Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933-2011)
By Olatunji Dare 4 hours 56 minutes ago
The Nation

•The late Ojukwu
Christopher Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the departed Biafran leader whose remains the nation has been bidding farewell this past week, was prescient.  Or, maybe, he made the most of his history tutorials at Oxford.
He could have settled down in a cushy post in the administrative class of the colonial civil service and look forward to the day when he would become a permanent secretary of a major ministry, or perhaps even chief secretary to the government.
He had all the right qualifications.  He was born well, or to put in the language of contemporary Nigerian politics, he had “pedigree.”   
That is an unusual qualification to demand of persons seeking political office in a republic.  Even more curious is the fact that the people administering the pedigree test have little or no pedigree to speak of.  But I digress.
Ojukwu had pedigree.  His father Sir Louis Phillip Ojukwu, transport mogul, industrialist and produce merchant, was reputed to be the wealthiest man in Nigeria, if not in all of West Africa.  He was an elected member of the Federal House of Representatives but reportedly turned his back on all that nonsense when a fellow member he regarded as a person of no consequence was given the floor before him.
Emeka Ojukwu had the best education his own precocious intellect could absorb and his father’s money procure — the old CMS Grammar School and King’s College, public school in England, finishing up at Oxford.
If he did not rock the boat too hard — there was no guarantee here, for he could be outspoken when occasion demanded, and generally did not suffer fools gladly — he would have attained the highest rank in the public service.
But his prescience or his reading of history or both, supervened.
The military had figured as major players in the affairs of many post-colonial societies in Latin America and Asia.  Africa already had its own example of this phenomenon in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Ojukwu saw this as the shape of the future in Africa and wanted to be a player in that future, according to his biographer Frederick Forsyth.
That explains why Ojukwu resigned from his post in the civil service and joined the Nigeria Army, one of the first five Nigerian university graduates to do so, in 1957.  When General Ibrahim Abboud took over power in Sudan the following year to end the chaos in that country, he must have confirmed Ojukwu’s prognostications on the role of the military in Africa’s future.
Further confirmation came literally for Nigeria’s backyard when, in 1963, Togo’s army overthrew the government of Silvanus Olympio, and again the same year when the army in Dahomey, as Benin Republic was then called, toppled the government of Hubert Maga.  A “wind of  “change” was blowing over Africa, but not exactly in the manner framed so eloquently by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
It is not clear whether this was the kind of role Ojukwu envisaged for the military in Africa – supplanting elected officials and administering the state as if it were a barracks, or intervening as patriotic arbiter in the disputes convulsing the post-colonial state.
But his opportunity came when the Nigerian military struck in January 1966, and he was posted to Enugu as military governor of what was then Eastern Nigeria.  In design, the coup had no ethnic basis to it.  In execution, however, it soon took on an ethnic coloration, spawning a “revenge coup” that culminated in the mass slaughter of Igbo resident in Northern Nigeria. As far as I can tell, it was Ojukwu, the student of modern history, who first called it a pogrom, the term that would fix it in the public consciousness.
From the pogrom, it was but a predictable step to demanding a loose federation, as in Aburi, and ultimately to secession when the Aburi accords were circumscribed.
Finding himself the right person at the right moment, Ojukwu followed the path of historic necessity and rose magnificently to the occasion. His plumed military cap, his luxuriant beard  a lá Fidel Castro, his commanding presence, his incandescent eloquence, and his mastery of the dramatic gesture, all combined to build him into a charismatic figure.  He was the darling of the foreign press, when never tired of remarking his Oxford education.
For the 30 months the civil war triggered by the secession lasted, Ojukwu personified the Biafran spirit – ebullient, defiant, resourceful, resolute, inventive, and resilient.  But the odds against Biafra were daunting.
 By a master-stroke, General Yakubu Gowon’s Federal Government had on the eve of the proclamation of Biafra given the so-called Eastern minorities their own states.  They saw  that their stake in Nigeria was more assured than in Biafra.  With the oil-producing areas in Nigeria’s hands, Nigeria held most of the diplomatic aces. And it had far more resources than the shrinking Biafra could mobilise.  In retrospect, it is a wonder that Biafra lasted as long as it did.
If the story had ended with Ojukwu in exile in Côte D’Ivoire, Ojukwu would have remained more myth than man.  Desperate to advance the ruling NPN’s political fortunes in the East by checkmating Dr Nnamdi Axikiwe’s NPP, the Shehu Shagari government granted Ojukwu a  pardon that freed him to return home to a triumphal welcome.
 But even the NPN was not prepared for the speed with which Ojukwu sought to establish himself as  a force in the party.  With his charisma and eloquence and antecedents, he could eclipse every  NPN member of the Senate, and might even set his eyes on the Presidency itself. 
And so, the NPN rigged Ojukwu out of the election he had won to the Senate, which was just as well, for the Shagari administration collapsed after the poll, victim of its own “landslide.”
Ojukwu tried his hands at magazine publishing, which would have served as an outlet for his ideas and the causes he cared about.  The magazine, NewGlobe, collapsed after just one edition.  He would later find his voice as a delegate to the Constitutional conference that Abacha set up to avoid coming to terms with Moshood Abiola’s emphatic victory in the June 12, 1993, presidential election.   Ojukwu had been elected conference delegate with some 124 votes, but he would claim that the conference’s mandate was superior to that of June 12.
There is no denying, all things considered, that Ojukwu was a great man.  But great men make great mistakes, and Ojukwu had his fair share. Among them would have to be counted the attempted invasion of Lagos that was halted at Ore, and the proclamation of the former Midwestern Nigeria as the “Republic of Benin.”  The puppet “republic” lasted 33 desultory days and inflamed local sentiment against Midwest Igbos.
Plunging headlong into the treacherous waters of Second Republic politics instead of staying regally above the fray, at least for a while, would have to be counted a misjudgment. That act made Ojukwu a divisive figure instead of a rallying point.
His roaming the world as envoy of the thieving and murderous Sani Abacha must be judged an act of self-stultification.
But let no one put Christopher Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu down as an ethnic warlord or as a mere secessionist leader.  
He was to the very end eloquent advocate of a Nigeria that is just and caring and humane and progressive and truly federal.  The ideas he pressed with such consummate skill at Aburi for actualising such a Nigeria live on. Under his dynamic leadership, Biafra gave the world inspiring intimations of what black humanity can attain under the right conditions.

Greatest west african, second greatest african behind mandela. Any body that says he does not agree is stup.dly pretending. I am from the great Edo state, and it is a pity that no nigerian can ever be great like him, wether living, dead or yet to be born. All we see are pretenders and those trying to buy cheap favours. I dare any ediot to say otherwise

okosodo:

Greatest west african, second greatest african behind mandela. Any body that says he does not agree is stup.dly pretending. I am from the great Edo state, and it is a pity that no nigerian can ever be great like him, wether living, dead or yet to be born. All we see are pretenders and those trying to buy cheap favours. I dare any ediot to say otherwise

up my Edo Inlaws

Okosodo you to much, ''say it as it is''

Thanks bro , only the truth i stand for