By Biko Agozino
General Olusegun Obasanjo who misruled Nigeria for eleven
years recently went to Ibadan to curse corrupt and inept rulers of Nigeria,
including himself, when he stated: ‘Maybe
we are all going to hell’. He may have intended the ‘we’ to refer to all
Nigerians but if I understand him correctly, he was referring to those of them
with full responsibility for the misgovernmentality that has bedeviled the
country before and after independence. No sane person will include blessed and
hard-working Nigerians, high achieving individual Nigerians who excel
internationally against all the odds and the victimized impoverished Nigerians
who suffer a life of hell on earth due to the wicked misrule or incompetence of
General Olusegun Obasanjo and his class allies among those who are condemned to
hell fire by his own mouth. And some Nigerians have already said Amen to Obasanjo’s
self-curse.
Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, saw things
differently as early as the 1930s when he wrote a ‘Beatitude to the Youth’ of
Africa in which he said alliteratively that ‘Blessed Are the Youth’ but in
which he also concluded by echoing that ‘Cursed are the Old Africa’ for obstructing
the emergence of the Renascent Africa
and the new Africa. Then again years before he died, Azikiwe renewed this clear
distinction of his by stating that ‘History
will vindicate the just’ in a statement that concluded by re-emphasizing that ‘God
shall punish the wicked’.
In the
curse against himself and people like him, Obasanjo actually revealed the open
secret why he suspects that Nigerian misrulers are jinxed. He stated in
that rambling self-righteous monologue that he went to visit Mwalimu Julius
Nyerere because Nyerere recognized Biafra and Nyerere gave him a simple riddle
that he is yet to unravel. According to him, Nyerere told him that his
ministers in Tanzania will claim that they were not corrupt and yet their
infant children had numerous choice properties in Europe and North America. Why
would Nyerere say that to an ethnic war-lord like Obasanjo?
Perhaps Obasanjo was arrogantly campaigning for support for
the ongoing genocide against fellow Africans and had the cheek to go and
attempt to bribe the revered Nyerere to end his recognition of Biafra. Instead
of ending the recognition, Nyerere went ahead and named major streets in
Tanzania after Biafra in protest against that monumental injustice of the
genocidal killing of more than three million Africans under the command of
Obasanjo and his hell-bent misrulers who cruelly declared that ‘all is fair in
warfare’. Those iconic street names remain today in Tanzania while Obasanjo and
his cursed fellow misgovernors abolished the historic name of the Bight of
Biafra as if that will wipe away the evidence of their genocidal crimes against
humanity. Today, simply flying the flag of Biafra in commemoration of the
innocent dead in Nigeria (as is done in enlightened countries that use the
opportunity to create flourishing tourist industries) will invite extra
judicial killings that go on unabated.
If you are superstitious, you may point to the Igbo genocide
as the cause of the curse that Obasanjo said was upon him and his class of ‘irresponsible’
marauders. The Bible commands that ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ and I understand that the
Koran teaches that ‘If you kill one of God’s children, you kill all of God’s
children.’ What part of that commandment do self-accursed misrulers like
Obasanjo and his ilk not understand? They did not just kill one or two or three
of God’s children which is bad enough – they killed three million plus. And yet
more than forty years later, they have not offered any apology and they have
not offered any reparations. As Nigerians always say, God is not asleep, and so
it is no surprise that Nigerian misrulers are a condemned bunch, from their own
horse’s mouth. They are all going to burn in hell for their evil deeds,
according to Obasanjo. Why not? Except that God is a loving and forgiving God,
quite unlike the unrepentant tyrants who are only paranoid about their deserved place in
the afterlife. Repent!
It is not only Nigerian tyrants that appear to be cursed due
to what Herbert
Ekwe-Ekwe relentlessly condemns as the foundational genocide of post-colonial
Africa – the Igbo genocide. All the countries that facilitated that
genocide have apparently also been cursed: The Soviet Union has vanished from
the world map and its successor, Russia, continues to battle insurgents in some
of its regions; the UK is about to be dismembered given the impending vote for
independence by oil-rich Scotland which will probably be followed by Wales and
by Northern Ireland all of which already have their devolved governments; and Egypt
which provided the air force pilots that bombed Igbo women in market places
during the war now appears to welcome the chickens back to its own roost as the
same officers trained by Mubarak when he was the commander of the air force college
during the Biafra war now devour their own people in the thousands. What goes around comes around
also in Northern Nigeria where the pogrom against the Igbo started and in the
Middle Belt where most the killings took place when train-loads of escapees
were waylaid and slaughtered. But the native doctor who concocts diarrhea
cannot hide his own buttocks in the sky according to an Igbo proverb because
when the rain falls, it won’t fall on one man’s housetop, sang Bob Marley.
