asha 80: op..off topic...you stay in onitsha what is the feeling of the average person on the street over the election imbroglio?

obayaya:

Bros... there are so many threads on anambra elections all over nairaland.. when we meet there we talk about anambra elections

GOVERNOR GODSWILL AKPABIO SPEAKS ON BIAFRA AND GOWON
_________________________________________

THEWILL: You have been very vocal lately in dismissing and trashing the then federal military government’s post-civil war efforts at the 3 Rs: Reconstruction, Reconciliation and Rehabilitation. What don’t you agree with?


AKPABIO: As a young man, you definitely will not understand me. But I was a victim of the Civil War. I was one of those who suffered the pains of the war. I was born sometime in 1962; the civil war came really into our area in 1967. So, I was probably five or six years old during the war; and if I had been around nine years, I would probably have been conscripted.

I saw parents throw their children into pit toilets because they did not want their positions to be made known to the enemy. I saw devastation; I saw kwashiorkor; I saw hunger; I was thousands of people and bodies littered everywhere and smelling while vultures had a field day every day. I saw houses destroyed; I saw families scattered such that till the end of the world, they can never gather themselves together again. There were children who were shipped away to Gabon, and they can never come back to Nigeria again because they were small. How would two-year-olds and three-year-olds ever know where they came from? They are proud Gabonese and I don’t think Nigerians are even asking questions.

So, during the Silverbird Man of the Year Award, there were pictures that were shown of the Civil War. Somebody, sitting by me, who is from the West, was asking if those things were acted: the Kwashiorkor-ridden children with their swollen tummies, ugly shapes and bony structures because of hunger and starvation.

The then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon attempted to explain that he tried everything to avoid the scenes that were being shown on the screen, that he did not want the war. The other person who could have answered him, unfortunately, that is Emeka Ojukwu, is dead. He said he tried everything to stop the war from breaking out but it’s only Ojukwu who could have answered whether he equally did his part in avoiding the war.

But something struck me: it was said that Gowon should be commended for initiating the three Rs: reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction. And I asked a very simple question, that I came with a written text but I wasn’t going to read it. I thanked Silverbird for the award; and I said I did not want to criticise my leaders because I am also now a leader. But I asked to be allowed to ask a question: how come reconstruction started in the West when the war was actually fought in the East? They started the Third Mainland Bridge, the National Theatre, the international airport, and so on, in the West, while the war was fought in the eastern region. And if we really wanted to ensure total reconciliation, how come every account holder in the eastern region was given only £20? It did not matter whether your father had £10,000,000 or £50,000,000 before the war; you were given just £20. It was a take it or leave it situation. If your family survived and there was an account holder alive, he/she went to the bank, and collected just £20.

Could £20 pounds solve the Kwashiorkor that we were seeing? Could it reconstruct the houses that were burnt? Could it produce food? A lot of other things happened that I did not mention on that occasion. Don’t forget that it was shortly after the war in 1971 that the policy of indigenisation started, where most of the foreign industries and companies were sold to Nigerians, and the war-ravaged eastern regions, which include the entire South-South and the rest of them, could not buy, because no one who did not have money to even feed or clothe himself would have had money to buy any industry. So, I was just wondering, as a young man, if that was true reconciliation, because one would have thought that the government would have gone to any extent to give them more money so that they could truly rehabilitate themselves.

They needed money from reconstruction, and I would have thought that reconstruction would have also started from the East. I just asked because we were lucky to have the persona dramatis of the war right in front of us: General T. Y. Danjuma, General Yakubu Gowon, General Buhari and others. It is very rare to see three former heads of state in just one place, so I had to ask.

I said also that it is important, even for the current-day leaders, that we continue to take actions that will unite Nigeria. And we should purge ourselves of actions that tend to cause pains to Nigerians. For me, I believe that because of certain policies of the federal government after the war, the war did not cease in the eastern region until about 30 years after the war.

asha 80: ok no problems.....as for this topic the people that were at the helm of affairs immediately after the bungled whatever positives that could have been extracted from the war.

Fkforyou: Nice article OP but I don't think we offer history lessons in most of our sec.skul dis days talk more or less to even write in WASSCE......I think that should be the starting point.
Nice article...keep it up.

bloggernaija: Prof. Chinua Achebe got it all wrong from the title of his latest infamous book “There Was A Country”, right down to the contents. This has expectedly generated a lot of controversies capable of dividing us more than it will unite us. If the foundation is crooked, what should we expect of the structure put atop it? Papa Achebe apparently is still getting carried away by his dream of Biafra so much that he forgot that Biafra is a country that never was.

