CHAPTER SEVEN
The Nigerian Civil War
The state of Nigeria was an artificial creation of British imperialism and its near disintegration during the latter half of the 1960s bore out the doubts that Macmillan expressed on his visit in January 1960 during his tour of Africa. From the moment of independence, indeed in the run-up to it, there had been fierce pulls away from the centre by the three regions of the North, the West and the East with the two smaller southern regions fearing domination by the North. Each region had a population greater in size than those of most other African countries. When Britain extended its power over what later became Nigeria it created separate colonies, which were only amalgamated to form a single Nigeria by Lord Lugard in 1914. Thereafter, the British colonial administrators fostered strong regional governments and, if anything, encouraged a sense of rivalry between the component parts of its colony while maintaining a balance from the centre. In 1914 there was no historical basis for Nigerian unity except British imperial convenience. At independence, therefore, the new Nigeria was based upon three largely autonomous regions whose interests tended to pull against any central authority and both before and after the British had departed there was intense rivalry as to which group or combination should control the centre. A further complication resulted from the fact that about two million of the Ibo people from the Eastern Region were dispersed in other parts of Nigeria, many of them holding jobs in the more conservative Islamic North where their presence was often resented. This structure, with its inbuilt tensions, that the new state inherited at independence produced increasingly divisive strains in the years 1960–66. Efforts to balance the claims and counter-claims of the three regions failed to satisfy the aspirations of any one of them and the federal political system began to fall apart.
The complexities of Nigeria’s history need to be understood in order to explain what occurred after independence. For centuries, until modern times, the North, the great majority of whose people were Muslims, had looked overland across the Sahara for its inspiration. In the South, the forests had isolated and fragmented the tribes and though there developed a clear North-South division, there were also many other divisions including the Yoruba kingdoms in the West, the Benin kingdom in the mid-West and the Ibos of the East who were less hierarchical and more democratic than any of the others. Then came the Europeans: at first on the coast as traders and slavers, then as imperialists who extended their influence into the interior by trade. It is one of the great ironies of West Africa’s colonial history that while the French have been accused of ‘balkanizing’ their vast territories of West and Equatorial Africa prior to independence so as to ensure their continuing post-independence influence, the British in Nigeria were accused of the opposite – the creation of a huge artificial state whose three main ethnic groups ought to have had individual countries of their own.
When Nigeria became independent on 1 October 1960, the stage-managed grandeur of the state occasion and the resultant euphoria briefly acted to mask the inherent contradictions that the new government had to face. Earlier that year Macmillan had remarked on the arbitrary imposed frontiers, which he described as ‘criminal’ in the way they divided tribal territories, and his political antennae sensed a looming regional-federal crisis. He was not alone in his forebodings about the stresses that Nigeria would face once independence had become an accomplished fact. At least the discovery of oil in the late 1950s gave rise to hopes of rapid economic developments although oil could create as many problems as it solved: ‘Shell alone is estimated to have invested a greater sum in Nigeria than the total manufacturing investment in that country. By 1964 the company claimed to have sunk £130 million in its Nigerian industry.’1 Since most of the oil was found in the East, in what would become Biafra during the civil war, it was to play a significant role in that war, persuading the Ibos that they could create a viable state of their own, and ensuring that the Federal Government would make every effort to obtain control of the oilfields as quickly as possible once hostilities were under way. By 6 September 1968 most of the oil-producing areas of Biafra had been taken by the Federal forces so that Biafra thereafter did not even have oil as a bargaining counter.
CIVIL GOVERNMENT 1960–66
In 1960 the three leading politicians were the Ibo Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Yoruba Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the Hausa Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. As politicians prior to independence they had each demonstrated remarkable political talents yet between them they failed Nigeria in the post-independence years. Balewa as the Federal Prime Minister did his best to achieve a balance between the regions but he was never strong enough to hold the country together. Two other powerful political figures were the northern hereditary ruler, Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, who was a champion of Northern rights and never thought in terms of a greater Nigeria, and Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Federal Minister of Finance. Given its background, what would best have suited Nigeria at independence would have been an authoritarian, radical regime capable of overriding the regional concerns of most other politicians. Unfortunately, the only real radicalism produced in Nigeria had been against the British and once they had departed politics descended into an argument about how the national ‘cake’ should be shared and the cake was in any case severely limited. A federal system ought to be used to unite a range of people who have in common more than the differences that separate them. Unfortunately in Nigeria, it appeared to work the other way round: ‘When self-government came, it came separately, at different times to the North and the South. Independence was possible only because the federal system enabled the various peoples to keep each other at arm’s length. Above all, the system was intended to provide a guarantee that no one tribe could easily dominate the rest.’2 Underlying political tensions were the problem, peculiar to all Africa at that time, of rising expectations that the government could provide jobs for all its citizens. ‘The government is the only substantial employer; and the output of school-leavers continually outstrips the number of new jobs available. This makes politics ruthless. Office means a livelihood not only for a politician but for his “extended” family and, beyond that, his village, town and tribe. In office, politicians will do almost all they can to stay there; out of office, they will do almost anything to get in.’3
Nigeria’s problems were in no sense unique. Every African country that came to independence in the 1960s faced rising expectations that were stymied by limited resources, the need for development on all fronts that was held back by the absence of anything like an adequately trained professional or technical class, and the need to attract investment funds. What placed Nigeria on a different plane to most other African countries was the size of the population: it simply had more people to educate, train and employ than anyone else. At the end of World War II illiteracy was almost total. In 1955 the Western Region became the first African government to introduce universal free primary education and by 1960 three million children were in 17,000 schools. At the same time the North, with half Nigeria’s total population, had hardly begun an educational programme and in 1959 its primary school population was only 250,000. At that time the Northern Region had an estimated 25 million population, the Western Region seven million, the Eastern Region 12 million and the Mid-West two million.
