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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Chinedu is a Sunday Columnist with www.ekekeee.com
Please join him on Twitter as @ekekeee
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