There was an attempt by the Eastern Region of Nigeria to secede, that attempt did not materialize, the leaders of the rebellious region surrendered, so there was never a country. If a celebrated scholar like Prof. Chinua Achebe believes in his heart that Biafra ever was, then it is easy for us to deduce the quality of the remaining content of the book. It is apparent that it is going to be nothing but Biafra-centric. Like many other writers that have weighed in on the Nigerian Civil War, we know that people will write from their own perspective and their opinion would be colored in most cases by wherever their hearts lie.

Let us examine certain areas from the book that have generated much furor in the polity.

When it comes to how Ojukwu starved his own people to death, by admission of Achebe himself, this is how Rudolf Okonkwo one of the reviewers of the book puts it “Achebe argues that some questions will be debated for generations. One of such questions has to do with the security reasons behind Ojukwu’s rejection of Nigeria’s federal government’s proposal for a road corridor for food and the federal government’s rejection of Ojukwu’s alternative”

When it comes to rejection of Ojukwu’s alternative by the Federal Government of Nigeria, Prof. Achebe was quoted as follows:

”It is my impression that Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself and for his Yoruba people. There is, on the surface at least, nothing wrong with those aspirations.

“However, Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose–the Nigeria-Biafra war–his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation — eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.”

This is a wonderful peek into the Biafra centric frame of mind of a man that wrote that attack. So the federal government of Nigeria actually made a proposal for a road corridor for food to the starving women and children of Biafra and Ojukwu rejected it for “security reasons”? That does not really sound like a people with genocidal intentions to me, ask Rwandans if you care to know more on genocidal intentions. Was the Nigerian government not entitled to its own security by making sure that arms were not imported as food supplies? When it comes to Chief Obafemi Awolowo and General Gowon and their security reasons, Achebe quickly concluded that it was “genocidal” and when it comes to Ojukwu, it will only “be debated for generations.” By the way, do beggars really have a choice? You started a war and you are dictating to your opponent on how he can supply you food to sustain the war against him? Did Prof. Achebe know that economic blockade is actually a legitimate weapon of war? It is even used in peace time.

Note that this came from Achebe himself in the same book that he has accused Chief Awolowo of genocide, how more ridiculous could the accusation get? I have deliberately decided not to even look outside of the book to shoot down the deliberate and wicked lies of Prof. Achebe. Of course, there is a ton of information out there to make a lie from this assertion. The two sides according to him disagreed on how food should be supplied to the hungry children of war, but Awolowo ‘a bloody civilian’ in the midst of the Army Generals is the Grinch that stole Christmas, he must be blamed for genocide. Good try Professor, but teacher don’t teach me nonsense!

I am seriously not bothered by the latest outburst of Prof. Achebe against Chief Awolowo. Antagonizing the Yoruba and anything not Igbo has been his past time. He is one of the same persons that lent their false intellectual support to the phantom carpet crossing in the old Western Region house. He expressed dissatisfaction with Wole Soyinka’s winning the Nobel Prize and has always had contempt for anything not originating from the east side of the Niger river. I know that for a man who has been writing fiction books for over 50 years of his life, and has milked one fiction book for the better part of his life, it may have become difficult for him to differentiate between fact and fiction. But I am concerned with how his latest work would affect the already very fragile nation both in content and timing. One would have thought that a man of 81 would have grown beyond the prejudices he has carried in his heart for over 40 years.

Fkforyou: @blogger naija pls how do you know all this stuffs...i really want to know....tanx..keep it up.

bloggernaija: Prof. Chinua Achebe got it all wrong from the title of his latest infamous book “There Was A Country”, right down to the contents. This has expectedly generated a lot of controversies capable of dividing us more than it will unite us. If the foundation is crooked, what should we expect of the structure put atop it? Papa Achebe apparently is still getting carried away by his dream of Biafra so much that he forgot that Biafra is a country that never was.

There was an attempt by the Eastern Region of Nigeria to secede, that attempt did not materialize, the leaders of the rebellious region surrendered, so there was never a country. If a celebrated scholar like Prof. Chinua Achebe believes in his heart that Biafra ever was, then it is easy for us to deduce the quality of the remaining content of the book. It is apparent that it is going to be nothing but Biafra-centric. Like many other writers that have weighed in on the Nigerian Civil War, we know that people will write from their own perspective and their opinion would be colored in most cases by wherever their hearts lie.

