The Nigerian Civil War is 50 years old this year. But many Nigerians are ignorant of what led to the war and who did what. As from this week, City People will bring you various stories and accounts of the war from different stakeholders in the country at that time.
We would also provide accounts from those who have written about the war in the last 50 years.
What did London journalist, John de St. Jorre have to say about the Civil War. John de St. Jorre covered the conflict for the London observer and he visited both sides of the fighting line several times.
He is also one of the lucky guys who had access to a lot of materials never published before, which he now published in his famous book The Nigerian Civil War which he first wrote in 1972.
At noon on 4th January, 1967, a group of young Nigerian Army Officers, a naval commodore and a couple of senior policemen were sitting around a large polished table, adorned with a bowl of flowers, in former President Nkrumah’s luxurious weekend lodge in Aburi, Ghana.
The officers, immaculately turned out in crisply starched uniforms and gleaming Sam Brownes, were listening intently to an older man, General Ankrah, head of the Ghanaian military government which had ousted Nkrumah almost a year before, who was talking in slow, measured tones.
Apart from a couple of confidential secretaries there was no one else in the room, but over in a corner on a small table stood a tape-recorder; a spool of tape revolved slowly and the voice-level needle flickered with the rise and fall of the general’s voice. Outside there was a cordon of heavily armed guards and security men, a couple of light aircraft standing by, a restless helicopter whose clattering rotors occasionally jerked the tape-recorder’s needle to its maximum limit, and a gaggle of pressmen kicking their heels and telling each other increasingly improbable stories.
It was a curious and historic meeting. For the first and last time during the Nigerian drama, the 2 principal actors-Gowon and Ojukwu-sat face-to-face, calling each other ‘Jack’ and ‘Emeka’, and talking over the problems which had estranged them. Such was the state of fear and mistrust in Nigeria at the time that the only acceptable venue for a meeting of the country’s Supreme Military Council was outside the country itself. And even then the participants insisted on flying back to
their regional capitals at the end of the first day and returning on the morning of the second. Aburi is probably unique in the annals of historic confrontations. The entire 2 day proceedings, apart from 2 short breaks, were recorded by the Ghanaians who, afterwards, gave each military governor and Gowon a copy of the tapes. The Eastern government later issued its own in sets of 12 ten-inch long-playing records.
The Aburi meeting was a watershed in the Nigerian crisis. Despite the brief moment of euphoria which followed the apparently successful discussions, it was, henceforth, to be downhill all the way. It is vital to see Aburi in the context of the pre-conference state of mind of the principals as well as in the atmosphere of the Nigeria to which they flew back after the champagne toasts and mutual congratulations were over. Ojukwu came to the meeting from the traumatised and aggrieved Eastern Region, which had already developed something of a siege mentality. His secessionist ‘hawks’ were flying high and opposed his attendance. His own position was, however, secure enough as long as he showed no weakness, real or imagined, with the Federal Government; this was one of the reasons why he turned up with a bevy of advisers and the most carefully prepared brief of all. Ojukwu’s Strategy was to bring back a concrete agreement on something as near to a confederal system of government as possible. He stated it elegantly and persuasively, ‘it is better that we move slightly apart and survive. It is much worse that we move closer and perish in the collision. He came to Aburi to re-write the Nigerian constitution-and largely succeeded.
Gowon and the other military governors arrived in Ghana in a very different frame of mind. They saw it less as a constitutional conference with full powers and much more as an informal, ice-breaking gathering
in the style of an officers’ mess committee meeting, the first, they hoped, of many to come. Few advisers attended, little detailed preparation was done beforehand and the politicians were kept out of it. General Ankrah, somewhat naively, echoed this in his opening speech: Soldiers are statesmen, he said, and if you could cut the politicians out altogether and leave things to the military men there would be no more wars. There was an assumption, evident in the content and tone of the remarks on the federal side, that the main priority was to get on talking terms with the East again, patch up the basic problems in a general way and leave the ‘small print’ and the follow-up action to the civil servants and the ‘legal boys’. There was an equally firm assumption that, with such an improvement in personal relations, future meetings of the Supreme Military Council in Nigeria would present no difficulty and would, therefore, occur frequently, enabling residual problems to be ironed out. There was, however, another reason for the amorphous and loosely knit nature of the federal strategy. It is often assumed that Aburi was a straight fight between Ojukwu and the rest; nothing could be further from the truth because, as the records make clear, the Federal camp was both divided and confused. The West was bitter about the Northern troops still stationed there.
