51 years in a thousand words

“It is always the season for the old to learn”. Aeschylus,525-456bc, Greek poet

Last week, I participated in a virtual conference under the theme, “Never Again:51 Years After the Nigerian  Civil War.” It was organised by Nzuko Umunna, an Igbo Think Tank with support from some media organisations. Participation at the attendance was bettered only by the frank expositions and lamentations that reminded one of how stuck we are in a past that will not yield to a future because neither the past nor the future show any meaningful convergence of the elite. On the face of it, a theme with emphatic “Never Again!” will suggest an exercise that will rally substantial national consensus that  events leading to the civil war and the civil war were some of the darkest chapters in our history, and should be carefully documented and harnessed as major building blocks of a new nation.

It may not have been the intention,  but my reading of it was that the conference was a resounding comment on the disarray that pervades our national psyche on all matters, which define our past, the current circumstances under which  we all suffer  and a future that is bleak and blank, inviting all and sundry to design it. Virtually every participant – except perhaps irredentist Nnamdi Kanu – were over 50 years at least. It is safe to assume that 90 per cent  of those who followed the conference were not even born in 1970, the year that the civil war ended, but their voices were loud and assertive at the conference. It turns out that those who embodied the history, shaped it and witnessed it had bred generations of bitter and ill-informed generations, which now install  barricades around the nation to represent their versions of their lives and legacies.

The only consensus of the conference was that many things are seriously wrong with our country. Beyond this, conflicting versions of the starting point of a depressing tale of consistent decline welcome any enquiry into our roots with bewildering strands, many of which have acquired lives of their own.  Some locate the first missteps at the 1914 amalgamation. Some will point at quarrels over constitutions, census, elections, conflicts with ethnic undertones, faulty designs of the federation and regional conflicts, all of which undermined the legitimacy of the new post-colonial Nigeria and made the 1966 coup virtually inevitable. There are others whose  start will be marked by the bloodshed in a coup that was undertaken in January 1966 in a manner that suggested that only political leaders  and military officers  from selected parts of the country were its target, and  a turning point  that suffered from a fatally naive  idea that a  better country could be built on the back of widespread discontent at political largess secured through violence. There are other starting points located at the July 1966 counter-coup, the bungled attempts to rein-in secessionist tendencies, the pogroms and the decision to secede. Everything about the war is fertile ground for dispute. Its  trigger, execution and end are violently contested by people whose learning medium is the internet and circles, which thrive only on feeding major sections of the population with made-to-measure history. Post-war developments provide additional sources of dispute, from rehabilitation and integration policies to the fact that no Igbo person has been a number one citizen of the country, elected or otherwise, and the Igbo is still being victimised by a nation, which sees nothing unjust in the five states that the Igbo share.

Where are the success stories of a nation that was created by the power of the foreigner 121 years ago, and has spent more time outside colonial control than under it? What happened to the historians that began to capture the idealism, the vision, the struggles and the determination and success of two generations of Nigerians who grew up to find their lives in colonial bondage, but resolved to fight it for freedom? How could a country that puts such store in knowledge and pride in history lose vital chapters of its existence, chapters that speak of proud Africans who believed in their capacities to rule themselves; to make mistakes and fix them; to dream big and build the foundations of a future with vision and faith?

Where is the history that speaks to the willingness of the Nigerian in all parts of the country to write a new chapter in greatness by the manner he welcomed the Igbo back into a nation they helped build; the faith of the Igbo in the intrinsic goodness of Nigerians who made spaces available to him in every inch of the country; the enterprise and industry of the Igbo that allowed him to rebuild and reclaim pride of place in the economy of every community he made a home in post-war Nigeria; the incredible speed of reconciliation that allowed major players in the rebellion and those ranged against them to share political parties, support each other against each other in political competition in  less than a decade after a terrible civil war? Where is the story of the Nigerian elite and simple folk that stood up against apartheid; the political elite that stood up against a military that had run out of ideas and spaces; the world-class intellectuals that built excellent  universities, military officers that led the search for peace in distant lands, respected economic entrepreneurs, sports people and millions of Nigerians who walked with a swagger and the type of confidence around a world that knew a Nigerian at sight?

Nigerians had lost many opportunities to build a model African nation that is as good as the best with its loss of the value of history. It stopped the vital work of building the past into the present and the future. The end of the civil war coincided with the start of an era where core values were eroded by massive sources of easy wealth. Immediate gratification became the defining objective of all public and private endeavours. Leadership became dwarfed by corruption and lack of vision, and the nation began to live a day at a time. This was the perfect context needed by those who will benefit from re-writing history and harvesting massive influence. The political elite took its eyes off building a nation and began a damaging scramble for power to plunder the commonwealth and build little enclaves too weak to be of use to the citizen, but capable of setting him up against contrived enemies. Fabricated history became weaponised, providing even punks outside the country with enough ammunition to create alternative history and ride on them into cult status. They now define the enemy and prescribe what to do with and about them. They give abandoned generations a false sense of reality, some meaning for their alienated existence, and ready-made enemies to vent on.

Fifty one years after the civil war, Nigeria is fighting a worse  war. While its political elite scrape the bottom of a damaged barrel, other leaders and elders find relevance only by routinely demonising each other’s identities. Organised criminals are exploiting a weak leadership and taking up positions in lives of millions of citizens. Millions of the young do not see their places in the future of the country. This is the time to ask the nation what it took to fight a just war and preserve a nation that deserved preserving. It is still the same country, but it badly needs citizens who will read its history correctly and pull it away from the edge because no country  stays  on the edge forever. If these citizens exist, they need to step up. There are no easy options for Nigeria, but the option of tolerating its continuing  decline is the worst for  every Nigerian, wherever they stand.