Let us examine certain areas from the book that have generated much furor in the polity.

When it comes to how Ojukwu starved his own people to death, by admission of Achebe himself, this is how Rudolf Okonkwo one of the reviewers of the book puts it “Achebe argues that some questions will be debated for generations. One of such questions has to do with the security reasons behind Ojukwu’s rejection of Nigeria’s federal government’s proposal for a road corridor for food and the federal government’s rejection of Ojukwu’s alternative”

When it comes to rejection of Ojukwu’s alternative by the Federal Government of Nigeria, Prof. Achebe was quoted as follows:

”It is my impression that Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself and for his Yoruba people. There is, on the surface at least, nothing wrong with those aspirations.

“However, Awolowo saw the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose–the Nigeria-Biafra war–his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go to every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation — eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.”

This is a wonderful peek into the Biafra centric frame of mind of a man that wrote that attack. So the federal government of Nigeria actually made a proposal for a road corridor for food to the starving women and children of Biafra and Ojukwu rejected it for “security reasons”? That does not really sound like a people with genocidal intentions to me, ask Rwandans if you care to know more on genocidal intentions. Was the Nigerian government not entitled to its own security by making sure that arms were not imported as food supplies? When it comes to Chief Obafemi Awolowo and General Gowon and their security reasons, Achebe quickly concluded that it was “genocidal” and when it comes to Ojukwu, it will only “be debated for generations.” By the way, do beggars really have a choice? You started a war and you are dictating to your opponent on how he can supply you food to sustain the war against him? Did Prof. Achebe know that economic blockade is actually a legitimate weapon of war? It is even used in peace time.

Note that this came from Achebe himself in the same book that he has accused Chief Awolowo of genocide, how more ridiculous could the accusation get? I have deliberately decided not to even look outside of the book to shoot down the deliberate and wicked lies of Prof. Achebe. Of course, there is a ton of information out there to make a lie from this assertion. The two sides according to him disagreed on how food should be supplied to the hungry children of war, but Awolowo ‘a bloody civilian’ in the midst of the Army Generals is the Grinch that stole Christmas, he must be blamed for genocide. Good try Professor, but teacher don’t teach me nonsense!

I am seriously not bothered by the latest outburst of Prof. Achebe against Chief Awolowo. Antagonizing the Yoruba and anything not Igbo has been his past time. He is one of the same persons that lent their false intellectual support to the phantom carpet crossing in the old Western Region house. He expressed dissatisfaction with Wole Soyinka’s winning the Nobel Prize and has always had contempt for anything not originating from the east side of the Niger river. I know that for a man who has been writing fiction books for over 50 years of his life, and has milked one fiction book for the better part of his life, it may have become difficult for him to differentiate between fact and fiction. But I am concerned with how his latest work would affect the already very fragile nation both in content and timing. One would have thought that a man of 81 would have grown beyond the prejudices he has carried in his heart for over 40 years.

Orlando Owoh: The US civil war and that of Nigeria are different. There was no way the FG led by Yakubu Gowon could have let the defunct Eastern Region to secede, because it was an integral part of the larger Nigeria.
The southern states ie the Confederate State was different. Based on what late came to be known as "compact theory", they argued that the original 13 colonies that formed the US did so without being forced. They joined it voluntarily, and as such could decide to leave at any time.

Onlytruth:

I believe that the theory applies more to Nigeria because the regions that formed Nigeria could have gained independence separately in 1957.
Those who failed to cease that opportunity are the greatests killers of black man's future.

Nothing stopped them from gaining independence then, and maybe later re-uniting under a better deal negotiated by FREE Africans.
The deal they got was basically manipulated - a trojan horse, and we've been saddled with the bloodshed and destruction in its wake ever since.
Quite sad.

doc sholz: @bloggernaija well said, I'm truly impressed

DerideGull: @bloggernaija

When I got to the point that reads “It is on record that Adekunle Fajuyi a Yorubaman chose to die with Aguiyi-Ironsi”, I concluded the entire balderdash was attempt on idiotic stunt.

DerideGull:

The article was not the handiwork of moronic dingbat called bloggernaija. It was an article written by a Yoruba plagiarist who claimed to be a staff of PWC during the fiery debate about “There was a Country”.