The Mid-West was out of line with the North (Mid-Westerners had also suffered in the July coup and September massacres) and, to a certain extent, with Lagos too. But underpinning the Federal side and its assumptions was a strong, though ill-defined corporate feeling that, despite all the disasters and bloodshed, a basis of trust still existed among the leader- ship-after all, none of the men seated around that gleaming table had blood on his hands-that the situation was now improving and that they all genuinely continued to believe in the ultimate aim of ‘One Nigeria’ (i.e. a Federal Nigeria) and a unified, national army.
But did Ojukwu also subscribe to those sentiments? Was Aburi for him a serious attempt to preserve the unity of Nigeria by arranging a temporary ‘pulling apart’ in order to move together again when passions had cooled? Or was it merely a convenient device-and an excellent window-dressing-to gain time and disguise his secession plans?
The Aburi meeting, for all its detail and 50,000 words, is inconclusive.
But it does reveal, perhaps better than anything else, the contrast in character and style between Ojukwu and Gowon and the fundamental difference in approach by the Eastern and Federal delegations. Seated on opposite sides of the table Ojukwu and Gowon were as different from each other as chalk is from cheese. The former with his broad, powerful face, covered with a bushy beard, high forehead, the hair receding prematurely and his strong compact body; the latter, smaller, lighter, more delicate in build and facial outline, boyish yet with a purposeful military moustache and a soldierly bearing. Ojukwu: 33 years old, the son of a self-made transport millionaire knighted by the Queen of England; like many Ibos, a Catholic, born in the North and given the best education that money could buy (King’s College, Lagos-Nigeria’s ‘Eton’-Epsom and Oxford); served for two years in the Nigerian administration then joined the army in 1957, officer training not at Sandhurst, but Eaton Hall where British national service infantrymen used to go; like Gowon, served in the Congo; a good battalion commander, a good disciplinarian, a good diplomat and an establishment figure par excellence; clever rather than intellectual, a complex man with undeniable star quality. Gowon, whose much more humble origins I have already described, looked and sounded far less assured, certainly honest and well-meaning, but naive and lacking in confidence with none of the incisive logic of the burly bearded man, yet with none of the controlled histrionics either. From the Aburi tapes, there is no doubt who is the stronger, more determined, and more mature personality.
The Eastern government’s proposals, nearly all of which were accepted by Gowon and the others, appeared to be reasonable enough on the surface. From the Eastern viewpoint a cooling-off period was essential. Eastern troops could no longer live in the same barracks as Northerners. A de facto separation of the army was agreed, but Gowon stressed that ‘we should keep the army’s oneness as much as possible’. Discussion of the army inevitably led on to the nature of the country’s government. ‘Is 3 a government in Nigeria today? Is there a central government?’ Major Johnson, the administrator of Lagos asked, striking at the heart of the problem. Ojukwu said there was not; after the July coup the country ‘resolved itself into three areas-the Lagos, West, North area; the Mid- West area; and the East area’. No one disagreed. Ojukwu refused to accept Gowon as Supreme Commander, as successor to Ironsi-whose grisly end was delicately discussed out of earshot of the microphones-and put forward a suggestion that the Federal Government should have a titular head.
On the second day, another proposal from Ojukwu on these lines was accepted. Gowon was to be down-graded from ‘Supreme Commander’ to ‘Commander-in-Chief’ and head of the Federal Military Government. The titles mattered less than the new powers which were given to the Regions. Apart from controlling their internal affairs, the concurrence of each Region was now required for any major decision affecting the country as a whole. This, in effect, gave each Region the power of veto over a host of crucial subjects ranging from declaring war on an outside power and the signing of treaties to the appointment of senior army and police officers, Federal civil servants and ambassadors.
The complex details and difficult task of squaring the new system of government with the old pre-January 1966 civilian constitution, which was to remain in force, were left to the law officers and civil servants to sort out. Meanwhile, to placate the West, it was agreed that massive recruitment of Yorubas into the army should begin and that Ibo civil servants who had fled from Lagos would continue to be paid from Federal funds until 31st March, the end of the financial year.
Aburi amounted to a de facto Confederation, though no one on the Federal side of the table appeared to realise it at the time. The recalcitrance, or even just the non-attendance of one Region at Supreme Military Council meetings could throw a spanner into the whole machinery of government and paralyse the country. Whether it could have worked in practice-and confederations, even in ideal conditions, have never worked for very long4-is impossible to say because it never came to the test. But it seems highly unlikely considering the bitterness, mutual mistrust and uncertainties of the time.
For Ojukwu, Aburi was a perfect solution. It provided him with a piece of paper to wave at his secessionist ‘hawks’ back home and say, with justification, that he had not sold out. It also gave him ample room to manoeuvre in the future: he could either move back towards the Federation or away from it still within the letter, if not the spirit, of the agreements. He had, moreover, shown both the Easterners and the outside world-of growing importance to the Eastern cause-that he was a reasonable man but not a subservient one. Finally, it enabled him to disguise his own feelings about secession-if indeed they were irrevocably formed-under a cloak of expediency and gained him extra time to prepare whatever contingency plans he considered necessary.
