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And The War Lingers – By Chinedu Ekeke
COMMENTARIAT | CHINEDU EKEKE | AUGUST
12, 2012 AT 6:04 AM
This land, in its entire length and breadth, is
soaked in blood. It has sucked up blood of
millions; millions of innocent lives cut short in
their prime.
Between 1966 and 1970, the land of Nigeria
drank the blood of one million Igbos from the
South East. The blood flowed in the streets and
trails scattered in towns and villages in that
region. Some accounts say it was between one
million and three million. But nobody has argued
that it was less. Amongst that shocking number
were inventors, leaders, mobilizers, scientists,
communicators, touts, drunks, clowns, doctors,
teachers and even the illiterate. People in various
walks of life, or those who would have been
excelling in many today, were all lost to that
tragic period of Nigeria’s history. Some of the
slaughtered, at a point in time, were students of
the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Young, and with
their future ahead of them, those lives were
wasted, and their blood shed to please the god of
oneness of Nigeria. To maintain our nationhood, a
grievous evil was committed against the people of
the South East. Even after the war, hunger and
starvation were unleashed on the vulnerable,
children and pregnant women, further increasing
the casualty figures during the war.
Those deaths were the beginning of sorrow and
agony to the families of the victims. The trauma
lingered, even years after the chaos ended. In
victory, no consolation, in form of visible
rehabilitation and reintegration, came the way of
the survivors, the vanquished. Till today, every
Igbo family tells their children the story of the
harm done their people. There is no family which
didn’t lose at least one life in that war. It was a
dark period in the history of an ethnic group, and
the killings didn’t discriminate against men and
women. My father told us stories of how he hid in
the bush for weeks, sleeping and waking with
wild animals, birds of the air and serpents of the
earth, just to avoid being killed.
We may not have to blame anybody now, but we
would be doomed if our carelessness causes
history to repeat itself.
And history is repeating itself.
Today the war lingers, and one Nigeria is still
shaky.
The UpNEPA! generation hadn’t been born when
the civil war was fought. The story may just be to
us what it exactly is: a story. But it happened,
and in it humans, with flesh and blood like us,
were affected.
Yet there is a maze we have to suss out. The head
of the Nigerian government during that civil war
was the head of the government after the civil
war; until someone else took over. He
philosophized on the possibility of a war ending
without any side turning out the victor or the
vanquished. That war ended with that
proclamation. But the task of accelerating the
healing process was left undone. Why was the
man who oversaw the war unable to invest in the
critical rehabilitation of both humans and
infrastructure? Why were equity and justice, the
two key ingredients that guarantee peace in all
human dealings, not pursued vigorously after the
war? Nobody valued the significance of the
volume of blood that was shed for Nigeria. We just
moved on.
Since after that historic strife, Nigeria has been,
“fortunately”, ruled longest by those who even
fought the war. Yakubu Gowon fought the war,
Babangida fought, Obasanjo fought. Yet each of
them treated the country like it didn’t need any
special attention, like we didn’t need to do
something fundamental if we wanted one, strong,
peaceful and prosperous nation. No particular
attempts were made by these people to distribute
our national wealth, to build infrastructure
massively, to educate the citizenry qualitatively.
From Yakubu Gowon to Ibrahim Babangida to
Olusegun Obasanjo, it’s been a tale of public
failure but personal wealth – all at the expense of
the good of the land; the land of blood, the blood
of millions.
The war is still on. And the land drinks even more
blood.
Our people still die in their numbers. The Lagos-
Benin expressway has been collecting blood from
our citizens in over a decade and half. It is not
just that route. Abuja-Lokoja expressway has
taken enough lives. It is supposed to be a national
embarrassment to a country that appreciates
shame. Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway kills by
the minutes. The road is an address for untimely
death. There are others in same – or even worse –
state spread all over the country. The money
allocated for their repairs, in all those years, are
standing as mansions and personal estates of the
government officials and contractors involved, in
choice cities within and outside Nigeria. Nobody
respects the blood of the innocent, or the cries of
their devastated relatives. Rather than be
compelled by the reality of that war to invest in
public good, we steal government funds with
impunity.
On air, our people perish. Nigeria has the worst
aviation safety history in the world. In June this
year, this record got highlighted by the Dana Air
crash. The blood of over 150 Nigerians, including
children, got shed. Today we have forgotten, and
we carry on like it never happened. Nobody
respects those we killed out of our greed and
criminal actions, nobody honors their grieving
relatives.