The easy task had been persuading the British to leave. ‘It was only when they had held power themselves for some time that the Nigerian political class began to appreciate how scarce were the resources that a government in a poor country could mobilize, and how few in numbers and how thinly spread through the country was the administrative service that had once (under the British) looked so all pervasive. But before they had made those shattering discoveries Nigerian politicians had over-committed their resources and personnel. They had also opened Pandora’s box of aspirations with welfare schemes that whetted people’s hopes at least as much as they fulfilled their expectations.’4 At least Nigeria did not face race problems of the kind that afflicted Southern Africa: there was no segregation and Nigerians were to be found on the boards of expatriate companies while half the managerial staff of big expatriate companies were Nigerian by the early 1960s. Corruption, however, was a different matter and resentment against politicians who became rich overnight was certainly a contributory cause of the widespread jubilation at the overthrow of the Federal Government at the beginning of 1966. Another problem concerned the continuation at independence of colonial salary scales for civil servants: these created a glaring differential between the new ruling elite and the mass of the people whose per capita income averaged £30. When the collapse came in 1966, ‘The peoples of Nigeria had never before been jointly disenchanted by the same government. While the people of other countries might have resented colonialism together, the peoples of Nigeria had not even shared a joint feeling of anti-colonialism together. The North especially had been too suspicious of the South, and too cautious in her assessment of independence, even to get worked up into a strong feeling of nationalism.’5
Although Nigeria attracted much goodwill at independence this was insufficient to ensure an adequate inflow of development capital on the scale required to create employment for all the new school-leavers. The country’s rate of economic growth, it soon became clear, would depend, at least in part, upon events both political and economic in Britain, the European Economic Community and the United States, and to some extent the Soviet Union as well, and stabilizing commodity prices – a policy much advocated at the time – was no substitute for expanding markets. Given liberal trading policies abroad and political stability at home, there was then no reason to believe that Nigeria would not emerge from the 1960s with a stronger and better-balanced economy, but the proviso was essential. In 1961 Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Minister of Finance, led an economic mission to visit 23 countries. In London he said he wanted to increase the flow of capital between Nigeria and the countries he was visiting. Nigeria faced three major economic problems: how to increase exports to pay for the ever-rising flood of imports; how to attract overseas investment for industry, to meet balance of payments and provide employment for the swelling numbers of school-leavers; and how to attract financial and other assistance for government development plans.
The proposed 1962–68 National Development Plan aimed to spend £600 million on Federal and Regional projects. Optimistically, Hella Pick wrote in the Guardian: ‘The various governments have always drawn up separate development programmes, and although there has been some co-operation through the National Economic Development Council these plans have covered differing periods, and very frequently there has been intense competition between the regions for the limited resources available. Now, however, a miracle has occurred: for the first time there will be a national plan, incorporating both regional and Federal plans.’7 The Federal Government was to spend nearly £60 million on road development and give top priority to improving communications with Niger and Chad to the north, its practical way of advancing towards closer regional union. The Plan, with increased allocations to bring it to £676 million, was launched at the end of 1962 and the aim was to raise £300 million for public expenditure and £200 million for private investment from outside, with the United States, Britain, West Germany, Canada, Israel and Japan each making pledges of financial or technical assistance, Czechoslovakia offering credits and Russia scholarships, as well as further assistance from various UN bodies. All this aid did not cover the targets set by Lagos. A survey in 1963 revealed that there were 5,000 Nigerians at the upper levels of government working alongside 2,500 expatriates; there were also 600 senior Nigerian engineers, 1,000 accountants and auditors, 425 registered doctors and dentists although senior staff in the universities were mainly expatriate.8 On the eve of the first coup in January 1966 the expatriate community consisted of about 40,000 British and a further 20,000 French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Swiss and American expatriates, representing the rapidly growing international aid community and mainly in commercial and technical posts.
POLITICS
In his book Mr Prime Minister, published in 1960, the fiery Chief Awolowo said: ‘The defects in British administration have turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For if British rule had been less inept than it was, the opportunity for Nigerians to demonstrate that they are qualified to manage their own affairs would have been correspondingly reduced.’ This may have applied to the pre-independence period but it failed convincingly to cover the performance of Nigerian politicians after independence, including Awolowo himself. There was, perhaps, a year from October 1960 before there was a distinct downturn in the political scene. At the end of February 1961, addressing the Action Group Conference in the Mid-West, Chief Awolowo, ever determined to lessen British influence, argued that Nigeria should become a republic. He also criticized the Federal Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, and called for the creation of more states. On 1 June that year Northern Cameroons, the former British Trusteeship territory with a population of 750,000, voted in a UN-supervised plebiscite to join Nigeria rather than the Francophone Cameroon Republic. In 1963 Awolowo got his wish when Nigeria changed its constitution so as to become a republic within the Commonwealth on 1 October.
Awolowo, the leader of the Action Group in the Western Region and often seen as a man in a hurry, got into serious political trouble in 1962 after he fell out with the Premier of the West, Chief Samuel Akintola, who sought a rapprochment with Northerners. There were in any case personality differences between the two men. On 2 November 1962 Chief Awolowo and 18 other members of the Action Group were charged with treasonable felony after the discovery of an ill-conceived plot against the Federal leadership. After an 11-month trial Awolowo was found guilty on 11 September 1963 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. His appeal against the sentence was dismissed in 1964. In the same trial Chief Anthony Enahoro, the leader of the Action Group in the Mid-West, whose popularity there was as great as Awolowo’s in the West, was also sentenced, in his case to 15 years for treasonable felony, conspiracy and possession of firearms; he fled to Britain where he became the focus of attention in an extradition case. It was a pity that these two most able men should descend to conspiracy when they might have used their talents more constructively. In the event Awolowo spent only three years in prison where he wrote Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution before he was released by General Gowon who told him, ‘We need you for the wealth of your experience’ to join the Federal Military Government during the civil war.
Part of the root problem in Nigeria was too many people pursuing too few jobs and each (they were known as applicants) looking to those in his own group or tribe to help him. ‘The real trouble is caused by the rivalry of the few large groups, especially the Hausa-Fulani of the North, the Yoruba of the West and the Ibo of the East. Each of these groups has a common origin, a common history, a common language and a common way of life. They are not only nations but big ones.’ This view recurs again and again over these years as both Nigerians and outsiders tried to find a way to bring the three groups into a working partnership rather than maintaining a permanent state of suspicion with one another. The same observer, quoted above, put the problem into the job perspective that counted most with the average Nigerian: ‘If an Ibo were appointed chairman of the railway corporation, it was automatically assumed that every possible stoker, linesman and railway clerk would be Ibo.’9
Nothing illustrated better the inter-tribal suspicions and rivalries than the Nigerian census. Both the census of 1963 and later ones became matters of acute controversy since the size of a regional population determined the number of seats it would be allocated for elections and the proportion of revenues it could claim from the Federal Government. Numbers, in other words, meant power and the regions constantly accused each other of inflating the size of their populations. A first post-independence census was attempted in May 1962, but abandoned after regional disputes in which North and South accused each other of inflating their numbers. On that occasion, after several months of counting, the North claimed a total population of 30 million against 23 million for the South. A new national census was completed on 8 November 1963. According to Clyde Sanger, writing for the Guardian, the census could become the greatest threat to Nigeria’s unity since independence: ‘Proportions are particularly crucial, since a new delimitation of seats in the federal legislature before next year’s elections depends on the population. In the 1959 elections on the basis of the old figures the North was given 174 out of 320 seats.’10 The 1963 census showed Nigeria to have a population of 55,653,821. Compared with the census of 1952–53, the North had increased its numbers by 76.8 per cent, the East by 71.6 per cent, the West (including the Mid-West) by 100 per cent, Lagos by just over 90 per cent. Much unease followed the publication of these results and Dr Michael Okpara, the premier of the Eastern Region, said the figures disclosed ‘inflations of astronomical proportions’. It was doubtful that any census results would be acceptable to all groups. The political significance of these 1963 figures was that the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), then the senior partner in the coalition government of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, emerged in a very strong position that should make it possible to rule the Republic on its own. The controversy following the census results led to a realignment of the parties. The National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) governments in Eastern Nigeria and the Mid-West rejected the census results. The Northern Region accepted them, as did the Western Region, where the government was a coalition of the NCNC and the United People’s Party whose leader was Chief Akintola, the Western Region premier.
