. In the specific case of Bakassi, his grasp of the issues involved is apparently very firm. As he himself told The News magazine (September 18, 2000), he had been involved in the case since 1981 when he was President Shagari’s attorney-general and minister of justice. In that interview he spoke authoritatively about Britain’s presumptuousness in giving Bakassi away to Germany, then Cameroun’s colonial master, in 1914. “In international law”, he said, “Bakassi fell within the protectorate of Nigeria and Britain. The title to the protectorate was vested in the people and chiefs of the protectorate and not on the British empire… (So) when in 1913 and 1914, Britain was purported to have transferred Bakassi to Germany, Britain was giving to Germany what it did not have”.

All this looks like sound legal argument in favour of Nigeria. But as Akinjide and those who picked him to lead our team of lawyers know too well, at least from his now famous – or infamous, depending on which side you are – 1979 case of two thirds of 19 states, politics counts a lot in court cases, much as we may pretend otherwise.

At issue therefore, was not Akinjide’s competence alone. Also at issue must have been his commitment to Nigeria’s territorial integrity. Anyone who has followed his political speeches and behaviour, at least in the last three years, will testify to the fact that he seems to have lost faith in Nigeria. For example, in an interview with the Sunday Vanguard on October 1, 2000 when Nigeria celebrated its 40^th anniversary, he categorically told the world that “I will say there was and there is still no Nigeria”. The only option left to Nigerians, he said, was to hold a Sovereign National Conference, to “decided whether we want to live together”.

Earlier he had told The Comet (September 27, 2000) that Nigeria as a country existed only on paper. “Nigeria”, he had said, “is not one country and the time has come to face the reality of the situation”. Extraneous as it may seem, it is not impossible that the judges of the ICJ had noticed our leading lawyer’s lack of faith in his country’s future and factored it into their decision to award Bakassi to a neighbour that seemed more certain about its own future.

At any rate, the moment Akinjide lost faith in Nigeria, the honourable thing for him to have done was to have resigned his brief. He did not, probably because it was too lucrative to worry too much about such fine things as personal integrity and honour. He did not resign and neither did those who gave him the brief deem it proper to retrieve it.

Which, when you come to think about it, is not altogether too surprising; those who sustained his brief also seemed to have lost faith in Nigeria. Otherwise, President Obasanjo would not in effect have announced to the world, the other day, that if the members of the National Assembly carried on with their threat to impeach him, that would be the end of Nigeria.

When a country’s president gives the world reason enough to doubt the future existence of his country and when lawyer leading its defence in an international dispute over territory displays a similar lack of faith, should the country’s loss of the territory in dispute surprise anyone?

Let us assume, however, for argument sake that we have not only a sound legal case but also an equally sound historical one. Would that make a good case for war? I don’t think so. Fortunately, the National Assembly also does not think so, albeit probably for the partisan even though sensible reason that they don’t want to give the president a pretext for indefinitely cancelling next year’s general election on the basis of Section 135(3) of the Constitution.

There may be more Nigerians living in Bakassi than Camerounians, but we do not need to go to war to be able to enforce their residential rights. Surely, the ICJ ruling can serve as a basis for finding a peaceful resolution to our differences over Bakassi.