The road to There was a country (1)

IN the evening of his life in 2012 prophet and professor, Chinua Achebe, completed and issued his last testament to Nigerians as a writer, a teacher, a patriot and a nationalist. The testament was contained in a book which was entitled: There Was A Country – A Personal History of Biafra. It came with a bang and elicited raw emotions and passions for and against the writer and the contents of his book. Achebe was not usually far from controversy but he was not known to shy away from it. But soon after publishing his seminal work which read like someone who emptied himself, he died. That was in March of 2013. The understanding of most of the people who read the book in full or snippets of it is that the author of the soar away Things Fall Apart was reminiscing and telling his personal story of the defunct Republic of Biafra of which he was an active participant.
Indeed he was. To borrow from Ike Anya, a London-based Nigerian of Igbo extraction who did an unofficial review of There Was A Country when it was published, he wrote: “Of particular interest are the snippets that emerged of life in Biafra – the intense emotional connection of a people united by the fear and anger at the massacres, the ingenuity of the engineers who found ways to refine petrol or build bombs and the efforts of artists and intellectuals to contribute to building a new nation. He also describes his own forays to foreign capitals to seek their support for the Biafran dream and the eventual withering and death of that dream”. Long before Achebe got to the final section of that book he had traced the problems that beset Nigeria at independence and the roles played by various persons and groups including external forces. Towards the end of the book he analyzed Nigeria’s journey since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, “dipping into the failures of governance and the consequences, raising several questions that need to be addressed for the future”.
Not known to pull punches, Achebe challenged the “popular perception that General [Yakubu] Gowon’s ‘No Victor, No Vanquished’ policy at the end of the war in 1970 led to the successful re-integration of the Igbo into Nigeria, highlighting the egregious government policy which wiped the savings of every Biafran who had operated their bank accounts during the war with an “ex-gratia” payment of just 20 pounds. He is also laser sharp in his conviction that part of Nigeria’s problem stems from its anti-meritocratic suppression of the Igbo people, and the refusal of the country to face up to insalubrious aspects of its history, issues that he argues continues to haunt it”. It is instructive that Achebe published There Was A Country forty-two years after the civil war and presented it during his 82nd birthday anniversary. He had lived and taught in the United States of America for years after he was partially paralyzed in an automobile accident in Nigeria.
In Achebe’s third book, A Man of The People, a fictional work, he had virtually foretold trouble in Nigeria. Even before the novel was published a military coup happened and a civil war which lasted between 1967 to 1970 broke out. Not many Nigerians especially our leaders took note then. But it came to pass. Is there a possibility that in this book, There Was A Country, Achebe was indeed referring more to Nigeria than to Biafra? The thought alone is foreboding and l sincerely hope that this is the product of my imagination. But why it cannot be my imagination playing weird tricks on me is that l am not an advocate of, or a believer in, the dismemberment of Nigeria. But is Nigeria the way it is presently structured a lie? YES! Is it sustainable in the long run? NO! Will something have to give sooner than later to steer the country away from a calamitous collapse? INEVITABLE! Is there any indication from the All Progressives Congress [APC]-led federal government of President Muhammadu Buhari that the country is consciously being pulled back from the precipice? NOT SURE, probably NO! Are there actions, utterances, policies and programmes of the government that are unsettling and causing anxiety and disaffection to sections of the population? YES!  Is the disintegration of Nigeria then unavoidable? Again NOT SURE, probably NO! Time and time again, the country appears to have an in-built mechanism to virtually pull itself back from the edge of the abyss. It happened in 1993 during the Moshood Abiola saga, again in 2010 during President Umaru Yar’Adua’s ill-health and subsequent death, and yet again in 2015 before, during and after the bitter and divisive presidential contest between President Goodluck Jonathan and the opposition candidate Buhari.
The expectation of many Nigerians was that healing and national reconciliation would rank high in the agenda of the new government of the APC and Buhari. It turned out very sadly not to be so. Indeed the actions, inactions and the body language of the president have appeared to exacerbate the nation’s fault lines. Barely two months after Buhari assumed office he was reported to have said in the United States of America that he would not be even-handed in his treatment of all sections of the country, a clear violation of his oath of office and oath of allegiance which are derived from the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria. He told an interviewer that it would be unrealistic to expect him to treat the 97 per cent of Nigerians who voted for him during the election the same he would treat those whose support for him accounted for only five percent of his victory. That insensitive and divisive comment is one year this month and it has not, to the best of my knowledge, been denied or refuted or moderated. The statement actually set the tone for the direction and attitude of this administration. The lopsidedness in the critical appointments to key government offices that followed in quick succession was shockingly insensitive.
This week virtually all social media platforms are awash with reports of recent retirements in the Army. Names and ranks and geo-political zones of the retirees formed part of the publication. But that is not the problem. In fact retirements, ordinarily, in the Armed Forces should be a routine. But in this case the highlight of the troubling publication was the claim that the retirements smelt like a case of ethnic cleansing. The report alleged that about 90 per cent of the ‘victims’ were from the South of the country while almost 50 percent of the 90 per cent came from the South East. It is difficult to believe the publication and the motives of those who leaked the story if indeed it is true. But the Army can do itself and Nigerians a favour by refuting the story if it is a lie or making a full disclosure should the story be true. We are in a democracy and the Army should be the people’s Army. Moreover, a cardinal promise of candidate Buhari while canvassing to be elected president was to run an open and transparent administration. The Commander-in-Chief should give the marching order if need be unless this, also, is part of the unfolding agenda of governance by exclusion.