The atmosphere of suspicion created by the census was carried through to the Federal elections at the end of 1964. These were held on 30 December. There were disputes over the conduct of the election, frequent accusations of fraud and subsequent disputes over the results. The NCNC and its allies attempted to boycott the elections; and the Federal Prime Minister, Balewa, fell out with President Azikiwe. Eventually, a compromise was worked out though no one expected this to last. The country had been effectively divided on North-South lines. Of an electorate of 15 million only four million had voted. The NPC won 162 seats to give it a narrow absolute majority; its electoral ally, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), won 36 seats of 57 in the Western Region. A compromise solution of 7 January 1965 saw the creation of a new coalition government with Balewa continuing as Federal Prime Minister and Festus Okotie-Eboh as Finance Minister. A leader in The Times said the situation did not encourage the view that the crisis had been resolved rather than postponed.
In general, though with exceptions, the post-independence government pursued a conservative foreign policy. However, there was intellectual disaffection with the government, which was seen repeatedly to break African ranks and take stands congenial to the West. In November 1960 Nigeria signed a defence agreement with Britain; the Action Group denounced the agreement, accusing the government of being too pro-British. It was a familiar argument at the time and many Nigerians were more radical in their attitude towards the former colonial power than the government was. Little more than a year later, on 21 January 1962, the treaty was abrogated, mainly as a result of Nigerian apprehensions that the pact would inhibit its independence of action, although in real terms Nigeria was simply beginning to cut imperial ties that Britain would have preferred to maintain. As another Africa observer was to write of this short-lived defence pact: ‘What is not revealed, and indeed what the British Government is at some pains to conceal, is that a pet project of the Ministry of Defence has proved – as predicted – to be politically explosive, diplomatically embarrassing and, practically, useless. It may come as some kind of bitter satisfaction to wiser heads in Whitehall – the experts of the Colonial Office who advised against such a military pact at the time – that their predictions have come true, and sooner than they or anyone else expected.’11 On the other hand, Nigeria had taken a radical stand in December 1960 when France exploded its third atomic bomb in the Sahara. Then, alone of African states, Nigeria broke diplomatic relations with France and said the test had shown ‘an utter disregard for the Africans, and constituted a grave insult to the Government and peoples of this country’.12 Relations with France were not resumed until 1966. Lack of African support for Nigeria’s lone stand against France rankled and undoubtedly influenced the Nigerian decision in 1965 not to break diplomatic relations with Britain over UDI in Rhodesia when the OAU was calling upon its members to do so. Even so, the last political act of the Balewa Government before its overthrow was to organize the special Commonwealth conference to consider UDI that met in Lagos in January 1966.
Following the flawed elections at the end of 1964, a sense of developing crisis was apparent all through 1965. The President, Dr Azikiwe, wrote an article in the US quarterly Foreign Affairs in which he advocated major changes to the Nigerian constitution that included judicial reform, unification of the local government system, enlargement of the scope of the Federal Government’s authority, diversification of the federal system, a change in the patterns of suffrage, including the enfranchisement of women in the North, the reinforcement of the constitution and the granting of specific powers to the president – in other words a virtual rewrite of the constitution. In particular, Dr Azikiwe urged the need to divide Nigeria into more regions. ‘In order to evolve into a near perfect union, the whole of Nigeria should be divided and so demarcated geographically and demographically that no one Region would be in a position to dominate the rest.’13 In response, the Nigerian Citizen, a newspaper sponsored by the Northern Nigerian Government, called for the President’s resignation, and said that if he refused a vote of ‘no confidence’ should be passed in Parliament. As crisis loomed most of the country’s oil, then being extracted at the rate of 200,000b/d, came from the Eastern Region although large new deposits had been discovered in the Mid-West and estimates then suggested oil revenues would reach £100 million by 1967. Writing shortly after the fall of the Balewa government Ali Mazrui would castigate its failures: ‘Nothing had helped the movement for a unitary state in Nigeria more dramatically than the mess in which the previous regime up to 1966 left the federal structure… Perhaps Nigeria is too pluralistic a country to be ruled on any basis other than that of quasi-federalism. But the very fact that there is now a quest for tighter integration was substantially attributable to the errors of the previous regime.’14
THE FIRST COUP 15 JANUARY 1966
By 15 January 1966, when the first coup was mounted, the political class in Nigeria had been deeply discredited. It was associated with corruption, nepotism, tribalism and inefficiency rather than good government so that the military takeover, when it came, was greeted with relief by a disenchanted population. The performance of the Balewa government had proved dismal rather than inspiring though it should not alone be blamed for what occurred: from its inception it had faced the near insurmountable regional demands that always threatened national unity. Several coups had been planned for January 1966 although the one that succeeded in overthrowing the government in the South did not bring its perpetrators to power. Five Ibo majors who sought to remove all the politicians of the leading parties and regions planned the coups. The leading coup-maker of 15 January was Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu who broadcast to the nation that the aim of the coup was ‘to establish a strong, unified and prosperous nation, free from corruption and internal strife’. The North, however, was the only region where the coup went as planned. On the afternoon of 15 January, Nzeogwu broadcast a proclamation ‘in the name of the Supreme Council of the Revolution’ and declared martial law over the ‘Northern Provinces of Nigeria’. He said the constitution was suspended, the regional government and assembly dissolved, the departments to be run by permanent secretaries for the time being. He also said: ‘Our enemies are the political profiteers, swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand 10 per cent, those that seek to keep the country permanently divided so that they can remain in office as Ministers and VIPs of waste, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the country look big for nothing before international circles.’
As Commonwealth leaders departed from Lagos, following the special conference to consider UDI in Rhodesia, some actually heard the gunfire that heralded the coup. Junior army officers assassinated the premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, the premier of the Western Region, Chief Akintola, the Federal Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and the Federal Finance Minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh. Federal ministers then asked Maj.-Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, the army commander, to take control of government. The new government he formed suspended the constitution. The young army officers responsible for the coup denied that they had been motivated by ethnic considerations and claimed they had only acted to bring an end to a corrupt regime, but the fact remained that they were virtually all Ibos and those they killed were not, thus greatly exacerbating fears in the North of Ibo dominance.
