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.