The financing of the Nigerian civil war and its implications for the future economy of the nation

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BUT, first and foremost, the rebellion must be decisively crushed, and the unity and territorial integrity of Nigeria preserved. It was an overriding policy of Government that nothing should be spared to attain this objective. Accordingly, in the first year of war up to the end of 1967, we spent £33.5 million to provide armaments, food, uni forms, transportation, and other necessi ties 0 f war. And in the second and third years up to the end of January 1970, we spent £98 million and £/ 70 million respectively, for the same purposes. “

At the same time, it was a cardinal policy of the Federal Military Government that after the war, no time should be lost in resettling those who had been displaced from their homes and places of permanent residence, in rehabilitating troops and civilians where necessary, in reconstructing damaged infrastructure and other public installations, and in developing the country as a whole, in order to make up for lost grounds, and progress forgone. It was important and crucial to win the war. But it is equally important and crucial, if not more so, to win the peace. For if we lost the peace we would have fought the war in vain, and our sacrifices would have been it colossal and criminal waste. It was no doubt clear to everyone, including every member of the Federal Military Government, that one of the potent means of winning the peace was to correct, drastically, the economic and social ills – that is, abject poverty, preventable diseases, squalor, and ignorance which had, in the past, plagued, and, for the present, continue to torment this country, without immediate respite. It is with these considerations in mind that, even in the midst of war and its attendant sufferings and deaths, the Fede.ral Military Government began to plan confidently for the future, with special emphasis on the period immediately following the cessation of hostilities. The plan, I am gratified to say, is now in its final stages of preparation; but its full cost is still to be calculated.

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Nonetheless, during the war, it was envisaged that the country would require for rehabilitation, reconstruction, and development, a record capital investment of the order of £1,500 million from both the public and private sectors, within five years after the war.

The financing of the Nigerian civil war should, therefore, be understood not just as connoting the defraying of the expenses of the immediate, narrow, and negative object of winning the war alone, but as embracing the conservation of our financial health to enable us to begin to fulfil immediately after the end of the war, the ultimate, positive, and permanent object of winning the peace. It is on the basis of this wider connotation that we will now proceed to recount the principles and some of the measures which we adopted in financing the Nigerian civil war.

Soon after the outbreak of war, three phenomena manifested themselves. First, in the traditional race between approved estimates of Revenue and Expenditure, the latter began to run rapidly ahead of the former which, at the same time, was fast losing the tempo originally set for it. Second; the pressure on our foreign exchange reserve also began to mount inexorably, at an unprecedented and unpredictable rate, in the face of considerably reduced exports.

Third, the financial requirements of the armed forces were only amenable to conjectural forecasts. There are far too many imponderables to cope with in war. Apart from the uncertainty of duration, and apart from the crazy vagaries of the unorthodox market for arms and ammunition in which we were obliged to operate in the early stages of the war, the amount of money required, at any given time, depended largely on our fortunes or misfortunes in the fields of battle, which fortunes or misfortunes were not in our exclusive control.

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