There was an immediate readiness to let Ironsi attempt to overcome the regional antagonisms that had bedevilled Nigeria since independence. He reassured the North when he chose Maj. Hassan Katsina, the son of a powerful Northern emir, as Northern Military Governor. Ironsi himself was non-political. He had worked his way up through the ranks to become a company sergeant major at 24 and had been appointed Equerry to the Queen on her 1956 visit. In February 1966 the Ironsi government released a statement: ‘It has become apparent to all Nigerians that rigid adherence to “regionalism” was the bane of the last regime and one of the main factors which contributed to its downfall. No doubt the country would welcome a clean break with the deficiencies of the system.’ However, the welcome that had greeted the Ironsi regime did not last long. As a fellow Nigerian soldier and later head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo said: ‘But in addition to his failure to take advantage of the initial favourable reaction to the coup, he did not know what to do with the ringleaders of the coup who had been arrested. He could not decide whether to treat them as heroes of the “revolution” or send them before a court-martial as mutineers and murderers.’15 Ironsi was handicapped by his own intellectual shortcomings.
In early May 1966, the diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times could write ‘that Nigerians were still delighted with the ending of the Federal Government and the Army’s popularity remained high’. But this was not the same thing as governing. Optimistically, he wrote of the absence of tribal strife.16 At the time there was a kind of phoney peace as Nigerians waited for the next development. This came at the end of May. The overriding question was what kind of political structure should replace the Federal structure that had broken down. Returning to Kaduna from a Supreme Military Council meeting in Lagos, the Northern Governor Hassan Katsina said to reporters in late May: ‘Tell the nation that the egg will be broken on Tuesday.’ He was correct. Ironsi had tried hard in the appointments he made to be impartial and not favour the Ibos but such impartiality displeased the hard-liners on both sides of the divide. He was under pressure from the Yorubas to unify the country and abolish the old regional structure. On 24 May he broadcast to the nation details of a new constitution. The former regions were to be abolished and Nigeria was to be grouped into a number of territorial areas to be called provinces. The country would cease to be a federation and instead become simply the Republic of Nigeria. The public services were to be unified under a single Public Service Commission and civil servants were to function anywhere in Nigeria where they were needed. ‘For Nigeria it amounted to another coup – executed by the stroke of a pen. The country was no longer to be called a federation, simply “the Republic of Nigeria”, ruled by a “national” instead of a “Federal” military government; the regions were abolished and replaced by groups of provinces; the Federal and regional civil services were unified and to be administered from Lagos; political and tribal organizations were dissolved and political activities banned for the next two and a half years.’17 The reaction in the North was violent. Some of the changes were only cosmetic, such as the regions being turned into provinces that in any case coincided with the former regions, but the two-and-a-half-year ban on political activity was another matter entirely and raised the question of how long the military proposed to stay in power. It was Decree 34, the unification decree that amalgamated the federal and regional civil services, that was regarded as a major threat to the North since it was seen as the beginning of possible domination of the North by the South: with an ‘end’ of politicians, at least for the time being, civil servants would control both the administration and the distribution of jobs. Ironsi admitted that the change was a drastic one. In a broadcast to the nation, he said: ‘Every civil servant is now called upon to see his function in any part of Nigeria in which he is serving in the context of the whole country. The orientation should now be towards national unity and progress.’18
Between Tuesday 24 May and the following weekend hundreds of Ibos were killed in pogroms in the Northern cities of Kano, Kaduna and Zaria; some of these pogroms were spontaneous, others had been organized by civil servants, ex-politicians, local government officials and businessmen whom the change of regime deprived or threatened to deprive of their jobs. These pogroms were followed by calls for the North to secede and condemnations of Ironsi. He called the four regional governors to a conference in Lagos, which appointed a commission of inquiry into the killings. They backtracked on Decree 34 and announced there would be no change to the regions. Then, believing all had quietened down, a mistake he later regretted, Col. Ojukwu, the Governor of the Eastern Region, broadcast an appeal to Ibos who had fled from the North to return to their homes ‘as the situation is now under control’.
THE SECOND COUP 29 JULY 1966
On 29 July 1966 a group of Northern soldiers arrived at the Western Region military headquarters in Ibadan where Ironsi was staying with Colonel Fajuyi, the West’s Military Governor, at Government Lodge. The two men and an aide were taken outside Ibadan, tortured and then killed. The revolt then spread to Ikeja barracks outside Lagos and the rebels seized the international airport. Brig. B. Ogundipe, the most senior officer after Ironsi, tried to prevent the coup spreading and sent a detachment of troops from Lagos to quell the mutiny but they were ambushed and suffered heavy losses. The Northern garrisons supported the revolt although no coup was attempted in the Eastern Region. This counter-coup of 29 July, which followed riots in the Northern Region, had two aims: revenge upon the East by the North for the first coup; and the breakup of Nigeria by Northern secession. The Northern soldiers soon found themselves in effective control in Lagos, the West and Mid-West but not in the East. It did not take long for cooler heads in the North to reject secession as a solution to their problems since it would make the North landlocked and dependent for communications upon the South and cut it off from the country’s new oil wealth. Revenge killings of Ibos were to continue through August. Brig. Ogundipe sent Col. Yakubu Gowon to parley with the mutinous troops at Ikeja barracks. Ogundipe, a Yoruba, was an old soldier who, like Ironsi, had worked his way up through the ranks and could expect to find little support in an army split on tribal lines – there were few Yoruba in the army. He summoned whoever was available of the Supreme Military Council to a conference at police headquarters where those who met were in a state of shock. Meanwhile, the rebel soldiers came out of Ikeja barracks and proceeded to kill Eastern soldiers or civilians. The Hausa soldier Lt-Col. Murtala Muhammed emerged as the principal spokesman of the mutineers whose immediate demands were the renunciation of the unity decree and the total separation of Eastern and Northern soldiers then in the army. They then demanded secession and the creation of a Republic of the North. Ogundipe broadcast a state of emergency.
