ProfDemi:
Continued:

Kunle Ojeleye in his book commented on how ill prepared the Biafran army were and that Banjo and the three others were killed because they dared to request better equipping for the soldiers. Hear him:

“Indeed, it was at the behest of this feeling that four Biafran military officers wrote a memorandum to the Biafran administration requesting for a review of the war effort. among others, their memorandum requested: that Biafra should have its own currency; there should be an immediate re-organisation and appropriate equipping of the Biafran army; the admittance of civilians into the Biafran decision making body and the decentralisation of the Biafran government; the mortgaging of Biafran oil in exchange for urgently needed military aid and equipment; and in the absence of all the preceding four requirements, immediate negotiation with the federal forces for a peaceful settlement of the crisis.

“For daring to take such a course of action, Lt.-Col. Victor Banjo, Major Emmanuel ifeajuna, Samuel Agbam and Major Alale were labelled as traitors, accused of wanting to overthrow the Biafran administration, court martial, and executed (Ottah 1981).” At the end, these four men were right. Biafra lost the war because it was ill prepared and because one man, Ojukwu, was chasing a pipe dream.

Banjo had told his wife that that whatever happens, he would let her know of his well being. One morning, following Banjo's death, Banjo's wife woke up in far away Sierra Leone with a dream on her heart. A bird had come into their home and after flying about a bit, it flew out of the window into the blue skies. Mrs. Banjo knew instinctively that that her husband was dead. She would eventually relocate to Nigeria and bring up her children as Nigerians, as her husband had wished.

A few months after Odumegwu Ojukwu died, following a prolonged illness, I was in the office of Prof. Olayinka Omigbodun (nee Banjo), the second to the last daughter of Victor Banjo, at the University College Hospital, Ibadan. I had come to see her on the book she wrote of her father. Among a few things we discussed I remember her saying this and I paraphrase: "the man who caused all these is today being buried as a national hero, while my father lies somewhere buried in an unmarked grave". The bodies of those four men were never found. Many of their families have found it difficult to reach closure on them.

Chris Ngwodo has rightly pointed out that the civil was wholly unnecessary. It was a war that was the result of the youthful exuberance and pride of 36 year old Ojukwu and 31 year old Gowon. Unfortunately those beating the drums of secession and war today are the same youths who have refused to learn from our history. Banjo fell out with Ojukwu from day one when he refused to support his secession course. However they both needed each other and they rode on themselves until the ride could no longer continue. Prof. Wole Soyinka, in his Memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, said when he met Banjo in Enugu, he saw a man who bought into his idea of a Third Force.

While the Nigerian and Biafran course was the first and second forces, set at warring against each other, Soyinka and a few others saw themselves as The Third Force. The Third Force aimed simply at stopping the war. They did everything to delay it. And if the youth leadership we had then were listening to them, there would not have been a war and the over three million lives lost would not have occurred. Gen. Alabi Isama, in his book on the civil war, "The Tragedy of Victory", wrote about so many gallant officers lost needlessly to this war. For his efforts at trying to broker peace between Nigeria and Biafra, Wole Soyinka was imprisoned by the Gowon government without trial all the war. He was refused permission to even bury his father. Gowon would however apologize personally to Soyinka for this years later.

The man Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), is asking Nigeria to go back to this painful lane again. Someone has said that a call to secession is not the same as a call to war. I have however reminded him that history has equated most calls to secession to a call to war. If it were not so, why are IPOB members armed to the teeth today? Why are they brow beating their people to obey some sit at home order? While this country can very well call for a referendum to decide on the question of Biafra, the mere fact that free and fair elections cannot hold in the Eastern part of this country is proof that no free and fair referendum can hold in the East. Besides, what states in this Federal Republic will call themselves Biafra? The last I heard, the people of the oil rich Niger Delta are averse to secession. And Kanu needs to get his elders involved in his course. He needs to respect his state governors, Senators and Rep members. As long as he treats these people as thrash, he cannot get their support. And government will not listen to a rabble rouser. When all these is done, we will then settle the matter of the thousands of intermarriages between Biafrans and other parts of this country. As far as I can see with all these matter on ground, Biafra is a dead agenda.

Victor Banjo, though dead, yet speaketh. His last words that he is not dead rings true. As a member of the Third Force, who did everything to avert war, he was calling on the people of this generation to sheath their swords. A united Nigeria is better than a splintered one, he's saying. He's telling us that if Nigeria divides, there will be no end to its division because every region of this country are still made up of people groups. If we cannot live together now, we will not live together in splintered groups. He's calling on us to jaw jaw, rather than war war. He's asking our young men to redirect their energies to more fruitful endeavors. He's saying that if we do not do the hard work of living together, the easy path of secession, which we think is better, will only be littered with the body and blood of our best minds.

The motives of those calling for secession today is even more insincere than those who called for it years back. If Biafra of Ojukwu days was born out of the genocide perpetrated against lbos, who is killing IBOs today? Let this Biafra cry cease. Let the legitimate claims of IBOs be looked into. Let us live together happily ever after. We are better off together than divided.

This write up is dedicated to my friend across the Niger: Chidi Iloegbu. Thanks for reading my articles.

PostScript:

I've adapted this article for WhatsApp readers. If you desire it for WhatsApp to send to friends on your list, edited for much easier reading on that platform, pls inbox me and I'll send it to you there.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1953318264953646&id=100008264737265

CC: Seun, lalasticlala, Mynd44

A RESPONSE TO DEJI YESUFU

By AKPOVETA, Valentine​ 't

Meanwhile, I just finished reading the article by Deji Yesufu.

