There was a time when truth was a virtue
and truthful people were sought for, crowned and
revered. There was a time when
parents taught their children to always say the truth in the face of all odds. There was a time when South Africa went through a tortuous
and harrowing apartheid experience in the hands of the ‘Bothas’ when the best activists and those who
opposed apartheid were houndeded into
jail and others outrightly eliminated because there were
the ‘Pieta’ and other ‘Bothas’
who felt that they were superior to other fellow South Africans just because of their colour, and
therefore sought to eliminate the hated colour.
There was a time when one man called Hitler was the president in Germany and he believed
that Germans were
superior human beings who must rule
and lord it over others, and particularly, that the Jews must be
eliminated, leading to the killing of over seven million Jews by herding
them into gas chambers and melting them within few seconds and strewing their
ashes into the river Nile! There was a time in Congo when the Tutsis and
the Hutsis tried to eliminate each other in a show of ethnic superiority and
ethic rivalry .
There was a time in one
country, there was a time in one community, there was a time in one village and
there was even a time in one home when hatred, animosity, and assumed superiority
of birth etc. have left the people in
ruins. There was a state in Nigeria which
allowed pompousity and egotism to hoodwink it into believing that it was ‘born
to rule’ while others were born to be enslaved.
A philosopher once opined that inferiors struggle to become equals and
equals struggle to become superiors and that is the state of mind that breeds
revolution. The whole world is a theatre
of subjugation and even God Himself knows this and he has never failed to
recount his experience with Satan and He even inspired the complete
documentation of his experience in the Holy Bible. The South African people
after the so many decades of apartheid regime regained their freedom and majority
rule began to be practiced and
thereafter instituted what they called “The Truth Commission;” where the role played
by individuals, group and people during the apartheid era were publicly discussed
and documented, not for the purpose of vengeance but for posterity.
It is quite impossible to beat a child
and prevent it from crying and equally stop it from sobbing. There is no event that does not have the key
players or the dramatis personae and the actions or the inactions of these key
players live after them. In my own Nigeria,
some ill informed people think that they could play a role in the ethnic
cleansing of a people without being mentioned or recorded by time! How could any idle and indifferent individual
blame an activist like Prof. Chinua Achebe for recording his personal history
of the Biafran Civil war? Achebe was
said to have worked as an ambassador to the Biafran government and
before then, he had worked in the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation at the time
of the 1966 pogrom; therefore, he was strategically positioned to experience
the heat of the turbulence.
That Achebe’s book “There was a country”
could be interpreted from many angles. I
could start from the angle of what Nigeria was which it is no more, such as: there
was a country where love, oneness, patriotism, and hope reigned; there was a
country where a southerner could stand an election in the north and win and
vice versa; there was a country where
graduates were sure of employment; there
was a country which knew no armed robbery nor kidnapping; there was a country
where there was no ethnic militancy such as OPC, MEND, APC etc.; there was a country
where the property of the southerners living in the northern part was
safe; but unfortunately, this country
which our forefathers founded and the British girl friend called it Nigeria, is
no more.
Nigerians act and refuse to face history,
but as long as life subsists, history will always prevail. That Chief Awolowo stopped the ferrying of
food to the children and women of war stricken and kwashiorkor infested Biafra
was not in doubt. Chief Awo himself explained out his reason to rest on the
supposition that part of the relief sent to the Biafra territory for the children
and women were consumed by the Biafran
soldiers. However, this reason is
not cogent enough to stimulate the perishing of millions of eastern Nigerian
children and women. It is to be noted
that the relief materials were sent by international communities to Biafra and
not by Nigerian government. It is trite
in law that instead one innocent person should suffer, it was better to allow
nine guilty persons to go free. So for the sake of the innocent children that
perished in hunger and malnutrition (kwashiorkor), Chief Awo should have allowed the relief
going to Biafra territory.
What does
Chief Awo explain about the nationalization policy that came into force
immediately after the civil war when the easterners were still impoverished by
the war and could therefore not afford to acquire any of the national economy
that was put up for sale? Of course, the
buck stops on the table of the government in power then – Gen. Yakubu
Gowon. Awo was just being mentioned
because he was a big fish in that regime but there was no idea he muted that
could sail through without the support of the head of state and his supreme
military council.
The point is that the fear of history ought
to make Nigerians and indeed humanity to refrain from taking rash decisions. To be
continued.