The coup-makers were unwilling to surrender power to Ogundipe, the Chief of Staff, and now the highest-ranking officer in the army. They felt he did not ‘belong’. He therefore, gracefully in the circumstances, gave way to Gowon and was subsequently appointed Nigerian High Commissioner to London. Gowon was the most senior officer of Northern origin although he came from the small Angas tribe of the Middle Belt of the northern plateau region and was a Christian rather than a Muslim. For the second time that year the country faced the question: what would happen next? Was the Federation to continue and who would lead it? The two obvious contenders for the leadership at this point were the cautious Gowon and the hot-headed Murtala Muhammed who at that stage was demanding secession for the North although opposition to the idea was crystallizing, especially among civil servants, lawyers and the police. Northern families then in the south were flown back home and civil servants were told to prepare to do so. A confrontation between Gowon and Muhammed led the majority of senior officers to choose the former as Supreme Commander; they did not want to break up the Federation; rather, it should continue under its existing form with a Northerner as head of state. This ‘consensus’ was arrived at over three days when Nigeria had no head of state. The Northern troops acted as arbiters of the country’s fate. Gowon, who was to lead Nigeria for nine years, was an interesting choice. A Northerner from a minority tribe, he was a Christian, non-smoking, non-drinking soldier who had been educated at Zaria in the North and in Ghana and Sandhurst. He had served in the Congo and then attended a course at Camberley Staff College. He was very much a ‘one Nigeria’ man who loved the army and knew how it worked. He also knew how to take advice and reach a consensus. He won the backing of those who saw the dissolution of the Federation as a disaster, especially the civil service, and he and his supporters soon became known as ‘New Nigerians’. Subsequent controversy about the legitimacy of Gowon’s elevation obscured the crucial fact that at the time what was needed was to stop the bloodshed, get the soldiers back to barracks and prevent the country disintegrating. This Gowon achieved.19
Gowon’s first recommendation of 13 August was to order all troops from Eastern Nigeria to be released and posted to Enugu in the Eastern Region and troops of non-Eastern origin in Enugu to be reposted to Kaduna and later to Lagos to form the 6th Battalion of the Nigerian Army. That action ‘broke the last thread and split the last institution symbolizing Nigeria’s nationhood and national cohesion, which had been regularly tampered with by the politicians since 1962’.20 Gowon and Muhammed were to clash about the coming war with the Eastern Region, even before the formal proclamation of Biafra. As early as April 1967 Muhammed was convinced that civil war was inevitable and that any delay was simply to put off the evil day but Gowon was more cautious. However, between July 1966 and May 1967 Ojukwu had built up the East’s forces and boasted: ‘We possess the biggest army in Africa.’ During this period he had secured arms and ammunition from French, Spanish and Portuguese sources while he had also obtained assurances of mercenary support from France and South Africa.
A second series of massacres of Ibos in the North took place over the end of September into October when between 10,000 and possibly 30,000 were killed. At the time there were about one million Ibos still in the North. A huge movement of population now took place as more than a million Ibos poured into the Eastern Region. There, for their own safety, Col. Ojukwu ordered all non-Easterners to leave the Region. Ibo refugees now came from the West, the Mid-West and Lagos as well as from the North. As the crisis worsened ‘and the possibility of a complete breakdown became imminent, the refugees from Lagos came to include senior civil servants of the Federal Government. These were to constitute a powerful pressure group behind Ojukwu, urging him to secede from the Federation’.21 By late November 1966 Gowon was facing the possibility of war with the East: ‘If circumstances compel me to preserve the integrity of Nigeria by force, I will do my duty,’ he said.
In January 1967 the military leaders met at Aburi in Ghana under the chairmanship of Ghana’s General Ankrah. Gowon wanted to maintain a single Nigeria, Ojukwu argued for separation. The meetings were taped at Ankrah’s suggestion to ‘avoid’ argument later. At Aburi Gowon made some concessions towards confederalism but no solution was reached and he then spent the next six months trying to persuade Ojukwu to turn away from secession, but without success. Following the Aburi conference, in a bid to keep Nigeria whole, the North agreed to the creation of more states, something Ojukwu had argued for and the North, to that point, had opposed. When Biafra seceded at the end of May 1967 Gowon declared an emergency and then divided Nigeria into 12 states, abolishing the old regions, a move that won wide support and removed the fear of domination by the North. War was then inevitable although a final peace bid was led by the Federal Chief Justice Sir Adetokumboh Ademola who flew to Enugu though the possibility of a last-minute reconciliation was an illusion. At 2 a.m. on 30 May Col. Ojukwu made an announcement at State House Enugu: ‘…do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as Eastern Nigeria, together with her continental shelves and territorial waters, shall henceforth be an independent sovereign state of the name and title The Republic of Biafra’.
THE CIVIL WAR
Once war had become inevitable the attitudes of the major external powers became a matter of great importance to both sides. A united Nigeria had great economic potential, as a market with its population of more than 56 million people, as a rapidly developing source of oil as well as natural gas in an oil-hungry world, and as a substantial producer of coal, iron ore, cotton and rubber. These resources, as well as significant hydro-electric power potential, gave it a base for industrialization. It was then the world’s largest producer of groundnuts and the second-largest producer of cocoa (after Ghana). Britain found itself in a dilemma: most of its business was centred upon Federal Nigeria but not the oil, and Ojukwu at once insisted that oil royalties should be paid over to Biafra by Shell-BP The British Government told the oil companies to make a token payment but the Federal Government proceeded to blockade the oil shipments. Britain was then the principal source of small arms for the Federal Government and while continuing to supply these refused to supply more substantial armaments, most notably aircraft, with the result that Nigeria turned to the Soviet Union. On 6 July 1967 Federal troops advanced into Biafra, and Nigeria was at war with itself.
When asked at the outbreak of hostilities what US policy towards Nigeria would be, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a press conference, ‘We regard Nigeria as part of Britain’s sphere of influence.’ It was a monumental gaffe, reminiscent of nineteenth-century big power attitudes towards the lesser countries of the world, and understandably infuriated the Nigerians. Even so, the big powers saw Nigeria as a ‘prize’ and determined to remain involved, with Britain, France, West Germany and the USSR in particular taking sides in pursuit of their interests. At the beginning of the war, when the British refused to do so, the Russians sold the Federal Government small, obsolescent aircraft; later, they supplied MiG 17s, Ilyushin bombers, heavy artillery, vehicles and small arms. The Soviet presence in Nigeria grew in other ways as well and in November 1968 it agreed to construct Nigeria’s first steel mill and provided a loan of £60 million for the purpose. The Soviet Embassy doubled in size and there was a growth of Nigeria–Russia friendship societies.
