The preceding chapter, the Conclusion, alone dates back to January 1969. All the other chapters in the second part have been brought up to December of that year.
It was allowed to stand because even in December, with no end to the war, the points it made remained valid in part. By late December the Nigerians’ fourth ‘final assault’ had made little headway. Lord Carrington, the British Conservative (Opposition) spokesman on defence matters, had spent a week inside Biafra, the first Conservative factfinder to be sent there in two and a half years. On his return on 22 December he said no end to the war was in sight.
Then in the second week of January 1970 Biafra collapsed. It came quite suddenly. A unit on the southern front, exhausted beyond caring and out of ammunition, quietly stripped off its uniforms and faded into the bush. There was no response from the Nigerians, and the rot could have been stopped by a competent commander. The Biafran officer concerned was incompetent and failed to notice the gap in his line. Units on either side of the missing men took fright and followed suit. Soon a gaping hole ran along the entire defence line from Aba city to Okpuala Bridge.
A Nigerian armoured-car patrol, probing north, met no opposition and rolled forward. Within a day the front was breached. The remainder of the Twelfth Division ran off into the bush. Between Okpuala Bridge and the River Niger to the west the Fourteenth Division was outflanked. Here too, exhausted troops faded into the bush. Colonel Obasanjo’s Third Nigerian Division rolled forward into the heart of the Biafran enclave, heading for the airstrip at Uli.
There was no opposition; men who had not eaten for weeks had no strength left to go on fighting.
In a last cabinet meeting on 10 January General Ojukwu (he had been elevated in rank during 1969) listened to his advisers for the last time. Their advise was almost unanimous. To stay and die would be futile; to stay and be hunted through the bush would bring further misery to the entire population.
That evening, after darkness had fallen, he drove to Uli as the Nigerian guns rumbled on the southern front. With a small group of colleagues he boarded the Biafran Super Constellation, the Grey Ghost, and flew out into a lonely exile. Brigadier-General Effiong, taking over as acting head of state, sought surrender terms twenty-four hours later. The long struggle was over.
East of the Niger the former Eastern Region, Biafra, was split into three states in accordance with Gowon’s decree of May 1967 which had triggered the secession in the first place. In the south the Rivers State was formed under a military governor called Diete-Spiff. In the extreme south-east the South-Eastern state came into being under a certain Colonel Essuene. The Ibos, the predominant force of Biafra, were allocated their postage-stampsized East Central State. Here Ibo Ukpabi Asika stayed on as governor, to run an administration that became a byword for corruption. He was finally removed and required to hold himself available for public inquiry in August 1975.
Following the war, Nigeria seemed to prosper, at least on the surface. The oil revenues increased year by year; then in 1973 the world price for oil doubled, and doubled again as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) struck at the oil-consuming West. The fact of the Nigerian regime’s oil production, and the vast amounts it was spending in Britain, made it very popular in London. The British Press, eternally following London’s Establishment thinking, almost elevated Yakubu Gowon to sainthood. Not a contrary word could be said or written about him or Nigeria.
Towards the end of Gowon’s reign the mismanagement finally came home to roost. The Port of Lagos was jammed with over 400 ships unable to discharge; the telephones ceased to function; the public services were in chaos; the roads had not been maintained in years; communications became almost impossible. Eventually even the British Press began to publish articles critical of the Gowon regime.
On 29 July 1975, nine years to the day after he came to power over Ironsi’s body, Gowon was attending the summit of the Organization of African Unity in Kampala, Uganda, when he was toppled. The man who took over, with a pledge to eradicate corruption, was General Murtala Mohammed, who sacked all twelve State governors and appointed new ones. Gowon went into exile in Britain and soon joined the pupils at Warwick University, announcing that he intended to study politics because he felt it was time to learn something about them.
To give credit where it is undoubtedly due, there was, after the Nigerian victory, no ethnic cleansing, no massacres, no genocide. And this was surely due in large part to the policy of reconciliation personally endorsed by Yakubu Gowon. But he never had a chance of bringing good government to Nigeria. At best he was a well-meaning front man to a junta of Northern military men, and after he went Nigeria entered into a long night of military dictator after dictator, a night only lightened by two remarkable interventions from General Obasanjo.
