To resolve crisis in the North
By Anthony Ezeifedi
WHAT prompted me to write this little piece was the lamentation of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) as reported in the Punch Newspaper of March 17, 2014 as follows: 'The Pan-Northern socio-political organization, Arewa Consultative Forum, on Monday, expressed concern over the increasing attacks by gunmen on the people of the region and called on the Federal Government to investigate an alleged external influence.
National Publicity Secretary of the Forum, Muhammad Ibrahim, said in a statement in Kaduna on Monday that investigating external influence in the ongoing attacks on the region became necessary in view of the sophisticated weapons being used by the attackers…
'The northern body said it was again shocked by the gruesome killing of more than 100 innocent people and destruction of their property in Kaura Local Government Area of Kaduna State on March 15.'
I would like the ACF to ponder over this short extract from Emeka Ojukwu's Ahiara Declaration during the civil war: 'The Biafran struggle is, on another plane, a resistance to the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries. As early as the first quarter of the seventh century, the Arabs, a people from the neareast, evolved Islam not just as a religion but also as a cover for their insatiable territorial ambitions. By the tenth century they had overrun and occupied, among other places, Egypt and North Africa. Had they stopped there, we would not today be faced with the wicked and unholy collusion we are fighting against. On the contrary, they cast their hungry and envious eyes across the Sahara on to the land of the Negroes…' Ojukwu wrote this as far back as 50 years ago but it sounds as if he was describing the Africa of today: think of Somalia, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan and so on. He wrote from the vantage position of an accomplished historian. The Gowons, Danjumas, Usenis and even the Obasanjos did not understand what Ojukwu was saying. By now, many of the so-called heroes of the civil war will realise that they were fighting a blind war although some of them ended up fighting for their pockets. They were pointing their guns in the wrong direction. It is now they are seeing the real enemies of Nigeria. Some will argue that they were fighting for Nigeria's unity but how united have we been since the bloodiest war in the history of Africa?
One simple question I will put to the 'heroes' is: can General Gowon, as of today, walk around freely on the streets of Jos, his home capital? Can T. Y. Danjuma, today, walk around freely on the streets of Yola? Can David Mark walk around freely on the streets of Makurdi? The people I have mentioned and others always claim to be 'heroes' of the civil war.
This brings me to what Eça de Queiros, a Portuguese writer, said about winning wars and the emptiness of heroism. He said that nobody ever won a war. After repeated British incursions into Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, he wrote: 'And what is eventually left after so much blood and agony and mourning? A patriotic song, an idiotic engraving in a few dining rooms, later on a line of prose in a page of some chronicle…
A consoling philosophy of wars!
In the meantime England enjoys the prestige of 'the great victory of Afghanistan' for a short while - certain of having to begin once more in ten or fifteen years, because they can neither conquer and annex a vast kingdom, as large as France, nor allow the existence of a few million hostile fanatics at their side. Their policy, therefore, is to weaken them periodically with a devastating invasion: such violence is required of a great Empire. Far better to possess only a little garden with a cow for milk and a couple of lettuces for summer snacks…'
The best one can get in a war is a pyrric victory. According to him, in every war, everybody is a loser. Sometimes, however, loss in wars has propelled nations into great prosperity like in case of Japan and Germany. Even the resurgence of Igbos after the civil war has stunned the whole world. The so-called heroes won the war in Nigeria but did they win the peace? Did they win the security of lives and property? Did they win the trust?
A French writer, Andre Malraux, in his book, La Condition Humaine translated: The Human Fate, mocked the claim of victory and hollow heroism by the Allied Forces when he looked at the devastation Europe and the loss of 60 million lives during the Second World War. He declared that victory and heroism were empty terminologies.
In addition, it was the fear of another world war that led to the arms race between the Western and Eastern blocks. Nobody wanted to be at the receiving end of another world war. The enormous cost of financing the arms race led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also affected the Western nations because a lot of resources that should have gone into human development went to the development and manufacture of frightening weapons of mass destruction. The United States 'won' the war in Iraq, which was mainly to remove Saddam Husseini but lost 4000 young Americans soldiers and spent hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Iraq is gradually sliding back to violence and bloodshed. Where is the victory? Also perhaps, if there were no invasion of Iraq by the United States, Osama Bin Laden would not have been provoked to plan 9/11 tragedy in which 3000 persons perished.
In the case of Nigeria, how can somebody claim to be a hero in a war that consumed two million children and hundreds of thousands of young men who fought on both sides of the war? Bakassi peninsular and its people were traded away to 'win' the war and Bakassi indigenes became refugees for life and their children after them. Where is the victory?
Coming back to our discussion, my own understanding is that the law of Karma has caught the north: what you sow is what you reap. The north has shed so much innocent blood in Nigeria, in the last fifty years. Every drop of innocent blood shed with impunity cries to high heavens for justice. The list of the victims of the north's reign of terror in Nigeria is endless: victims of the 1966/67 pogrom in Northern Nigeria which was planned and executed by serving military officers with the tacit approval of the northern elite while Gowon, the then Head of State, looked the other way. Thousands of easterners were butchered along the streets of Kano, Kaduna and other northern cities. That was the nascent Boko Haram in action. Thereafter, many northerners would like to pretend that it never happened; victims of Maitasine riots in the eighties, two young Nigerians murdered by General Muhamadu Buhari under a drug law that never existed, Gideon Akaluka who was beheaded in Kano and his head taken round Kano City in broad daylight and nobody was apprehended for murder, Dele Giwa who was brutally murdered with a letter bomb, Chief Alfred Rewane, an activist, who was murdered in cold blood in his bedroom during the dark days of Abacha, Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other Ogonis who were brutally hanged by General Abacha for agitating for a cleaner environment and a fairer share of the resources coming from the oil-rich Niger Delta, victims of Sharia riots in Kaduna, victims of Boko Haram attacks and other disturbances not mentioned here.
The spirits of these innocent Nigerians are crying for justice. The north has murdered sleep and will sleep no more. The solution to the north's present problems is neither political nor military. It is spiritual. First, northerners must confess that they have terrorised the rest of the country in the last fifty years.
Secondly, the north must ask for forgiveness. Thirdly and most importantly, the north must make atonement and restitution to the victims or families of the victims of their brutality. General Gowon should lead this restitution movement. Instead of organising prayers for Nigeria, he should start organising compensation and rehabilitation for the victims or the families of the victims of northern atrocities. It is a known fact that the reign of the military in Nigeria offered many northern generals easy access to our national treasury and today, many northern generals and their associates are billionaires. Such billionaires should be involved in the restitution-and-appeasement process.
My views may sound absurd or strange or even ridiculous to a lot of people but the truth is that no one can escape that Law of Karma. The north has sown bloodshed and it is reaping bloodshed. A word is enough for the wise.
• Ezeifedi lives in Lagos.
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