Biafra benefited from the image, which it carefully cultivated, of a small, embattled country being bullied by a large one. An abundance of relief supplies was available – the problem was one of delivery. International assistance for Biafra came from a number of sources and for a variety of reasons. Its supporters included humanitarian agencies, four black African states which recognized it, Rhodesia (then embarked upon UDI), South Africa and Portugal because it was in the interests of the white regimes in Southern Africa to prolong the war in Nigeria since chaos and breakdown in Africa’s largest, most promising black state boosted their claims to maintain white minority control. There was considerable international sympathy for Biafra as a ‘small loser’ and the Federal Government was criticized for not having made greater efforts to find a peaceful solution. Tanzania recognized Biafra on 13 April 1968, Gabon on 5 May, Côte d’Ivoire on 14 May and Zambia on 20 May. In the case of Tanzania President Nyerere defended his decision to do so with his usual intellectual skill on the grounds that the Ibos had been artificially included in Nigeria by the British for imperial reasons and had the right to secede if that was the wish of their people. Zambia’s President Kaunda followed the Nyerere line. Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon were generally seen as acting on behalf of French interests. Haiti, for reasons that remained obscure, recognized Biafra on 23 March 1969. France supplied weapons for Biafra through its surrogates, Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon; Portugal did so through Portuguese Guinea. The principal sources of humanitarian aid, though there were others, were the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Church Aid and Caritas. Biafra obtained a number of old DC-class aircraft from Rhodesia. Both Portugal and Spain supported Biafra to stifle aspirations for independence in their own African territories while a motley range of gun-runners and other dubious arms dealers became overnight friends of Biafra. As Gen. Obasanjo was to say in his account of the war, ‘The main paradox of the Nigerian civil war was that Tanzania, Zambia, Rhodesia, South Africa, Portugal and Spain all found themselves in the same camp supporting secession in Nigeria.’22 President Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, who had a pathological fear of Nigeria, assisted Biafra with financial support and persuaded de Gaulle to be more open in his support for it. De Gaulle, in any case, had not forgiven Nigeria for breaking diplomatic relations over the French nuclear tests in the Sahara at the beginning of the decade. In a realistic assessment of external support for Biafra, Obasanjo wrote: ‘The effective rebel propaganda and phoney battle victories on Radio “Biafra” coupled with open diplomatic recognition and other support by four African countries, Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon and Ivory Coast, one West Indian country, Haiti, and covert support by one of the major world powers, France, and the double-dealing by some countries in Africa and Europe, Republic of Dahomey, Sierra Leone, West Germany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden, had strengthened the rebellion almost to the point of permanently sustaining it. Cynics all over the world had started to deride the Nigerian Army and saw no hope of Nigeria becoming a united country again.’23 Mobutu, on the other hand, gave open support to the Federal Government as did Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal and Congo (Brazzaville).
Ojukwu’s decision to invade the Mid-West Region in August 1967 changed the course of the war. Had he played a wholly defensive role, defending Biafra against Nigerian attack, he might have lasted longer and gained more sympathy within Nigeria itself, but by attacking the neighbouring region he showed his readiness to threaten non-Ibo Nigerians and, as a result, he lost overnight the support and sympathy he might otherwise have had from many of the Yoruba. Instead he could now be branded as arrogant, power-hungry and over-ambitious and the slogan ‘one Nigeria’ in opposition to the threat he posed became highly popular.
The fall of Enugu to Federal troops on 5 October 1967 raised the hope that the war would soon be over but this was not to be. A description of Enugu after its capture suggested that Ibos, fearful of what might follow the fall of their city, had simply fled. And that being the case, the war was likely to continue for some considerable time. ‘It is not so much the war damage; in fact, compared to Asaba the destruction has been comparatively mild. It is rather the complete absence of people that unnerves. There are Federal troops by the score, guarding key positions, but of civilians there are no sign. The limited nature of the damage makes it, if anything, more uncanny. With so many houses so recognizably recently lived in, you almost expect the bad dream to end and all the people suddenly to return. It is rather like one of those mystery stories about abandoned ships, like the Marie Celeste, found with signs of evident recent habitation, only with nobody on board.’24 On 20 October Federal troops took the port of Calabar and the government in Lagos announced plans for post-war reconstruction. An OAU mediation mission arrived in Lagos to be told by Gowon: ‘The most valuable contribution the mission can make in the present circumstances is to call on the rebel leaders to abandon secession. Your mission here is not to mediate.’ More to the point for the Federal Government, Emperor Haile Selassie said that the mission’s cardinal objective was to discuss ways and means, ‘with the help of the Federal Government, whereby Nigerian national integrity is to be preserved and innocent Nigerian blood saved from flowing needlessly… We believe a solution needs to be urgently sought to accommodate the varying interests in Nigeria, but it must be specific enough to ensure the steady development of the Nigerian state’.25
By the beginning of 1968 the dense Ibo population had become concentrated in the eastern heartland round Aba and Umuahia and the Ibos, with nowhere to run, were fighting for survival. It seemed that a second, more desperate and bloody phase of the war was about to begin. As West Africa was to editorialize at the end of the year:
The grim fact… remains. This is a civil war in which international appeals sound like international interference and in which the Federal Government is no more ready than any other sovereign government to accept instructions from outside. The Federal Government, in fact, has gone further in its response to international opinion than some of its supporters like. Wisely it has extended the stay of the international observers, whose reports refute the accusation that the Federal Forces are bent on ‘genocide’ (which would, if true, leave the Biafrans no alternative but a fight to the death)…26
The Federal side had its own problems, not least among some of its military commanders. After capturing Onitsha early in 1968, Murtala Muhammed, who was a difficult, power-hungry man, walked away from his Division, accusing the Commander-in-Chief (Gowon) in particular and Army Headquarters in general of deliberately starving his division of arms, ammunition and necessary equipment to prosecute the war effectively. He refused to return and expressed his lack of confidence in Gowon. On 19 May 1968 troops of the Federal 3 Marine Commando Division entered Port Harcourt where they witnessed a disorderly and dispirited Biafran exodus under way. After this defeat a flurry of diplomatic activity by friends of Biafra followed to keep the increasingly beleaguered ‘state’ in being.
As in the Congo (K) a few years earlier, Nigeria had to deal with the mercenary factor. The civil war was the first since the Carlist wars in Spain during the nineteenth century in which mercenaries fought one another from opposite sides; or rather, they did not fight one another which was part of the problem.
Mercenaries had earned such a bad name for themselves in the Congo that it was a political risk to use them at all. The Federal Military Government in Lagos, in any case, wanted to demonstrate its ability to deal with Biafran secession on its own. Biafra, however, was promoting the image of an embattled underdog fighting for its existence and so could legitimately seek outside help including that of mercenaries. In the end both sides used mercenaries but were able to exert far greater control over them than had been the case in the Congo. In July 1967 the Federal Government hired British, Rhodesian and South African pilots at a reported fee of US$2,800 a month tax free to be paid into numbered Swiss bank accounts. However, since Britain refused to supply warplanes, Soviet and Czech planes were purchased and flown by mercenary pilots from Czechoslovakia and Egypt as well as pilots from Britain. The Federal Military Government employed between 12 and 20 such pilots throughout the war – there was a rapid turnover – and employed them to fly Russian MiG17s since the Egyptian pilots proved inadequate. In November 1967 Biafra hired 83 French mercenaries under Col. Roger Faulques. Their task was to train Biafran troops. Faulques was soon joined in Biafra by the already legendary Bob Denard, who came fresh from his activities in Angola and Katanga, with another 200 mercenaries. Then a third group of French mercenaries arrived under Michel Declary. The Biafran decision to recruit French mercenaries followed the refusal of the British mercenary Mike Hoare to accept the Biafran offer for he wanted more money than Biafra was prepared to pay. Many of the French mercenaries quit when they discovered that the equipment needed for training the Biafrans was not forthcoming. By the summer of 1968 the French contingent had dwindled to five and by then it was apparent to the mercenaries that Biafran secession was doomed. In any case it was by then apparent that Biafra’s compelling need was for pilots to ferry supplies to its only remaining airstrip at Ulli. Some of these supplies were in the form of humanitarian aid provided by such non-government organizations as Caritas, the World Council of Churches or the ICRC.
