Intolerance,Religious Bigotry And Corruption

Over one million people died in an avoidable debacle. For soccer loving Nigerians that equates about 16 Emirates capacity stadia (at 60,361 sitting capacity per Stadium) crammed full of dead Nigerians, or 6,534 (six thousand five hundred and thirty four) Dana Air Crashes with 153 Dead Nigerians in each doomed aircraft.
I hear the same burning indignation that some Nigerians espoused when details and pictures of the 1966 pogroms filtered into Eastern Nigeria. Rightly so, the blood of the average man on the streets of Enugu was as fever pitch hot as (or even hotter than) the blood of his kindred that had been violently spilled under the scorching Northern sun. Rivulets of blood, Igbo blood had collected in clotting pools in the streets of Kano, Kadunna, Ibadan, etc. Some of the youths aggregated angrily in the streets of the major cities in Eastern Nigeria; Enugu, Onitsha, Owerri, Umuahia, Port Harcourt turning their angst into vitriolic bursts of war chants…‘Ojukwu nye anyi egbe! Nye anyi mma! Ka anyi gbue Gowon! Nye any egbe! Nye anyi mma! Ka anyi gbue Gowon!’…‘Ojukwu arm us with guns! Give us Machetes and we will kill Gowon! Arm us with guns! Give us Machete’s and we will kill Gowon!’.
Those where the heady days that preceded the Biafran civil war, just like the heady days of today…then atrocities where occurring with dizzying speed, young and old lifes were being snuffed out daily, violently terminated while two swashbuckling young men on the opposite sides of the divide held my peoples’ destiny in their hands; Jack (later to be addressed as Yakubu) Gowon, barely 32 years old at the time (I will be 40 by February next year!) and the loquacious and articulate Emeka Ojukwu, a young 33 year old Colonel.
Some claim with the benefit of hindsight that the Federal Government, as part of its annihilation and genocidal agenda, goaded the secessionist Biafra into a war it was ill prepared for. I also suspect that Ojukwu will have been tarred, feathered and run out of town (assuming he could escape with his life) if he had not heeded to his peoples clamour for war, a survivalists quest for self determination.
So to this rabid baying hound, I say, I hear your bloodcurdling growls and grunts, but I also know the history of my beloved country Nigeria. I am Igbo, by the way, which you are obviously not and I am also from the ‘Christian South’ (a gross misnomer) i.e. the supposed sworn enemy of ‘the ‘Muslim North’ (another gross misnomer). But unlike you, I have chosen to extract some insidious lessons from the embers of rabid ethnicity, the fractional and religious intolerance that the likes of you fanned in the run-up to the failed Biafran secession….trust me, I know of that and have read a significant part of the literature (inclusive of some tomes not available in the public domain) more than most.
Prior to the pogroms of 1966, my late father was well cocooned in the luxuriant life of the then emerging Lagos upper class. He was the Press Secretary to one of the ‘powers that be’ however the second (abi na third) wave of pogroms forced him to abdicate Lagos. By sheer providence, he missed being part of the ill fated trip that cost both Ironsi and Fajuyi their lifes. Upon the declaration of Biafra he proceeded to join the Biafrian propaganda machine and together with the likes of Senator Uche Chukwumerije, served as the focal point of that effort, a platform that up till today is widely regarded by historians as one of the most effective wartime propaganda campaigns.
Just recently, through Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, we have since learnt that though a lot of Nigerians have forgotten the pains of war, Steve Jobs became an Atheist after he confronted his Lutheran Church pastor over Life Magazine’s cover picture of two starving Biafran children. He wanted to confirm if God was aware of such inhuman suffering and did nothing about it. Once he was assured that an all knowing God knows everything, including the suffering of the children of Biafra, he turned his back on the Christian God for good. That was an American! That memory stayed with him till well after the war…and he died an atheist about 43 years later.
For the secessionist, even after the war, despite the ‘no victor, no vanquished’ post war mantra, irrespective of how much you had in your Bank account, my late father and all Biafran adults received a 20 Nigerian Pounds ex-gratia payment from the Federal Government of Nigeria as redemption for any asset owned prior to the war. A new beginning you may say, but it is imperative to note that every family living in the erstwhile Biafran enclave post the war, started life afresh on 20 Nigerian pounds! Other polices were designed to emasculate the vanquished. The victorious federal government declared that Biafran citizens who owned property in parts of the country outside the former secessionist territory had effectively ‘abandoned’ those assets. So my maternal grandfather and many other easterners lost their legitimate possessions in various corners of Nigeria. As if that wasn’t sufficient forbearance, my late father and many of his ilk were not reabsorbed into the post-war civil and diplomatic service (ostensibly because of their role in Biafra) till almost 3 years after the war had ended, by which time all their subordinates in the civil and diplomatic service had become their superiors.
Today, I am a proudly detribalised Nigerian, not because I think that the Biafran adventure may not or could not have worked but that I now realize that in the sphere of international diplomacy and politics, might is right, and that only if the super powers (like the UK and US that supported the Nigerian Federal might) support you will your agenda be realizable. Today, we all bear the brunt of Nigeria’s myriad social and economic inconsistencies…I, just like you (possibly more sef), and much more than you can imagine.
So my point? Today, some eutopically make it seem as if Biafra will have been the panacea to all or woes, but during the lifetime of the short lived Republic, issues of marginalisation of the minority tribes by the majority Igbos had already began to rear its head. Issues of corruption by the newly emerged Biafran aristocrats (plus senior military officers) where already threatening to tear the fabric of the society apart. Unfortunately, most separatist choose to remember the romanticised and lionized version of Biafran history, the lifes of its leaders have become hagiography…my brother, Biafran had all the symptomatic manifestations of the issues that plagued Nigeria! You may argue that it constituted predominately of Christians, however it will have been a matter of time before the Ijaws, the Ibibios, the Ikwerre, the Efik etc cried foul…..Your religious bigotry and fanaticism has blinded you to the root cause of the problem…intolerance, religious bigotry and corruption, thus you are pursuing shadows, trying to cure the symptomatic manifestation.
As for Islam being evil, oh boy! A little knowledge is truly a bad thing. No religion is intrinsically evil. However, religious fanaticism, such as the one you are currently exhibiting, is repugnant and is the catalyst that leads to intolerance and the destruction of societies. Read your history books..anti-semitism and Islamaphobia where triggered by the Christian directed pogroms that preceded the first crusade in 1096, and ran through to the last…eight bloody crusades that are equivalent to the current day mayhem in some of the countries you mentioned; Libya, Iraq, etc…Those crusades, just like the modern day adventures of the US and its allies, were orchestrated under the garbs of the Church (‘God willed it’ was the Crusaders’ battle cry) but was intended to help the European Monarchy acquire wealth and divert the energies of their increasingly adventurous peerage.
Unfortunately my dear brother, in our not too distant history…Christianity was a much more bloody and violent religion than Islam. This was fanatic Christianity…easily activated by a corrupt leadership, be it religious or ethnic, to divert the mind of the masses from the purloining.
So what is my point? At the end of the day, it is about a moral regeneration and tolerance! As my Igbo elders will say, it is about ‘Egbe be ugo be, onye si ibe ya ebena nku akwana ya, ka ma ya gosi ya ebe o ga ebe’…meaning, let the kite perch on the same branch (or bough) that the eagle will like to perch, any bird that resists its peer from perching, let it not sprain its wing, rather let the protagonist show its peer a better suited branch to perch on’…War has devastating consequences my bro…please take note.




Jekwu Ozoemene