The Biafran ghost
18th July 2016

Like Banquo’s ghost, the past haunts us today,
again. Forty-nine years after the civil war, we are
still fighting the war. Some think the war is over.
They are wrong. The war is with us because we are
a nation of self-deceit. We lie to and at ourselves.
We say peace whereas tribulation lurks and
detonates everywhere.
That is why Boko Haram harangues us in the North.
It explains the resurgence of the IPOB and MASSOB
and the rumblings of the Niger Delta Avengers and
the barbarous entitlement of herdsmen. Even before
the past few years, when bombs were literally quiet,
tongues exploded between tribes. Rhetoric rattled
rhetoric. Tribes and tongues differed by saying
tribes and tongues differed. The June 12 excitement
was a rebirth of the divisions of the 1960’s.
We did not solve the problem when it confronted us.
When Gowon exploited his name as an acronym of
unity, GO ON WITH ONE NIGERIA turned out to be
an empty epithet, a feel-good delusion from a victor.
Nothing concrete was resolved other than fell the
enemy in battle.
Did we resolve the issue of abandoned properties?
Leading up to the war, pogrom lit up the North in
incandescent murders. Not only Igbo were killed as
many tendentious literatures say. Even Adichie’s
Half Of The Yellow Sun, for all its strengths,
portrayed the single story that the author has
campaigned against. The slaughter up North
targeted anyone who was not Yoruba, and that
included the sweep of minorities in the today’s Niger
Delta. Urhobo, Itsekiri, Edo, Efik, Ogoni, etc were
mincemeat in the cauldron of death.
Now, did we have any enquiries into that sanguinary
chapter? The northern elite, including political, feudal
and military leaders, reportedly encouraged the
barbarities. Has anyone been punished or even been
officially reprimanded? We have not even officially
investigated. We know too that Nzeogwu’s coup
was seen as tendentious, and it inspired some Igbo
to provoke northerners with their proprietary
swagger, boasting that they had taken over the
country. Have we looked at that, too? If the
swagger was bad, the killings were never justified.
But even at that, have we addressed them as a
people? Ironsi enacted Decree 34, and some analysts
said it was naïve because he did not intend to
introduce a unitary system to impose Igbo
hegemony. If that act was naïve, what of the
second act? He did not want to try the coup
plotters. That, according to critics, gave him away
as an Igbo jingoist.
Have we revisited the Aburi meeting, and its
aftermath, and how that confab either ossified or
laid bare the fissures of our inter-ethnic relations?
Were there blames? Where there acts of overreach
on both sides? Was the war avoidable? Did the
pogrom make war inevitable? How come a region
that knew it was tactically and materially inferior to
its opponent take the plunge into war?
So, we also had the war atrocities. We saw what
Ojukwu’s army did in the Midwest when Biafra
invaded, and the resentment overshadows
conversation up till today. We know of the killings of
the Igbo in Asaba and how Murtala’s Second
Division teased out trusting locals to welcome them
and killed them like animals. Gowon, who could not
rein in his generals, only had an apology over 40
years after. The apology, however heartfelt, never
brought closure.
So, when hostilities ended, Gowon declared that
there was no victor and no vanquished. We know
that was as vacuous as GOWON. We just wanted to
move on, like a child who walks into a party from a
bathroom without cleaning up. The smell and mess
linger.
The ghost has followed us ever since. In education,
over whether we should have catchment areas or
not. In the Orkar coup. In Saro Wiwa’s murder. In
the Matatsine imbroglio. In the meltdown of Fulani
and indigenes relations in the plateau. In the June
12 logjam. In the choice of Jonathan as president.
In the choice of Buhari as counter president. The list
is endless.
So, when many, including the self-serving Atiku,
called for restructuring, it was because the civil war
and ghosts of the many dead are still with us,
walking the Nigeria earth, apologies to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Developed nations
understand the merits of closure. Last week, Britain
unveiled the Chilcot report and picked to pieces all
the facts of that ignoble chapter of the Iraq War.
Tony Blair was exposed, as well as some of the
intelligence community and the parliament. The
nation looked itself in the mirror, and mea culpa
replaced a sense of righteousness.
On the Iraq war, the New York Times issued a
lengthy apology for allowing the emotion of the day
sways its professional duties. Next time, both
England and United States will think deeper before
throwing innocents at the teeth of battle. The crisis
of the Balkans is still lapping up its culprits today.
Enquiries have dredged up the bad guys and they
are subjected to the rule of law. The Hutus and
Tutsis have also had theirs and those who inflamed
the land to butchery have been exposed and
punished. Apartheid in South Africa had its Truth
and Reconciliation Commission.
The Second World War could not be concluded
without a clear resolution through the Nuremberg
trials. The First World War was concluded without
such an enquiry. The victors simply punished
Germany and isolated it. The result: a resurgent
Germany with the Hitler of hate.
A people must always learn not to take its injustice
for granted. During the Peloponnesian War, Athens
fell because it merely slaughtered its best generals
who did not pick up its dead at sea as was the
custom. The parliament did not reason. The absence
of its best brood of soldiers allowed Sparta to crush
it.
So, when Buhari stands accused as nepotist and
regionalist in his appointments, it is because he has
not transcended the hubris of the civil war. He
invokes GOWON but he denies it when his pen signs
an appointment. When does a chief of staff to a
president become a board member of Nigeria’s
choicest corporation? How do we call a truce with
the Avengers when the NNPC board is lopsided and
has only one name from the oil producing areas?
The civil war haunts because the hostilities have
never really ended. Unnerved on his throne, Macbeth
could not exorcise Banquo’s ghost. He said, “Avaunt
and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee, thy bone
is marrowless and thy blood is cold.”
The Biafran ghost still spills cold blood. We may
deny it and say our nation is not negotiable, but the
past keeps growling and badgering. The more we
claim we are together, the more apart we get.

COPIED

Posted By: Sam Omatseyeon:
SOURCE: THE NATION
http://www.thebiafratimes.co/2....016/07/the-biafran-g