the Biafra Story (1969) (9 page)

He was immediately sent for officer training at Eaton Hall, Chester, and emerged as a second lieutenant. (He is sometimes wrongly referred to as having been at Sandhurst.) After further courses at Hythe and Warminster, he returned home and got his first posting - to the Fifth Battalion based at Kano in Northern Nigeria. Two years later he was promoted Captain and sent to Army Headquarters at Ikeja Barracks, Lagos. This was in 1960, indevendence year.

For the wealthy bachelor officer of Nigeria's darling army, life was very pleasant. In 1961 he was sent to the West African Frontier Force training school at Teshie in nearby Ghana as a lecturer in tactics and military law. Top of the class in tactics was Lieutenant Murtela Mohammed.

Later that year Captain Ojukwu returned to the Fifth Battalion at Kano, but was soon promoted Major and sent to the First Brigade Headquarters at Kaduna. The same year he served at Luluabourg, Kasai Province, Congo, with the Third Brigade of the United Nations peace-keeping force during the Katangese secession. From here he was selected for further military training and in 1962 attended the-Joint Services Staff College in England. In January 1963 he was made a Lieutenant-Colonel and as such became the first indigenous Quartermaster General of the Nigerian Army.

It was while in this position that he took the decision and gained the experience that was later to enable him to give the lie to British Government claims that arms shipments from London to Lagos were only a part of 'traditional supplies'. While in office he operated a policy of 'buy the best at the price from whatever the source'. Under this policy most of the old arms contracts with British firms were cancelled, and fresh ones placed with more price-competitive manufacturers in Holland, Belgium, Italy, West Germany and Israel. By the time the present war broke out the Nigerian Army remained dependent on Britain for the supply of ceremonial dress uniforms and armoured cars only.

A year later he went back to the Fifth Battalion, this time as Commanding Officer. It was while he was at Kano during 1965 that the young Major Nzeogwu at Kaduna was plotting the January 1966 coup. No one has ever bothered to suggest that Colonel Ojukwu was party to, or knew about this coup. The plotters left him strictly alone. For one thing he was regarded as too much an 'establishment' figure; more important, however, was that it was known that his legalistic turn of mind would make the idea of rebellion against legally constituted authority repugnant to him.

When the coup of January 1966 exploded he was one of the few who did not lose his head. Gathering the Provincial Administrator and the Emir of Kano together in conclave he urged them both to join with him in keeping Kano and its province free from disturbance and bloodshed. They were successful; there was no rioting in Kano. Within hours he was on the telephone to General Ironsi pledging his support and that of the Fifth to the loyal. side.

A few days later, when Ironsi needed an Eastern Region officer to become Militar y Governor of the East, he called on Colonel Ojukwu to take the job.

At the age of thirty-three Colonel Ojukwu was appointed to govern his own people and the five million non-Ibo people of the Eastern Region. The carefree days were over. Those who knew him in the old days say that a considerable change came over him. With the responsibilities of government and later of popular leadership the lively young army officer subsided and gave way to a more sober figure. He still takes the post, rather than himself, extremely seriously. Ahead, although he did not know it at the time, lay the massacres of May 1966 of his own people, another coup d'6tat, more race slaughter, hatred, mistrust, broken pledges, the decision to follow the people's wishes and pull out of Nigeria, war, starvation, the calumny of half the world, and possibly death.

But after taking over in January 1966 it did not look like that. Like Colonels Fajuyi and Ejoor, Colonel Ojukwu lost little time in tackling the corruption and venality he found in public life in the East. As elsewhere in the South, but not in the North, some of the top politicians of the old regime were detained while the spring-cleaning went ahead.

Even the massacres of May in Northern Nigeria did little to dim his hopes for One Nigeria. After General Ironsi had had an assurance from the Sultan of Sokoto that there would be no more killing, Colonel Ojukwu took the opportunity of the visit of his friend the Emir of Kano to Nsukka to ask his people who had fled the North to go back to their jobs. Later he was to regret this stand, and the sense of remorse when many of those who took the advice died in later massacres still pains him today.

In two things Colonel Ojukwu is almost unique in the present situation. For one, thing he was not compromised by participation in the corrupt rule of the politicians; the present politicians of Lagos are largely those who wheeled and dealed in the old political circus where self-enrichment out of public funds was the order of the day. Again, he was not involved in either of the military coups; most of the present military musclemen behind the politicians in Nigeria today are the same group who put through the bloody coup of July 1966.

Secondly, he was a wealthy man in his own right. After his father died in 1966 he inherited large properties in Lagos and elsewhere. But the inheritance was not all in property. The old financier had large sums deposited in Swiss banks, and before he died he gave his second son the details and access to them. Had Colonel Ojukwu played things the way the Lagos clique wanted, following the July coup, he could have kept all that and still held office. By doing what he did he lost everything in Lagos and his entire fortune in Nigeria. As regards the money overseas, he insisted when the crunch came that the last penny of it should be spent on Biafra before any of the old Eastern Regions funds abroad were touched. The total fortune has been estimated at f.8,000,000.

Chapter 6.

The Autumn Atrocities

THE situation following the July coup was complex and deeply unhappy. As news of the killing of the Eastern Region soldiers in barracks all over Northern and Western Nigeria got back Ao the East, feeling ran high. Without their weapons, dis- guised in civilian clothes, walking by night and hiding by day, the first groups of officers and men who had escaped from the killings began to cross the Niger and tell the tale.

