Echoes from Biafra 1

 

First, I want to identify myself, to give an indication of where my position is coming from. I am of Igbo ethnic group. I experienced the Civil War first-hand.

The first shot of the war in present-day South East was fired in Alo-Uno, a border village in Nsukka; part of present-day Enugu State. I was there at the time. Some hours before that, the first batch of Federal troops had entered the then Eastern Region in Gakem, a border village in present-day Cross River State.

I was a senior primary school pupil of Alo-Uno Primary School, when the war started. I remember what the experience was like, including our evacuation to Enugu town; and further, to my village in Anambra State.

From then, till the end of the war, in my post-war secondary-school years and after, I had developed a keen interest in the study of wars, starting from the Civil War. I later joined the Nigerian Army as an officer-cadet.

During my service years, I retained a consummate interest in military history and conflict studies across the world, with closer interest in African conflict spots: Morroccan war with Western Sahara; Arab-Israeli wars; Algerian years of fundamentalist bloodbath; the Tanzanian-supported guarrilla war that chased away President Idi Amin of Uganda; Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict; Somalia; the long Congo war (s); Liberian and Sierra Leone civil wars; Angolan war with Jonas Savimbi’s rebel army; the anti-Apartheid long war, with its extended dimensions to the wars in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

Many years ago, I had argued that there was a major difference between the South West (Yoruba) and the South East (Igbo), when it comes to thinking about going to war. In about the past three centuries, before the 20th Century, the Yoruba ethnic group, which cuts across about four countries of present-day West Africa (majority of them in Nigeria), had fought several serious wars, some of which were very devastating and protracted on-and-off conflicts.

They ran a vast empire that cut across about three nations of the present-day West Africa, with headquarters in present-day South West Nigeria. Their racial memory has a better understanding of what war is. Dissent and dissidents abound, but they remain an ineffective minority, with loud voices that can dish out insults and abuses.

On the other hand, the Igbo had hardly had any experience of serious war, other than inter-village communual conflicts. They are traditionally of republican administrative structure, and personal enterprises in trade and commerce. I first made this argument in a discussion with fellow Igbos as to whether Awolowo betrayed the Igbos by not declaring secession of Western Region from Nigeria, after Ojukwu did so for Eastern Region in 1967.

In Igbo land in the late 1960s, it was relatively easier to mobilise public support for the secession war by playing up victimhood emotions and coordinated propaganda narratives that presented half-facts as the whole truth. The secession war lasted just 30 months (two and a half years), and Biafra was roundly defeated in battle.

It was a progressive combat defeat from beginning to the end. It was not any peace talk that ended the war; nor was it any international intervention. It was a clear defeat —  one of the shortest full-scale wars in contemporary African conflict studies.

By its second year, many top Biafran leaders had moved their families out of the land. In the last weeks of the war, many other top leaders, including Ojukwu, fled to other countries; and the remaining frontline commanders, particularly Brigadier Achuzia who refused to flee (he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier by Ojukwu, as he, Ojukwu, was set to flee the land), reached out to surrounding Federal troops to surrender.

It was a completely hopeless situation: no logistics, no food, no ammunition, demoralized and confused troops, at a time when even the shrinked Biafraland had been dissected into three parts (Biafra 1, Biafra 2 and Biafra 3), with virtual no-man’s-land in-between; and surrounded by Federal troops!

The present drumbeat of war in the South East is driven by dirty politics carried too far. Feeding the flame of passion with provocative rascality, insults and abuses, ethnic hate propaganda and coordinated lies, in which there is even no attempt to present a verifiable evidence: statistical facts, to prove the battle cry of marginalisation.

All that is required is the “Big-Lie” strategy as propounded by Joseph Goebbel, the Nazi propaganda minister of the Second World War: “Tell the lie boldly and repeatedly, and the masses will take it as the truth.”

But that strategy didn’t save Hitler’s Germany, despite that it had a very formidable military force. Germany was roundly defeated and its capital city, Berlin, reduced to rubbles by massive ground and aerial bombings.

Back to Nigeria, those who make stupid gambles of war today in the South East, trusting in their version of the”Big-Lie” strategy, may sooner than later face a catastrophic and even more humiliating and confusing collapse of their dream and ego.

I rest my case.

• Col. Nass (rtd), my guess columnist today, writes from Enugu, Enugu State.