There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

The old man’s bed

of straw caught a flame blown

from overnight logs by harmattan’s

incendiary breath. Defying his age and

sickness he rose and steered himself

smoke-blind to safety.

A nimble rat appeared at the

door of his hole looked quickly to left and

right and scurried across the floor

to nearby farmlands.

Even roaches that grim

tenantry that nothing discourages

fled their crevices that day on wings they

only use in deadly haste.

Household gods alone

frozen in ritual black with blood

of endless tribute festooned in feathers

perished in the blazing pyre

of that hut.1

The Aburi Accord

The absence of a concerted plan to address the eruption of violence throughout Nigeria against Easterners, mainly Igbos, and the inaction around the refugee problem amplified the anger and tensions between the federal government, now led by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, and the Eastern Region. Calls in the East for independence grew louder, and threats from the deferral government grew more ominous, in a vicious cycle.

A last-ditch summit was held from January 4 to January 5, 1967, to discuss the areas of conflict. Great optimism was expressed that this would be the instrument to bring lasting peace to Nigeria. Aburi, in Ghana, was chosen as the venue, as a concession to Ojukwu, who had asked for a neutral site outside Nigeria for this meeting, but also to impart a sense of impartiality and credibility to the summit. A document memorializing the areas of shared understanding was produced after two days of meetings. It would be known as the Aburi Accord.1

The gathering was attended by senior military and police officials2 and government secretaries.3 Topics for discussion included: a committee to work out a constitutional future for Nigeria; the back payment of salaries to Igbo government employees who were forced to leave their posts as a result of the disturbances; the need for a resolution renouncing the use of force; and the refusal of the Eastern Region to recognize Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon as supreme commander. The predicament of displaced persons following the pogroms in the North, the fate of soldiers involved in disturbances on January 15, 1966, and the planned distribution of power between the federal military government and the regional governments also required urgent attention.4

The goal of the Gowon-led Nigerian government was to emerge from these deliberations with Nigeria intact as a confederation of the regions. Many intellectuals and key members of Ojukwu’s cabinet in the E

ast had been battling with solutions to these issues for months before the Aburi meetings, thinking through various possible answers to these key questions: What is a confederation? How would it work in the Nigerian setting? How much power would be delegated to the central federal government as opposed to the regions? In my estimation there was not as much rigorous thought given by Gowon’s federal cabinet and the powerful interests in the North. The two parties therefore left Aburi with very different levels of understanding of what a confederation meant and how it would work in Nigeria.5

By March 1967, two months after the summit in Aburi, Ghana, the Aburi Accord resolutions had yet to be implemented, and there was growing weariness in the East that Gowon had no intention of doing so. The government of the Eastern Region warned Gowon that his repeated failure to act on issues pertaining to Nigerian sovereignty could lead to secession.

Gowon responded by issuing a decree, Decree 8, which called for the resurrection of the proposals for constitutional reform promulgated during the Aburi conference. But for reasons hard to explain other than as egotistical self-preservation, members of the federal civil service galvanized themselves in energetic opposition to the agreements of the Aburi Accord. Seeing this development as a strategic political opening, the Yoruba leader, Obafemi Awolowo, the West’s political kingpin, heretofore nursing political trouble himself, including prior imprisonment for sedition, insisted that the federal government remove all Northern military troops garrisoned in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, and throughout the Western Region—a demand similar to those Ojukwu had made earlier, during the crisis.6

Awolowo warned Gowon’s federal government that if the Eastern Region left the federation the Western Region would not be far behind. This statement was considered sufficiently threatening by Gowon and the federal government to merit a complete troop withdrawal.

There were increasing indications that Northern leaders never had any intention of implementing the settlement negotiated at Aburi. Ojukwu at this point was exasperated by what he saw as purposeful inaction from Gowon. During March through April 1967 he responded by instituting a systematic process that severed all Biafran ties to Nigeria: First he froze all official communication with Lagos, and he then followed this swiftly by disconnecting the “Eastern regional government’s administration and revenues from those of the federal government.”7

I was in Lagos at the time. This event was so big that I cannot even in retrospect fully explain exactly what was happening. People were confused. I was confused myself. People who are confused in such a situation generally act with great desperation, emotion—some would say without logic.