One thing that Igbo leader and world famous author Professor Chinua Achebe’s latest book, There Was A country, has definitely achieved is that it affirms that it is time we stopped walking as if on eggshells, around the history of Nigeria’s chain of crises. Achebe’s characteristic bare-knuckle account, for all it is worth, has opened the floodgates of candid debate. However if the professor hoped to use the book to validate the fantasy he had peddled for decades, he must be sorely disappointed now because the book did exactly the opposite. It has inspired a number of authoritative rebuttals, some of which have and more of which will further set the records straight.



Achebe once wrote that the trouble with Nigeria is a failure of leadership, which obviously he does not think he is part, but the truth is that Chinua Achebe is part of a generation of Igbo leaders, indeed a clique of self-serving Nigerian leaders, that consistently failed their people. When leaders arrogantly refuse to admit their own failings, indeed refuse to accept the fallibility of man, the usual resort, of which Achebe and some Igbo leaders like him are evidently fond, is to look for scapegoats, however improbable.

In the second quarter of the last century, a half-wit German army corporal and his thuggish friends bullied their way into Germany’s governance. They thereafter paved Germany’s way to ruin with the propaganda of a superior Aryan race, supposedly whose progress was being impaired by a long list of scapegoats—Jews, Blacks, gypsies, the regular army, communists, the disabled and others. Victorious allies and other decent Germans made sure that surviving Nazi leaders faced the full music, for destroying countless lives in pursuit of their delusions. However, the tragedy was not that in modern Europe people with evil and petty minds like the Nazis existed. The tragedy was that those who ought to know better did not, but went along instead. The moral here is that humans will believe only what they choose to believe.

I love Professor Achebe’s fiction and celebrate him for it, as do millions of other Yoruba people that he so much delights in vilifying but I detest his politics, especially when he deliberately intertwines the two and calls it history. It is understandable that, having made very little if any contribution to the advancement of his people, even as he exploited their history and lore for his own profit, Professor Achebe would now try to cad a decent burial from them. However, this long running but obviously futile effort to line his casket with the reputation of a decent people and their worthy leaders, for a man of Achebe’s age and endowment in life, is nothing but sheer wickedness.

As they say, a people deserve the leaders they get. While Igbo people are welcome to accept another of Achebe’s fiction as fact—the same way that they have turned Achebe’s Things Fall Apart into authentic Igbo history, and celebrate it as such—they have no right to ask the rest of the world to follow suit. Highly pertinent questions, long buried inside the grave of a no-victor-no-vanquished post-civil war policy, are about to resurrect. And if Igbo individuals are afraid to ask their leaders like Achebe, the right questions, perhaps for fear of what they might discover of the truth, others will.

Professor Achebe claims that his people would have won the civil war had Chief Obafemi Awolowo not led genocide against the Igbo. Awolowo did that, Achebe alleges, because he and his Yoruba race were jealous of Igbo individualism, Igbo superior education, Igbo higher technological advancement and Igbo domination of Nigeria’s politics and industry. While the wishful conjecture of such a claim, for Nigeria of the sixties, is clearly self-evident, it nonetheless mirrors the same self-deception of Igbo battle capability, which self-serving leaders as Achebe sold to an already bruised and battered people to plunge them headlong into a war for which they were not prepared. They say a wise General picks his battles; Igbo leadership of the day simply lacked the good judgment to run away to fight another day.

Awolowo did not ask or conspire with anyone to go and murder a whole crop of Northern military and political leaders in their beds and in front of their families. Neither did the Yoruba ask anyone to kill Easterners en-masse in the North. In fact, despite being, essentially, bystanders of both conspiracies, each side considered many innocent Yoruba lives to be acceptable collateral during that sad period of Nigeria’s history.

There was a clear pre-misjudgement or miscalculation by Igbo leaders, of the North’s response to January 1966. Incidentally, I hold the opinion that being in prison in the East, where the ringleaders evidently did not make any serious plans or allocate tangible resources to implement their coup, saved Awolowo’s life. I have no doubt that if Awolowo had been in prison in the West or in the North, the coupists would have dragged him out and killed him. All that nonsense about carrying out the coup for Awolowo is simply propaganda, origin of which I suspect is Awolowo’s enemies in the North.

Then there was the unpardonable mistake of ordering their people, following the first round of pogroms, back to the killing fields of the North, without first pacifying an aggrieved people. Following which the so-called Igbo champions concocted the hemlock of Biafra.

Biafra was good going as long as General Yakubu Gowon and Awolowo fed Biafra’s leaders like Achebe and their families. Even as Achebe and others like him watched other people’s children die of hunger, kwashiorkor and their leaders' wickedness.

However, as soon as Awolowo stopped sending food, one by one, Achebe and others like him fled Biafra. The world never saw so many ‘roving ambassadors’ of a country. They left poor Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu to hold the poison chalice, predictably which he also refused to drink, as he, too, eventually fled, leaving helpless Igbo masses to their fate.

The integrity factor is all too evident. Chief Awolowo was honest to admit his role and defended what he saw as the good sense of blockading an enemy in war. Northern Nigeria leaders have admitted no less about the pogrom, saying they simply avenged their military and political leaders murdered by the Igbo. South-South leaders confirm that they sabotaged Biafra to free themselves from alleged Igbo ethnic oppression and brutal economic assault. What do we get from Igbo leaders? Denials of what in essence are a series of their bad judgment, while people like Achebe try to put a spin on history. Yet they wonder why others do not give much for the integrity of Igbo leaders like Chinua Achebe.

‘Transferred aggression’ is when an individual that is overwhelmed by superior circumstances looks for another individual, perceived to be an easy target, upon whom to vent his or her frustration. Such frustration is usually borne of one or a mixture of inferiority complex, cowardice and, or, shame.

http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/guest-articles/what-has-achebe-ever-done-for-the-igbo.html

kunlekunle: the guy needs to leave inheritance for his children, he's broke.

bittyend: Still waiting for answers.

Baby mama: In my area when boys/ men acts like gossipy middle school girls,onlookers get concerned.
Achebe,a man's man published his best seller at the age of 28 ,today it has sold more than 11 million.,so twenty something year olds are no kids,some of you may even be older.s
if Achebe is useless to Igbos,let the Igbo man worry about that.
I feel ashamed to see Nigerian men act this way and I don't even know you folks.So unmanly.In a manly ranking of 1 to 10, this is at the minus level
You need to man up guys and quit acting like little wimpy sissys
Take it from a female,this is the most effeminate way for a man to act besides switching his hips while walking
*smh*

Baby mama: In my area when boys/ men acts like gossipy middle school girls,onlookers get concerned.
Achebe,a man's man published his best seller at the age of 28 ,today it has sold more than 11 million.,so twenty something year olds are no kids,some of you may even be older.s
if Achebe is useless to Igbos,let the Igbo man worry about that.
I feel ashamed to see Nigerian men act this way and I don't even know you folks.So unmanly.In a manly ranking of 1 to 10, this is at the minus level
You need to man up guys and quit acting like little wimpy sissys
Take it from a female,this is the most effeminate way for a man to act besides switching his hips while walking
*smh*