Starting from scratch and with a small loan from a friend, he began a transport company with two lorries. By late 1975 he had built up a chain of companies in transport, construction, gravel quarrying and distribution franchises …
Throughout these six years, endless delegations of Ibos and others slipped across the borders from Nigeria to visit him. In East Central State the Gowon régime had tried desperately to find an Ibo who could break the charisma exercised by Ojukwu over his own people. They failed dismally. In fact the opposite occurred. Compared with the public corruption they saw all around them, the integrity of the Ojukwu régime began to appear more and more remarkable to the Nigerians, and not merely the Ibos. Delegations of Yoruba and Tiv began to ask to come and visit him in exile.
It took years for the Ivorians, and the French civil servants and businessmen who abound in the Ivory Coast, to come to believe that he had not a secret hoard of Biafran public money stashed away in Switzerland. When they did believe it, some thought it admirable, others madness.
Back in the heart of Iboland, some of the cream of the educated Ibos, perhaps 10,000 in all, went to work for the Nigerians. For the masses of the Ibos, farmers and small traders, artisans and clerks, the road was hard. But they got by, working all hours of the day and half the night, building up a sort of life again. They silently rejected the Lagos Ibos proposed to them by the Gowon government. They scrawled on walls and the sides of lorries the words, ‘Akareja [‘he who has gone away’] must return’.
General Obasanjo permitted elections for a return to civilian rule in 1979 and there ensued a brief window of quasi-democracy under a civilian president. It was he who, in 1982, permitted the exiled Emeka Ojukwu to return home. He invited me to accompany him. It was a remarkable experience.
The Ojukwu party was flown home under presidential amnesty. After a few nervy days in Lagos we took off in a jet-liner of Nigeria Airways to Enugu, capital of the East Central State, the Ibo homeland. Whatever reaction any of us expected to witness as the exiled leader came home from twelve years away, no one foresaw what happened.
As the airliner circled the airport at Enugu those looking down saw a vast human sea of faces staring upwards. I had never seen a million people in one place before, but I saw them that day. It was quite a sight.
After landing, the airplane was engulfed for two hours before the cavalcade could begin to inch forward on the fifty miles drive to Ojukwu’s home town of Nnewi. Another half million lined the route. Akareja had returned.
After three days and nights of unremitting celebrations I bade him farewell and, still under amnesty, made my way home to London via a country that had once put a price on my head. I have never returned, nor seen him since.
Emeka Ojukwu made one brief and disastrous attempt to reenter the political arena, standing as senator for Onitsha Division in the elections of January 1983. He was defeated only because the Ibo State Governor rigged the election, destroying thousands of ballot boxes to ensure his own favoured candidate won.
It did none of them any good. Just after New Year 1983 the army struck again, establishing yet another junta government and putting all the politicians in jail.
Ojukwu was released after six months in Kiri Kiri jail, Lagos. He settled for life as a businessman and now divides his time between Lagos and Enugu where he has homes.
Would Biafra have succeeded and prospered as a self-governing nation-state? The evidence says yes. It would have benefited from the oil beneath the land, the ingenuity and capacity for hard work of the Ibo nation and, I believe, under this Oxford graduate, good government. Most African peoples would yearn for such a state.
In fact the coup of 1983 led to another sixteen years of brutal and corrupt rule until, just before the millennium, the last despot, the brutal General Sani Abacha, died or was assassinated. Surprisingly, elections followed, to be won by the now elderly General Obasanjo, who became president, and remains so at the time of writing.
But are the forty years of coups, corruption and dictators really over? One would like to think so. Thirty-four years ago Emeka Ojukwu tried to give his people something better, and Britain, more than any other, destroyed the chance.