While I think he may have done a passably good job with the abridged versions of the lessons in history, the problem, as I see it, is that he went further.

Where he would have been perfectly alright as a historian, regurgitating bits and pieces of history, and drawing some conclusions from incomplete narratives​, while ignoring contexts and the actions that the times, pressures and information of that period necessitated, I am more than a little peeved that he designed to give a simplistic solution to an obviously complex problem.

His opinions are not only a sign of a very uninformed mind, lacking a strong grasp of reality or global parallels, they also lack any real form of empathy.

He sees himself as a Third Force but his arguments are no different, in form or substance, from those who would force people to remain in an inconvenient union of imperial making without addressing the essence of the core of the agitations. Deji is not a Third Force. He is an ignorant force. A dangerous and ignorant voice.

He transposes the call by the dying Victor Banjo to the Nigerian situation, "I'm not dead yet!". He misses the poignancy of the end of that narrative. Banjo died. Eventually.

As the guns were trained on him, vomiting their metal messengers of death, he died.

The soul of Nigeria, today, is at the centre of a firing squad, with the guns of marginalisation, corruption, debilitating ignorance, sectionalism​, and whatnot, trained on her. She may cry again and again that she is not dead. But except these guns stop firing, she will die. That is an incontrovertible truth.

How many SNC's have we had? What has been the result? To think that typing out overly simplified solutions to fundamental problems that have perennially faced Nigeria and shaped every single facet of her socio-cultural and political facets- fundamental problems that have not been addressed, to think this will magically solve our problem is to reveal how out of tune Deji is with reality. We cannot wish away our problems. We cannot​ write it away either.

Deji goes ahead to say that since the Ibo's are no longer killed, then they have no reason to ask for a referendum for secession. In his narrow-mindedness, only a genocide should be reason enough to ask for secession. But that, even then, the glorious Third Force should be listened to- that even secession should not be a reason to secede. Essentially, he says everyone must stay in this forced marriage for which we had no say. He compounds the expression of his folly when he says we should just live together "happily ever after".

But this his pipe dream of "together happily ever after" is backed up with absolutely no facts. And when he goes on to say we are better off together than divided, I do not understand where he gets that idea from.

If the blood merchants who put together this contraption called Nigeria for their pecuniary gains, without regards to the several unique differences amongst the tribal groups, had put together Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana together into one country with a land mass approximately equal to Congo or Algeria, a buffoon would come to the conclusion that five countries cannot break away and function independently​. But we have these five countries existing relatively peacefully, side by side, dealing with their issues and making progress in their different ways.

Why can it not be the same for Nigeria as it presently exists? Who says that we are better together than divided? What are the indices from which that conclusion was drawn?

Yesufu, thinking he writes to unthinking people, says some really laughable things.

He says that the claim of a call to secession not being equal to a call to war is insincere. And that gathering arms in readiness for the eventuality of a war is proof that Biafrans are itching to be aggressors. This is an asinine suggestion. If he thinks that the possession of arms must be interpreted strictly as a warning of aggression and impeding war, but not as a possible safeguard against the mindless slaughter of innocent people demanding their right to self-determination and sovereignty, then indeed, it is Yesufu who needs a lesson in history.

The book of our nationhood has pages written with the blood of innocents mass murdered, and killed in droves- by rampaging mobs as well as soldiers. Unarmed people shot dead. Whole populations denied food and medicine and slaughtered for the fun of it, for the singular reason that they were Ibo's.

Now, Yesufu, in his silliness, suggests that the Ibo's should not arm themselves if their call for secession is truly sincere. That, therefore, leaves another option- a referendum. But Yesufu, the clown, shoots down the idea of a referendum too. He says the south-east is notorious for compromised elections and that since free and fair elections cannot hold in that region, then free and fair referendum cannot hold in that region.

Yesufu is a bumbling nitwit.

If we ignore the bloated census figures of a certain part of the country, if we ignore the child voting and disproportionate vote results compared to accredited voters in that part of the country, if we ignore the mass protests in that same part that usually end in blood-letting because of a loss of their popular candidate in polls, if we truly ignore all that and say that only the south-east has flawed electioneering processes, is that not an indictment on the systemic failure of the nation's electoral body? How is that a south-east problem?

If, truly, the Ibo's are beating the drums of war, then it is a drum that the system created.

Whose interests does it serve to be together yet not "together" in the real sense of the word? Whose interests does it serve to refuse to address all the issues of marginalisation and underdevelopment and, in fact, all the valid concerns of each unique group? Whose interests does it serve to continue to drag along this bumbling, unwieldy bulk of very disparate peoples in this geographic space who, when the chips are down, do not even see others as their brothers but as second class citizens as long as they do not share the same heritage or mother tongue?

How can we restructure the nation in such a way that every federating unit will take a more involved approach in their development and be responsible for the pace of their growth, rather than be tied to a central government?

These are valid questions Deji should ask. Or else remain silent. And not pollute the already befouled public space and discussions with his fetid ignorance.

While I used to be a strong advocate of one Nigeria by all means, I have grown wiser and have come to accept that the Nigerian project- this Luggardian contraption seems doomed to fail. Asides from the fact that the way Nigeria is presently constituted seems fashioned to serve the interests of a few to the detriment of the many- the interests of a section with a born-to-rule mentality over another section, asides from this fact, I believe that every people have a right to self-determination. And anyone advocating the everlasting legitimacy of this British colonial legacy, without seeking ways to adapt this contrivance to our present realities and persistent agitations, is nothing but a tyrant.

I suspect Deji is one.

This post is dedicated to common sense.

Awesome! Waiting with rapt attention for the part 2…