The war still rages on. And we keep quenching
the land’s thirst for blood.
Last week, the gods of Nigeria drank to excess in
Okene, Kogi State. The merchants of death, a
testimony to the glaring dysfunction that we have
become, bombed worshippers in a Deeper Life
church. We have long got used to it. Nobody is
shocked any more. Bombs have come to live
among us. A couple of days before that, it was in
Yobe. Within a month, serious attempts were
made on the lives of two Emirs; inside Mosques.
They survived, but those around them didn’t.
Innocent lives were sent to early graves. Their
blood wet the ground, and soaked it. In the last
two or so years, it’s been harvest of blood, in
places of worship, in hotels, in parks, everywhere.
Day by day, our Nigeria hands out misery to her
citizens, under the watch of rulers who maintain
criminal silence while they steal every money in
sight.
The war rages on. The only condition necessary
for it to thrive, injustice, is still resident here.
Within a week, injustice and neglect have forced
two new countries out of Nigeria. The Ogoni
people declared their indepence, hoisting their
national flag. And few days after, the people of
Bakassi peninsula followed suit. They also hoisted
their flag made up of a mix of blue, white and red
colours, with 11 stars on the blue colour. They
launched their radio station through which they
will be communicating their citizens. They are
Nigerians, but they have opted out of the union.
The Nigerian government is obviously in a fix.
They are adopting the silence approach, wishing –
or trying to wish – the reality away.
Do we roll out the tanks and reduce the people of
these regions to dust? Do we feed the ground
with more blood, their blood? For expressing their
frustration with an entity that has given them
nothing in return for all their years of loyalty, do
we annihilate them? Do we declare them rebels?
How do we treat these new dissentions that
threaten to reduce Nigeria into fragments?
The war rages on. It’s even in the North.
The North gives every one of us a bone to chew.
Boko Haram has declared the region a special war
zone and ensured a remarkable steady decline in
economic activities there. Yet, even before the
advent of Boko Haram, there was no meaningful
development in that region. Many citizens were
not educated. Poverty bites hard in a region that
has produced more rulers for Nigeria than the
other regions put together. But in the lives of
each of the rulers and their families and friends,
it’s a galore of unbelievable –and inexplicable –
wealth.
Poverty in the North, in the face of mega wealth
of their elites, is the reason for the spread of the
war in that region. It’s easy to get new members
enlisted in the army of extremists trotting the
landscape. The injustice is not about to be
addressed. Those who became rich and accessed
the good life through the bridge of injustice and
corruption, erected for over three decades, aren’t
willing to let go of their primitive acquisitions.
The wonder is that we have had people from
various regions of the country occupy Nigeria’s
very powerful presidency, yet the evil of
misgovernance has lingered. Stealing the money
for bettering citizens’ lives is the rule, and no
president in post-war Nigeria, except General
Buhari, has taken the issue of good governance
seriously. Governance for the others means plain
stealing, and impoverishment of the citizens.
The war lingers. The individual parts of the union
we call Nigeria want out of the marriage. Also, the
blood of those we killed out of greed and stupidity
demands justice today, more than ever before.
The only justice we can do them is to build
prisons and start jailing every person involved in
the stealing of this country’s resources. We must
include, amongst those to be jailed, judges who
acquitted rogue public officeholders and upheld
rigged elections. We must not leave out military
generals who rode on the regime of
unaccountability to inflict injury, through
treasury-looting, on our national psyche. Those for
prison must be sent there fast. Once we are done
recovering their loots and throwing them into jail,
then we commence immediately with massive
welfarist schemes, starting with expansive
infrastructural development; building houses for
the poor wherever they are, taking care of their
health, providing qualitative education for their
children at affordable prices and giving them
convenient means of moving from one point to
another.
Some of us have committed ourselves to one
Nigeria, but not one in which by-gone will be by-
gone. This nation can afford to ignore every evil
done to it, but not the evil of corruption.
Corruption takes the wealth meant to give life and
happiness to many and replace such with death
and misery. That is where Nigeria is. And that is
the challenge before the present ruler.
Mr Goodluck Jonathan is presiding over a nation
at war with itself, and the end of that war can
only be guaranteed with good governance as
defined by the people, not government
apologists.