Back to the future in Biafra

“THE”sozas were moving nearer now. And then they begin to shoot. Tako, tako, tako. And still I cannot see Agnes. And I do not see my mama too. And my mama house and Agnes mama house are not there. And all the Dukana people have disappeared. Not even one person in the town. Fear cut my heart. The sozas were moving nearer and their bullet begin to fall near me. Plenty bullets. I begin to shout ‘Mama, mama, mama!’ I was shouting like that when I opened my eyes.

“Ah, so it is all dream. Very bad dream. Already, day don begin to break. My mama come to ask me why I am calling her. I told her that I was dreaming. I told my mama how I dream of many many sozas singing song and shooting gun and pursuing me. And I ran away from them and fell into the river and how they continued to pursue me. And how I return to Dukana and I cannot find her or her house. And all the people of Dukana are no longer there. My mama told me that she too have been dreaming how aeroplane came to Dukana and dropped big big mortars on top of the church and how everybody was afraid and running about and hiding and calling God to help them. And she ran with them but I was not near her and she started looking for me but she could not find me…Well, well, well, this dream and my own are almost identical. What can it mean?”

That dream in Ken Saro Wiwa’s Soza Boy – a novel in rotten English – came true. It was the Nigerian civil war in which the initiators lived and prospered and died as heroes. A war in which willing fools and helpless conscripts died without graves. The war ended 47 years ago.

I watched a video online of some shirtless IPOB members taunting and challenging soldiers to a firefight in Umuahia, Abia State, last week. There was an earlier one in Abakaliki. They wanted another war for the same old reasons. The Nigerian Army said its men were attacked with stones and bottles in Umuahia. Where unrestrained children spit in the face of death, their elders are not far away. It once happened in the failed state called Somalia. Every time peacekeeping troops passed the streets of Mogadishu, there were always children by the roadside to haul stones at them. It did not matter where you came from or who you were. Americans, Indians, all were pelted with stones by the wanton children of Somalia. Nothing could be more frustrating for persons trained as practitioners of violence than to be attacked and be barred from fighting back.

Then the stone attacks were extended to the Nigerian contingent. The children of Mogadishu stoned them and they were quickly fixed by the Nigerian military. Their commander told me several years later that he knew the attacks were very unusual. He saw through the attacks as a trap.  A fight-back would draw instant global outrage: “Soldiers shoot children in Somalia.” So, what did he do? He answered: “I noticed that each time those kids attacked with stones, their parents and other elders were always sitting behind them laughing at the helplessness of the soldiers. So, one day I told my boys what to do. We moved our trucks into town and, as expected, the attack came from the children. This time, it was more intense than the previous ones. My soldiers got the signal. They jumped down from the vehicles, armed with stones. The audacious kids were not our business. We ignored them. Then … the elders behind them were thoroughly stoned. It was not supposed to be funny at all. And that was the very last time any peacekeeper of any nationality was attacked by the kids of Mogadishu. The Americans were surprised. They asked me how we did it; I told them ‘I’m a Yoruba man from Nigeria; an African.’” That was in 1992 and the Contingent Commander was Olagunsoye Oyinlola, that time a Lt. Col.

I pity the ordinary man in Igboland. He is hungry, ill, hopeless like his fate-mate in other lands. But his case is worse because he is always the Soza boy who fights unprepared wars. He has always suffered at the hands of the elite and is willing to suffer more, trusting every messiah who comes forward.. I have a problem with Igbo elders. They are faithful candidates for mistrust and distrust. They scavenge for personal opportunity in everything. They have not changed from what they were in 1966/1967.

The federalist structure of Nigeria was destroyed by persons who were Igbo. Our first president was Nnamdi Azikiwe.  He was an Igbo elder who celebrated his anti-federalist mission in the politics of Nigeria. Dr Nwafor Orizu was the acting president of Nigeria in January 1966. He was an Igbo man who handed over Nigeria to General Aguiyi Ironsi. Ironsi was the Igbo man who killed the Federal Republic of Nigeria with his obnoxious Unification Decree. That decree is the poison that has made noxious all constitutions we have had since the war. It is the tap root of the evil tree that Nnamdi Kanu attacks today. Should Kanu now be blaming everybody outside the East for Nigeria’s evil tree and its poisonous fruits when those who planted it are right there in his ancestral stead? There is a direct link between Igbos’ maggot infested firewood and the unwanted presence of lizards in Nigeria. In a moment of national crisis in the 1990s, Murray Last (2000:330) took note of a newspaper advert in which Igbo elders warned “Yoruba separatists not to expect Igbos to join them in a second civil war. Never again!” Now, it is neither war nor peace for the people who have lost a war. But the one who lost will lose again unless he learns and change. And, has he learnt anything? Where do the Igbo elders belong in the current battle for the soul of Nigeria? Are they behind Kanu and his incoherent agitation for Biafra? You don’t recognise Nigeria and its democracy but you are praying the Nigerian constitution to save you from the vice grip of the Nigerian state!

You will be visited by ugly lizards if you house maggot-infested firewood in your compound. The last one week has been very bad for the Igbo man in Nigeria. It has also been very testing for the Nigerian nation. The days after the stone and bottle attacks were very bloody but instructive. The dance of pythons in mud land brought back memories of the 30-month civil war which the Igbo lost. The victim of the war of the past appears determined to play victim again. There is the anecdote of the farmer who boasted before the war. “I will fight with my cutlass. I will kill with my gun.” The war came and he scurried to bury his bald head in the thicket of his crops. Is it true Nnamdi Kanu is in hiding? Did people die in the army encounter with IPOB boys? Were the ones who got killed not the jobless who thought Biafra offered hope from the hopelessness of Nigeria? Should anyone be killed at all? How many died? Don’t just believe any figure from either side. The figures won’t ever be accurate. A war is on. Truth always dies with the first volley of war. Truth and, especially, figures were casualties of the last 1967-1970 war. The victim said he lost over two million people with 60 per cent of the kids of the East killed. But primary school enrolment in the East Central State in 1970 immediately after the war was 914,037. The 1964 figure (before the crisis and the war) was 757,968. Tax registration in that state in 1971 was 817,000 compared with 808,000 in 1965. So, don’t join arguments on figures. Join in taking down the business of hatred that is distracting all of us from the real battle to snatch back Nigeria from the jaws of cannibals.

We lost the federation with its destiny a long time ago. But is it not said that nothing is really irretrievably lost in politics? The road to a retrieval of our country from the wolves and the hyenas is not the one being paved from Igboland. Easy-going chameleon is asked why he walks without a thud. He says it is because he does not want the earth to cave in. The Kanu/IPOB road was taken before. It left Saro Wiwa’s Tall Man stranded, confused, helpless, hopeless: “Well, I don’t think it is good thing or bad thing. Even sef I don’t want to think. What they talk, we must do. Myself, if they say fight, I fight. If they say no fight, I cannot fight. Finish.” I hope the Igbo remember that this road led straight to hell. It will finish off whoever takes it again.