第 9 页

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.

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 Mid-

westerners (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 ex-

politicians 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.'t

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:

Recent events have shown that for Nigerian leaders to try and

The Problem of Nigerian Unity: The Case of Fastern Nigeria, p. 28. t Verbatim Report of Proceedings of Supreme Military Council, Aburi, Ghana, 4-5 January 1967, p. 45.

build a future for the country on rigid political ideology will be unrealistic and disastrous. We have pretended for too long that there are no differences

between the peoples of this country. The hard fact which we must honestly accept as of paramount importance in the Nigerian experiment especially for the future is that we are different peoples brought together by recent accidents of history. T6 pretend otherwise would be folly.

The similarity of conclusion in that passage and the one quoted earlier from the Eastern publication are obvious. For the first time ever it appeared that East and North were agreed on the self-evidence of their own incompatibility. . The North went even further, asking that in any new Nigerian Constitution a secession clause should be written, adding: 'Any member state of the Union should reserve the right to secede completely and unilaterally from the Union, and to make arrangements for cooperation with the other members of the Union in such a manner as they may severally or individually deem fit.'t

Unlike the Eastern attitude, the North's viewpoint was completely in accord with decades- of tradition. That was when the second volte-face occurred. There seemed after a few days in Lagos to be a crisis inside the Northern delegation. Colonel Katsina arrived from Kaduna; the delegates hurriedly left for the North; the conference was adjourned. When the Northerners arrived back after consultations, they presented an entirely different set of proposals. This time they wanted a strong and effective central government, thus diminishing the autonomy of the Regions; they agreed to the creation of more states in Nigeria (the idea had Iways been abhorrent to them before); and they agreed to cut but any mention of secession.

There have been various explanations offered for this extraordinary break with all traditional Northern attitudes. One is that the Middle Belt elements, whose infantrymen composed

Original memorandum submitted by the Northern Delegation to the Nigerian Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference which opened in Lagos on

12 September 1966. Quoted in full in The North and Constitutional Developments in Nigeria, p. 23.

f Ibid., p. 25.

the bulk of the army, made plain that they did not want a

impose on return to regional autonomy, since that would re

them the hegemony of the Emirs which they found so irksome; and that they pressured both the North and the central government with their preponderance in the army, on which both sets of rulers now depended, to get their 'way. If this is true, then it brought a new force into Nigerian politics, the minority tribes, and caused what Mr. Walter Schwarz refers to as 'the third coup'.

Another explanation is that it occurred to the Emirs, or was explained to them, that virtually autonomous regions would depend largely on their own revenue, and that the North would then be left to repay the massive loans owing for the Kainji Dam project and the Bornu Railway Extension, while the East would collar most of the oil revenue.

A third explanation is that once again the British diplomats got to work and used their undoubted influence in the North to urge that it was certainly not Whitehall's wish that Nigeria should become a Confederation of States.

Fourthly, it is possible that the Northern rulers realized that they could afford to let minority tribe figures take the front of the stage in a unified Nigeria, and could even afford the creation of new states, provided they remained the true power base in the background by making sure that the central government remained dependent of its power on the army, and the army remained the tool of the North. Some evidence to support this view came later when, after the North had ostensibly been divided into six states, Colonel Katsina was asked by a B.B.C. correspondent whether this change in any way affected the traditional power structure in the North. He re-

plied, 'Not in the slightest'. When, half way through the present war, Gowon looked as if he might assert himself, Katsina moved a brigade of Hausas to the northern approaches of Lagos and calmly appointed himself Army Chief of Staff in succession to another northerner, Colonel Bissalla.