General Gowon who presided over that genocide has gone around
the country asking people to pray for Nigeria. I wonder what kind of prayers
Nigerians pray for their country. It is likely to be the same self-glorious
prayer that they say on their televangelist call-ins when they always ask god
to destroy their enemies. Rarely do Nigerians admit wrong-doing and ask
for forgiveness of their sins.
When Chinua Achebe tried to heal the sore-ridden conscience of the nation in There Was a Country, the unrepentant blood-thirsty tyrants that were still alive and their phantom ‘intellectual’ lackeys pretended to be offended by the objective truth and went on boasting that the genocide against the Igbo was justifiable. Gowon’s initial ignorant comment was that he ‘did not know if Achebe will be getting a penny from that book’, a baffling response from someone who holds a doctoral degree from a top UK university.
When Chinua Achebe tried to heal the sore-ridden conscience of the nation in There Was a Country, the unrepentant blood-thirsty tyrants that were still alive and their phantom ‘intellectual’ lackeys pretended to be offended by the objective truth and went on boasting that the genocide against the Igbo was justifiable. Gowon’s initial ignorant comment was that he ‘did not know if Achebe will be getting a penny from that book’, a baffling response from someone who holds a doctoral degree from a top UK university.
Of course, no genocide is ever justifiable and condemning
genocide is not about getting pennies. Thus General Gowon who reacted emotionally
to There Was A Country without
reading a single page of the damning book, has recently started singing a
different tune. Perhaps for the first time, he now admits that lots of innocent
fellow Nigerians
were killed and their properties destroyed due to the abuse of power during the
war and that there is a need for justice to be done to our fellow citizens.
Belatedly, Ohaneze Ndigbo has set up a reparations committee to seek the reparations
that were demanded in the recommendations of the
official Justice Oputa Panel report which President Obasanjo attempted to
suppress but was unofficially published online.
It is tempting to agree with the superstition that Nigerians,
nay Africans and people of African descent globally are cursed. I have heard
highly educated Africans explore this hypothesis that everywhere black people
are in power, nothing seems to work because, as a pejorative saying among Diaspora
people of African descent puts it, black people can’t run snow. Some of the
people who hold this mistaken belief yearn for the re-subjection of black
people to the terror of oppressive white rule or direct colonialism as the panacea for the
perceived ineptitude or wickedness of black misrulers. But history is not a
mystery.
Personally, I do not agree that Nigeria is cursed, for as Ola Rotimi would put it, The Gods Are
Not to Blame. There are historical and structural reasons why people of
African descent are suffering the incompetent leadership that we are burdened
with today. As Obi Igwe put it in one of his gospel songs, what we need are leaders (Ndi ndu, also literally, forces of life) and not rulers (Ndi ochichi, also literally, forces of darkness). There
are some concrete steps we can take to reverse the ineptitude at the leadership
level and uplift our people from avoidable penury in the midst of plenty:
First, I call for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be
declared as a public holiday in memory of the millions who were genocidized in
Biafra. During that day, every year, let all Nigerians embark on a general
fasting and all the money saved on food and drinks should be donated to the
Igbo reparations fund while parents will use the opportunity of the national
demonstration of penance to teach future generations that what was done to the
Igbo must not be allowed to happen again in Africa. This could be done also by
using the day of mourning to promote history literacy through the communal
reading of the history of the genocide.
Secondly, the Federal Government of Nigeria should allocate
100 billion naira every year for at least 40 years to the Fair Igbo Reparations
Mandate (FIRM) as a token recognition of the inhumane crimes committed against
our people by our own government. No group of Nigerians would lose anything
when the government eventually recognizes that killing three million of our
people was completely wrong and pays reparations. The amount suggested here
annually is chicken feed compared to what one of these hell-bent misrulers
steal with impunity relentlessly.
The Federal Government of Nigeria and Ohaneze Ndigbo should
demand for the foreign countries that supported the genocide to contribute to
the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate because when this evil is recognized and
forgiveness is requested through the token payment of reparations, the knock-on
effects in the national conscience will yield a greater consideration for human
life, create massive wealth that the cosmopolitan Igbo will spread across the
country and across Africa for the benefit of all, and help to produce conscientious
leaders who will help Nigerians and Africans to reach their full potentials.
Finally, Nigerians should follow the example of Nyerere, Nkrumah and Du Bois and
recognize that evil against any African anywhere is not an internal affair of
any country or state. Rather, we should fast forward the unification of Africa into the
People’s Republic of Africa in a way similar to democracies of scale that are
more viable because unity is strength. When Africa is finally united in a
continental government, no single group of Africans will ever be able to wake
up one morning, slap their buttocks, and embark on ethnic cleansing in Africa
because the rest of us will rise to put an end to any attempted genocide in
Africa by internal or external forces.
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