But if Aburi was made for Ojukwu and if the opposition was neither very astute nor very determined, he still played his hand brilliantly-and with feeling. His manner, somewhat theatrical (the rise and fall of his voice was about as exciting as the rhythm of a metronome) nevertheless conveyed the terrible sense of loss and shock in the East and pointed up the contrasting attitudes on each side of the Niger at that time. He crushed Gowon’s repeated attempts to put the whole thing on the level of a jolly ‘get-together-of-the-lads-in-the-mess’ with bitter scorn. One of the most symbolically revealing remarks of the meeting comes after Gowon had made a particularly poor attempt at a joke. Ojukwu snaps back, ‘we are obviously not talking the same language.
For Gowon himself, Aburi was a complete reversal of the strong policy lines he had sketched out in his seminal speech on 30th November. The creation of states was never mentioned; confederation, previously ruled out, stepped smartly in again through the back door; and the use of force his ultimate sanction-was solemnly renounced on the first day of the meeting. In obligingly agreeing to practically everything that Ojukwu proposed-the latter, it became apparent, had prepared statements, proposals, even communiqués at his side for every contingency-Gowon and his colleagues eased the current tension momentarily at the cost of redoubling it, if or when Aburi backfired. By transferring Nigeria’s sovereignty from executive leader to the Supreme Military Council which was henceforth dependent upon the unanimous agreement of all its Regional members for decisions, it clearly required ideal conditions of peace, mutual trust and- a united dedication to keep the country together if the Council (and the agreements) were to work at all. That such conditions were not present was evident almost as soon as the military leaders left Nkrumah’s luxurious lodge and returned to the bitter realities of their own country. And as the aftermath was to show, Gowon and his colleagues at Aburi hopelessly underestimated both the mood and strength of the secessionist forces in the East and the determination of The Federalists in Lagos.
Aburi, as one writer later put it, was ‘to die on the vine’. 5 Even the early publicity acclaiming it as a success helped to kill it, for the more people talked about the agreements the more confusing and contradictory they became. Ojukwu set the ball rolling with a Press conference in Enugu the day after he returned from Ghana. ‘It was unanimously agreed … that the Regions should move slightly farther apart than before,’ he said. ‘The East believes in confederation … we have gone a long way towards that as a result of this meeting.’ Meanwhile, the federal civil servants in Lagos were passing a cold and critical eye over the document the soldiers had brought back so triumphantly. The more they read the more appalled they became for, whatever they thought of the integrity and intentions of Ojukwu and the Eastern military they had no doubts that their own former colleagues-top Ibo civil servants like Francis Nwokedi, Pius Okigbo, and Cyprian Ekwensi-having lost all were hell bent on secession and would use the Aburi Accord to further that end.
They immediately wrote a devastating Memorandum, punching holes through virtually every clause of the agreement, spelling out its Unworkability, how it would lead to the break-up of the Federation, and adding a few gratuitous political ideas of their own. (Although marked ‘Top Secret’ this document was smuggled to Ojukwu by an Eastern agent and later published in full in Enugu.)
Then Gowon, like Ojukwu, under pressure from his ‘hawks’, told the country what he thought Aburi meant at a Press Conference in Lagos on 26th January. Clearly much influenced by the civil servants and other federalists, he back-tracked some distance and produced quite a different interpretation, highlighting both the discrepancy between the basic assumptions of the two sides and the ‘all things to all men’ nature of the accord itself. ‘We did not go to Aburi to write a new Constitution for Nigeria … however, we did agree to return to the status quo of January 17th, 1966.’ He reasserted his position as ‘supreme commander’ with direct and sole operational command over the entire army (‘we definitely decided against Regional armies,’ he said) and promised the supporters of new states that the ‘issue will have to be given early consideration’. The ‘Aburi spirit’, 3 short weeks after the meeting, was already flickering out and both principals were to blame: Ojukwu for not resisting the temptation to spell out his ‘Confederal’ victory the moment he got home and thus opening the old wound, and Gowon for not ignoring the challenge and then publicly reneging on certain crucial parts of the agreement.
However, serious attempts were made to try and reconcile the different interpretations of the ill-starred accord. Prolonged meetings of top civil servants and the ‘legal boys’ from all the Regions took place during February in Benin. Unable to agree among themselves, all they could do was to give their opinions and then refer the problem to the Supreme Military Council. But the latter could not meet-Ojukwu claimed it was too dangerous for him to travel outside the East-to discuss the issues, let alone reconcile them. The result was stalemate and drift at government level and a new upswelling of bitterness down below.
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