AS WITH IRAQ, ALMOST 40 years later, oil in the mid 1960s lay at the core of Nigeria’s problems. Huge deposits of fossil fuels had been discovered along the coast of the Eastern Region, or Biafra, as it was known for the short time that it existed.
Even today there is much squabbling about exactly who owns what. At one stage in the early 2000s, Nigeria and the Cameroon Republic almost went to war over the disputed Bakassi Peninsula: nobody even knew it existed until oil was discovered there. Until then, Bakassi might have been a new brand of toothpaste.
There was more sabre-rattling over what constituted the offshore rights of Equatorial Guinea – formerly Spanish Guinea – and, more recently, a botched South African mercenary attempt to oust the President of that island government, one of the most brutal and corrupt countries on the globe. Oil motivated that lunacy as well…
Four decades earlier, it was oil that made the Ibos greedy because they wanted all the black stuff for themselves. Certainly, they didn’t need what they termed the ‘Backward North’ to enjoy any of it: all the oil under the ground was rightfully theirs was it not? Therefore, ran the argument, which was quite public, let’s keep it for ourselves. Goodbye Nigerian Federation!
It was about then that quite a few developed nations – Britain, America and Russia in particular – began to look seriously at the military options involved. It seemed clear that Nigeria was heading for civil war. Nevertheless, it was a complicated issue. Internecine strife – as we have seen more recently in places such as Chechnya, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere – usually is.
Meanwhile, I’d settled into my new job in Lagos and there had been some interesting developments following the army mutiny that had almost claimed my life. I stayed on at Ikeja during this period, running the military gauntlet each day until I was on first name terms with most of the senior Nigerian Army and Air Force officers there.
From my office at the airport, despite being open to large numbers of commercial airlines, including the old Pan American Airways (the company ran a regular service between New York and Johannesburg), I could see that the government was starting an arms build-up of its own in anticipation of an Ibo secession. The first evidence of this was the arrival, in full Nigerian Air Force livery, of a squadron of Czechoslovakian Delphin trainer/fighter jets. Some of these trim little aircraft were parked outside my office.
Everybody was delighted. At last, the Federal government was showing a bit of muscle! For the first month these brand new warplanes were almost mollycoddled. Each morning they were carefully washed down and polished. Come the end of the day, someone would emerge from the hangars and close the cockpits. It was all meticulously done. Additional canvas covers would be spread over the planes so that nothing would be damaged if it rained. By the second month, the covers had disappeared. Weeks later nobody even bothered about rain, or whether the cockpits were open or closed to the weather.