In early February 1976 a junior officer walked calmly up to General Mohammed’s car as it sat in a traffic jam and emptied two magazines of sub-machine carbine ammunition into it. Mohammed died instantly. The attempted coup aborted, nevertheless, and General Obasanjo, formerly commander in succession to Adekunle of the Nigerian Third Division in the war, took over.
Meanwhile General Emeka Ojukwu remained in exile in the Ivory Coast. He had arrived there with precisely one 100-dollar bill in his possession.
He was perhaps the only man who had ever held power in West Africa who came out without a private nest-egg of money embezzled from public funds. Not only had he not milked the till, he had spent every penny of his private fortune on his people. He was penniless.
Starting from scratch and with a small loan from a friend, he began a transport company with two lorries. By late 1975 he had built up a chain of companies in transport, construction, gravel quarrying and distribution franchises …
Throughout these six years, endless delegations of Ibos and others slipped across the borders from Nigeria to visit him. In East Central State the Gowon régime had tried desperately to find an Ibo who could break the charisma exercised by Ojukwu over his own people. They failed dismally. In fact the opposite occurred. Compared with the public corruption they saw all around them, the integrity of the Ojukwu régime began to appear more and more remarkable to the Nigerians, and not merely the Ibos. Delegations of Yoruba and Tiv began to ask to come and visit him in exile.
It took years for the Ivorians, and the French civil servants and businessmen who abound in the Ivory Coast, to come to believe that he had not a secret hoard of Biafran public money stashed away in Switzerland. When they did believe it, some thought it admirable, others madness.
Back in the heart of Iboland, some of the cream of the educated Ibos, perhaps 10,000 in all, went to work for the Nigerians. For the masses of the Ibos, farmers and small traders, artisans and clerks, the road was hard. But they got by, working all hours of the day and half the night, building up a sort of life again. They silently rejected the Lagos Ibos proposed to them by the Gowon government. They scrawled on walls and the sides of lorries the words, ‘Akareja [‘he who has gone away’] must return’.
General Obasanjo permitted elections for a return to civilian rule in 1979 and there ensued a brief window of quasi-democracy under a civilian president. It was he who, in 1982, permitted the exiled Emeka Ojukwu to return home. He invited me to accompany him. It was a remarkable experience.
The Ojukwu party was flown home under presidential amnesty. After a few nervy days in Lagos we took off in a jet-liner of Nigeria Airways to Enugu, capital of the East Central State, the Ibo homeland. Whatever reaction any of us expected to witness as the exiled leader came home from twelve years away, no one foresaw what happened.
As the airliner circled the airport at Enugu those looking down saw a vast human sea of faces staring upwards. I had never seen a million people in one place before, but I saw them that day. It was quite a sight.
After landing, the airplane was engulfed for two hours before the cavalcade could begin to inch forward on the fifty miles drive to Ojukwu’s home town of Nnewi. Another half million lined the route. Akareja had returned.
After three days and nights of unremitting celebrations I bade him farewell and, still under amnesty, made my way home to London via a country that had once put a price on my head. I have never returned, nor seen him since.
Emeka Ojukwu made one brief and disastrous attempt to reenter the political arena, standing as senator for Onitsha Division in the elections of January 1983. He was defeated only because the Ibo State Governor rigged the election, destroying thousands of ballot boxes to ensure his own favoured candidate won.
It did none of them any good. Just after New Year 1983 the army struck again, establishing yet another junta government and putting all the politicians in jail.
Ojukwu was released after six months in Kiri Kiri jail, Lagos. He settled for life as a businessman and now divides his time between Lagos and Enugu where he has homes.
Would Biafra have succeeded and prospered as a self-governing nation-state? The evidence says yes. It would have benefited from the oil beneath the land, the ingenuity and capacity for hard work of the Ibo nation and, I believe, under this Oxford graduate, good government. Most African peoples would yearn for such a state.
In fact the coup of 1983 led to another sixteen years of brutal and corrupt rule until, just before the millennium, the last despot, the brutal General Sani Abacha, died or was assassinated. Surprisingly, elections followed, to be won by the now elderly General Obasanjo, who became president, and remains so at the time of writing.
But are the forty years of coups, corruption and dictators really over? One would like to think so. Thirty-four years ago Emeka Ojukwu tried to give his people something better, and Britain, more than any other, destroyed the chance.
FREDERICK FORSYTH
HERTFORDSHIRE, August 2001