Before the main Federal onslaught on Biafra, Gen. Gowon issued a ‘Code of Conduct’ to his troops in which it was stressed that the Ibo people were not the enemy. At the same time it laid down that mercenaries ‘will not be spared: they are the worst enemies’. The stated reluctance to employ mercenaries despite the fact that both sides did so was in part because senior Nigerian officers on either side in the civil war had formerly served with the United Nations in the Congo and had been up against mercenaries there. References to mercenaries almost always led to headlines in the African and Western press. When mercenaries were engaged the assumption was that they possessed military skills that the Federal or Biafran armies lacked; in the end this special advantage came down to pilots. Three kinds of mercenary were employed in the civil war: pilots on the Federal side; pilots and soldiers in Biafra; and relief pilots employed by the humanitarian organizations assisting Biafra. Combat mercenaries charged huge fees but gave poor returns and were rarely worth the money they were paid. The reputation of mercenaries suffered during this war. They were not seen as invincible forces; rather, man for man, the white soldier was no better than the black soldier although he wanted maximum pay while exposing himself to minimum risks. Disreputably, the mercenaries on the two sides engaged in a pact: the Federal pilots did not destroy Ulli airstrip, which they could have done, and avoided engaging with one another since they did not wish to forego their lucrative jobs. Their deliberate failure to destroy the Ulli airstrip greatly prolonged the war: ‘Without Ulli Biafra would have collapsed in a matter of weeks, perhaps days’.27 The French government actively supported the French mercenary role in Biafra, which was persuaded to use French mercenaries by Jacques Foccart, the French secret service chief, and it was his office that recruited Roger Faulques. Later in the war, when the French mercenaries had left, Biafra harmed its image by recruiting mercenaries from South Africa and Rhodesia. In real terms, whether in fighting or training, Biafra got very little value out of the mercenaries upon whom it spent vast sums of money, the greater part of which was wasted. Moreover, despite continuing support for mercenary activity, especially from France, they did little to retrieve the reputation that they had acquired in the Congo.28
A number of peace initiatives were mounted during the course of the war: by the United Nations, the OAU, the Commonwealth, Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the Vatican, but none succeeded in bringing an end to the fighting. The Nigerians had to find their own solution and this was only possible once the Federal Military Government had won the war. For any peace talks to take place, Gowon first insisted that Biafra should renounce secession. The OAU, under intense pressure from its members, insisted that peace had to be within the context of ‘one Nigeria’, which in the circumstances of a war fought for secession and later ‘survival’ was bound to be rejected by Biafra.
AN APPRAISAL OF THE WAR
At the time of the war and into the twenty-first century a recurring subject of debate in Africa and between Africa and Europe has been about the extent to which European colonialism can and should be blamed for Africa’s post-independence problems. In 1968 Dame Margery Perham was the doyenne of British Africanists whose deep knowledge of and love for Africa, and particularly Nigeria, equipped her as a formidable critic. That year she wrote an important essay, Nigeria’s Civil War29, that provides a classic historical analysis of the background that made the war inevitable. It is worth examining this piece in depth not only for the light it sheds on Nigeria at that time but also because her arguments have much relevance to other aspects of post-independence Africa, both then and later. Dame Margery argues: ‘It cannot be said, however, that the Nigerians rushed altogether recklessly into independence or that the British government wholly neglected to prepare them for it. For some ten years before 1960 there had been almost continuous argument and experiment, with conferences between British ministers and officials on one side, and Nigerian leaders of all parties and regions on the other, hammering out the lines upon which independence was to be achieved.’ The author then examines how, in the nineteenth century, Britain expanded its trade, influence and ultimately its power from the coast into the interior.
In 1861 Britain annexed Lagos and made it a colony and from Lagos created a Protectorate of the Yoruba hinterland. East of Lagos Britain created the Oil Rivers protectorate to control the traders of the region and then granted a charter to the Niger Company under Sir George Goldie who became the first creator of what became the British Nigerian empire. Perham describes the historic differences between the Yoruba grouped within states based upon cities; and the Ibo isolated in their forest region who had prevented political organization above the family and clan level, and points out how the British tried and failed to create any form of chieftainship among them. The Niger Coast Protectorate was proclaimed in 1891. As Perham then says, though the Ibo were hard to organize, under the system of British control over the whole of what had become Nigeria, during the 1940s and 1950s they became the most active, Westernized group in Nigeria and ‘streamed out of their poor and overcrowded land to employ their energies and their newly-gained skills and education in other parts of the protectorate’. The third major group of Nigerians were in the North where the open country and climate had encouraged the development of city states; they had also been open to Islam and influences from across the Sahara while a religious revival early in the nineteenth century had reinforced the influence of Islam. Lying between the North and the South were a number of pagan groups that formed what came to be called the Middle Belt of Nigeria.
In 1900 the British Government took over from the Niger Company, Lord Lugard was sent as administrator and over six years evolved the system of indirect rule. In 1906 the two contrasted southern regions were brought together and in 1914 Lugard returned to unite North and South. But, and this was the crucial event or non-event, ‘This was a union of three British administrations rather than three populations.’ There lay the key to what was to follow. For 30 or more years thereafter there was no British policy from above or African pressure from below to stimulate a real unity. Each of the three administrations worked separately from the other two and showed no urge to assimilate, while indirect rule in the North was carried to such an extreme as to preserve the differences between the Hausa-Fulani and the rest rather than help break them down. The result of this colonial approach was that the three peoples came to independence in different ways from different backgrounds and held little in common with one another. Unlike Tanzania where a range of tribes united in a single party, TANU, to demand independence from Britain, in Nigeria separate regionally based political parties were formed to fight for independence. The Yoruba under Awolowo formed the Action Group, yet even so divisions remained among their city states. The Ibo under Azikiwe formed a single democratic party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) (later the National Council of Nigerian Citizens). They wanted a unity that would allow them to migrate all over the region. Both the Southern parties saw the need to extend their influence outside their tribal bases. On the other hand, the Northern emirs, fearful of the more politically advanced Southerners, created a monolithic northern party, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC). The result, as Macmillan perceived during his visit of January 1960, was a vast country that should not have been united at all; or, if it had to be united, this should have been done in a very different way to that which the British had pursued. Two of the three regions had to combine to form a government and in 1960 it was the North and East that did so, leaving Awolowo and his Action Group out in the cold. There was no natural affinity between the Northerners and the Ibos and this soon became apparent. As Perham says towards the end of her essay, ‘The troubles, which broke out only two years after independence, were only a prelude. It was now dangerously clear that control of the federal centre and its finances would fall to the party, which in practice meant the region, with the majority of members. The census of 1962 not only recorded a population of 55.6 million… but placed 29.8 of these in the north, thus endowing it with a built-in majority over the other regions.’ From that time onwards, unsurprisingly, a census in Nigeria was cause for controversy.
This historical prelude to the civil war should explain why there was much criticism of Britain then and later. The colonial system was about maintaining imperial control; it was not designed to create a nation. Margery Perham could be described as the British establishment ‘radical’ on African affairs at that time, yet as understanding as she was of African problems and developments and as clear and concise as is her analysis of Nigeria, she is never able, nor does she try, to explain why the British neither attempted nor intended to weld their multifaceted creation of Nigeria into a nation. Indeed, to do so, under the imperial system, would have been to create a nationalist force that would have proved irresistible long before 1960 and imperialism was not about such an approach. In her scrupulous account of how Britain united and yet kept Nigeria divided, Margery Perham lays bare the extent of British blame for the civil war. After reading such an analysis it becomes easier to understand the endless African diatribes against colonialism of the 1960s. At the end of the twentieth century thoughtful Africans could claim that many of the continent’s problems still resulted from the colonial era. It may be an easy way out of current dilemmas to blame the colonial past just as the ex-colonial powers dismiss such claims as a sign of Africa’s refusal to face present realities. But the debate cannot easily or quickly be made to disappear and the more we examine the decisions and policies of the colonial powers prior to independence, the more apparent it becomes that they have bequeathed to their former colonies an uneasy inheritance.
THE END OF THE WAR, NIGERIA REMAINS UNITED
By the beginning of 1969 the war had become curiously indecisive, a situation that led supporters of Biafra to argue, prematurely, that there could be no Federal victory. At the same time a rift had developed between the Federal field commanders and staff headquarters in Lagos with the former complaining that the latter were too complacent. By this stage in the war the strategy of the Federal Army, which in any case enjoyed huge superiority in numbers and arms, was to blockade the shrinking enclave of Biafra and bring about its surrender by starvation. Towards the end Biafra was confined to a small enclave of territory that was served by the single airstrip of Ulli to which supplies were brought by mercenary pilots. Over December 1969 and the first days of January 1970 the Federal Army deployed 120,000 troops for its final assault on Owerri and the Ulli airstrip. These fell to the Federal forces over 9–10 January and the war was over. At that stage the total strength of the Federal Army was 200,000 troops. Biafra, despite its handicaps, had demonstrated astonishing resilience: its propaganda had fostered the idea that surrender meant genocide, creating a fear that persuaded the Biafrans to fight almost to the end while, at the same time, engendering international sympathy and support. During the final year of the war Nigeria’s foreign policy was hard pushed to prevent other countries following the four African states that had recognized Biafra, while strengthening Western and Soviet support in supplying its military requirements. Increased Soviet military supplies arrived in the country in October 1969 and this allowed the Federal Chief of Staff, Brig. Katsina, to announce in November that final orders had been issued to the Federal forces to liberate the remaining rebel-held areas. At the same time Gen. Gowon suggested that the end of the war was in sight and accused ‘foreign meddlers’ of having prolonged the crisis by using the pretext of providing humanitarian relief. The final assault on what remained of Biafra was launched on Christmas Day.
In a statement Ibos in a United Africa Federal Policy the Federal Government said: ‘It must be stated quite clearly that the civil war has not been directed against the Ibos as a people but against an unpatriotic and rebellious clique. The Head of State, General Gowon, considers the unimpeded return of the Ibos into the Nigerian family the keystone of his policies and programmes.’ With three million Ibos crowded into 1,500 square miles it was malnutrition and starvation that forced them to surrender, plus the increasing difficulty of obtaining ammunition. Even so, the Ibos had kept going with great ingenuity and endless expedients.
One of the most devastating civil wars in post-1945 history came to an abrupt end on 12 January 1970. On 10 January 1970 Lt-Col. Ojukwu handed over control to his Chief of Staff Lt-Col. Philip Effiong and fled to Côte d’Ivoire where he was accorded asylum. On 12 January Effiong instructed the Biafran forces to disengage. On 14 January the New York Times reported: ‘Nigeria’s future as a united nation and a respected member of the international community depends heavily on the compassion and wisdom displayed by her leaders in the wake of their military victory.’ As Gen. Obasanjo, who led the final assault, was to say later: ‘The task was honourably discharged by all Nigerians in form of relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction and reintegration, and success was accomplished, as in the civil war itself, to the amazement of friends and foes alike.’ On 15 January at Dodan Barracks in Lagos, the headquarters of the Supreme Military Council, Lt-Col. Effiong signed the formal act of surrender and declared: ‘We accept the existing administrative and political structure of the Federation of Nigeria. Biafra ceases to exist.’
The war, with its terrible suffering, had nevertheless kept Africa’s largest black state intact. In the post-war period that followed, Gowon’s greatest achievement was the way in which he presided over the reintegration of the defeated Ibos into the mainstream activities of Nigerian life. The war proved a traumatic affair for Africa as a whole; just as the continent was emerging from colonialism it was both daunting and humiliating to contemplate the possible collapse of Africa’s largest and potentially most powerful state. The war provided comfort for the white racists in the south who could argue that independence merely brought chaos while it gave Nigerians pause to think at the readiness of the big powers to interfere in pursuit of interests that often had little to do with Nigeria’s needs. Britain and the USSR were the two main sources of arms for the Federal Government while France was the principal source of arms for Biafra, supplied mainly through its proxy, Gabon. International observers were unanimous that the reports of genocide were unfounded, which provided a boost for Gowon and his policy of rehabilitating the Ibos. A unique aspect of this war was the high rate of success achieved by Biafran propaganda and the widespread belief it fostered in the West that the Federal Military Government was pursuing a policy of genocide although no proof was ever adduced in support of the claim. The war was prolonged unnecessarily by two factors: the Ibo belief, cultivated by its own propaganda, that genocide would follow surrender; and the part played by international charities, which continued to provide relief when otherwise Biafra would have been forced to surrender. The war became a cause for various charities whose propaganda ‘to feed the starving Biafrans’, however well intentioned, prolonged both the war and the extent of the suffering. Estimated casualties were 100,000 military (on both sides) and between 500,000 and two million civilians, mainly as a result of starvation, while 4.6 million Biafrans became refugees. In the end, 900 days of warfare had not destroyed Africa’s largest black state, while Biafra’s bid for secession and independence had failed.