For Colonel Gowon the week was crucial. Several reasons have already been cited as the basis for his choice as leader of the plotters. That he was the next senior officer in line was obviously not true. His own explanation on the radio on I August that he had been named by a majority of the existing Supreme Military Council was also quickly discounted in the East. For one thing the Council did not make majority decisions, and for another thing it had not met. A third reason given for his selection, notably by expatriate writers at the time, was that he was 'the only man who could control the rebels'The new regime was faced with three urgent unsolved problems: the killing inside the army had to be stopped, a Supreme Commander acceptable to everyone had to be found, and the future basis of association of the four regions had to be sought.

Colonel Ojukwu, although not prepared to recognize the supremacy of Colonel Gowon, nevertheless realized that if anything of Nigeria was to be saved from the mess he would have to try to cooperate with the new regime. Towards this end he proposed by telephone from Enugu that there should be a meeting of representatives of the Military Governors to try to get agreement on at least a temporary association of the regional military power blocks that the coup had created.

The controlling force in the North, West and Lagos was now the Northern Army. The Easterners in 'the army' (i. E. the Federal Army) had been killed or chased out, most Midwesterners (and there were not many) had been of the Midwestern Ibo group and had thus been classed as Easterners, suffering the same fate, and the Westerners in the army were little more than a handful. Traditionally the Yorubas seldom presented themselves as candidates for the army.

The meeting of representatives was duly held on 9 August, and the vital agreement it reached, with the Northerners con-gions of curring, was that all troops should retu -rn to their re origin. Although often overlooked by later writers, this agreement might have saved Nigeria had it been carried through. The coup in the West had had the support only of the expoliticians of the Akintola days, who were still heartily disliked by the majority of the population. The return of the Northern soldiers to the North would have enabled the Westerners to speak'their mind, something quite impossible so long as there were garrisons of Northerners in every barracks and squads of them manning the roadblocks.

Chief Awolowo, freed from prison, still had enough popularity to speak for the West. But the pledge was never fulfilled by the new regime. The excuse given was that there were virtually no Yoruba troops to replace the Northerners. In fact security could have been assured by the police, for the Westerners had no cause to run amok. As it turned out the Northern soldiers stayed put; to the Westerners, as to the Easterners, seeming like an army of occupation, and often behaving Eke one.

In the East Colonel Ojukwu stuck to the letter of the agreement. The Northern-b@,,-n component of the garrison at Enugu was repatriated to the North by rail, and in accordance with the terms of the 9 August concordat, they were allowed to take. with them their arms and ammunition as a protection against being waylaid en route. These arms were then supposed to be sent back after the troops had got home. But once in Kaduna the troops from Enugu kept their weapons and no more was heard about them.

Elsewhere Eastern-born troops were clamouring to return home. Apart from the fugitives of 29 July and the succeeding days, there were other groups who were still intact. From the North some of them were sent home, but without arms or escort, and were forced to submit to repeated molesting on the way from the by now hostile populations through whom they passed. The tension grew.

By late in the month it became clear that there were still hundreds unaccounted for. That was when Colonel Ojukwu asked that the outstanding personnel be allowed to return home, and the twenty-two at Ikeja were executed in consequence.

These events were not without their effect in the East. After the May massacres in the North a Commission of Inquiry under the chairmanship of a British High Court judge had been instituted by General Ironsi. In doing this he was following the practice laid down by the British after the Jos riots of 1945 and the Kano killings of 1953. But before this Commission sat, he had asked his Chief of Staff to conduct a brief preliminary inquiry. Pressed several times before the Supreme Military Council to produce his findings, Colonel Gowon had procrastinated, claiming the report was not yet ready. In fact it never was ready, and after taking power he dismissed the Commission, which consequently never sat. As a result there was no apportionment of responsibility for the May killings, no prosecution in law of those responsible, and no compensation for the victims.

Thus a deep suspicion of Colonel Gowon grew in the East: it looked as if he had never intended the background to the May killings to come to light. This impression was heightened when he subsequently caused to be published a document that claimed the riots had been caused solely by the publication of the Unification Decree of 24 May. In fact this decree was the unanimous decision of the Supreme Military Council, which had as its members two Northerners, Colonel Hassan Katsina and Alhaji Kam Selem.

Far more important, and often overlooked, was a complete volte-face in Eastern thinking on the question of the future form of Nigeria. Previously the Easterners had been the foremost advocates of One Nigeria, li@d put more effort into the realization of this concept than any other ethnic group' and had constantly promoted its cause at the political level. But between 29 July and 12 September the East swung through 180

degrees. It was not, for them,, a happy experience, but one which they felt was dictated by recent events. A plaintive paragraph in one of the official publications of the Eastern Region Government in the autumn explains the conclusion the Easterners had come to:

Recent events have shown even more clearly that the belief of the Easteners that only a strong central authority could keep the people of the country together was presumptuous, and perhaps an over-simplification of the situation. Now, the whole basis on which the Eastener's conception of one nation, one common citizenship and one destiny was built, appears never to have existed.

It was not an agreeable confession to have to m4e, and the sense of disillusionment wag profound, almost traumatic. Even today it is still reflected in the tone of those in Biafra who were at the centre of affairs at that time. Meanwhile in each region discussions at every level were taking place to decide the posture each region would adopt at the forthcoming Ad Hoc Constitutional Review conference to be held in Lagos starting on 12 September. At this conference the East proposed a loose association of states with a wide degree of internal autonomy, not because that was the Eastern dream, but because it seemed to be the only format which took cognizance of the realities of the situation. Three months later Colonel Ojukwu expressed this view in two sentences: 'It is better that we move slightly apart and survive. It is much worse that we move close and perish in the collision.'

The North also opted for a loose federation, but even looser than the East had proposed. The Northern proposal was so loose that it amounted to a Confederation of States; and to leave no doubt about their wishes, the Northern delegation appended a detailed memorandum about the East African Common Services Organization, which it suggested as a model. In their proposals the Northern delegation had this to say about Nigerian unity: