Dr. Onyekakeyah’s script titled “Those marginalizing the South-East dated 22nd November, 2016 adverted my mind to the army slogan used by the Nigeria Army during the war against Biafra. The refrain of the slogan is “muje, muje! mukwashe kayansu, kayan kito”. This singsong translates to “let’s go! let’s go! let’s go and plunder the land and property that belongs to nobody”. This attitude of the military has remained the bureaucratic attitude of Nigeria’s military leaders to the South-East. The military leaders that fought Biafra are as visible today as they were during the war in the Council of States. This attitude of the mind that sees the South-East as a plunder land has persisted in both military and civil rule. If Nigeria is still disunited and unstable it is because of this negative disposition of the dominant members of the council of states against Ndigbo.
So it is curious that my good friend unwittingly roped the very victims of domination, discrimination and marginalization in his blame game. Is it the responsibility of ordinary citizens of the South-East to construct and maintain federal and state roads traversing their homelands? Where do ordinary Ibo, Ibibio Efik, Ijaw, Ogoni, Kalabari, Abriba and Okrika men come in under urban planning and development?
Under dual federalism issues verging on urban planning and development are in the domain of federal and state governments. These levels of government are the ones that plan and lay down the network of roads, urban and industrial infrastructure. So the indigenous people of the South-East cannot be blamed when these levels of government fail to develop their homelands.
A former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once remarked that men are governed with words. But the diplomacy of reconciliation, reconstruction and rehabilitation General Yakubu Gowon flaunted before Nigerians after the war was to hoodwink the world. No reconciliation, reconstruction and rehabilitation took place. Not even abandoned properties were returned to their owners. No compensation was paid to those who lost lives and property in the North during the pogrom against the indigenes of the South-East. The Aburi accord was observed in the breached.
The military government of General Gowon did not for once intend to implement his much vaunted Marshall plan to re-integrate the South-East 46 years after the Nigeria–Biafra civil war. The South-East is only haphazardly and half-heartedly reconciled, reconstructed and rehabilitated (3rs) by the indigenous people of the South-East themselves. General Gowon could not reconstruct, rehabilitate and reconcile the South-East with the rest of Nigeria before he was ousted and sidelined in a military coup when he gaffed that the hitherto promised 1976 handover date was no longer realistic.
It took almost 23 years (1976-1999) before General Olusegun Obasanjo came up with another political legerdemain called Oputu panel of inquiry. The aim of the enquiry, as it later became clear, was merely to provide a talking cure. In this public enquiry, people were allowed to ventilate their worries, fears, feelings of insecurity, deprivation, persecution and injustices meted out to them. At the end of the enquiry, the polity was overheated nerves were not soothed. Like General Gowon’s noble chicanery, General Olusegun Obasanjo’s variant was full of overpromises and under delivery.
It does appear that the then supreme military council had a tacit agreement among their members to fleece the South-East using the harvest strategy. It was under this harvest strategy General Yakubu Gowon sold off the oil rich territory of the South-East called Bakassi to Cameroun without the consent of the indigenous people of Biafra.
Another war strategy Gowon found potent and efficacious was to divide and sell (balkanization). He also used the strategy of divide and rule (state creation for differentiation and disaffection). In order to divide and disunite the South-East and thus make it easier to subject the composite tribal nationalities to a set of dominance rules, the South-East was partitioned. These were the machinations and mechanisms used to marginalize the South-East. Those marginalizing the South-East used mixed strategies to fleece the South-East before letting it go if need be, as Prof. Ango Abdullahi seems to be suggesting when he said “the north is ready for Nigeria’s break up!!”
Those marginalizing the South-East have decided to give the South-East as little as possible. Budgets for the South-East are hardly implemented and nobody cares. But they are to take as much as possible (harvest) from the South-East in terms of economic resources. Nigeria lives like a jigger in the toe of the South-East drilling its oil wells and using the royalties of the South-East and South-South to develop the South-West North-West and North central as favoured states.
Funds earmarked through the budget for developing and building roads bridges, railways, or airports in the South-East are hardly applied to the purpose before the funds are transferred by virement to areas of more pressing needs. Both Raji Fashola and Rotimi Amaechi have not started talking about the South-East. It is like a law, that budget implementation must begin from the South-West, North-West, North-Central Axis. The North-East, South-East, South-South axis must come later, and must go for the crumbs if something is left to pursue the development plans and programs of the axis.
The unwritten policy of maximum exploitation and minimum or marginal development of the South-East/South-South axis has continued to be in vogue 46 years after the war. The leopard has refused to change its skin. Even the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has refused to be different. But the Massob, the IPOB, and Niger Delta militants cannot passively watch the federal government use the harvest strategy to loot and suck the lifeblood out of its veins, muscles and sinews. The oil harvest is not even used to develop the South-South, South-East and Niger Delta area (Biafra territory).
Shortly after the inauguration of General Muhammadu Buhari as the executive president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, this policy analyst counseled his government to forthwith embark on mega-industrial city development to be located at the saddle point between Rivers or Bayelsa Imo, Anambra and Delta States. In that write-up, it was observed that the Federal Government planned and developed Lagos as a large metropolitan city and industrial conurbation.
During the Obasanjo-Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida interregnum, the federal government built a new seat of goverment in Abuja. It was planned and developed with all the trappings of a cosmopolitan city. Thus, there is a city in the South-West where all Nigerians live together and interact with one another. In the North Central, there is the Abuja metropolis where all Nigerians live and interact with one another. But there is no such place in the South-East, South-South axis. The federal government has refused to build the third (Nigeria stands on 3 legs) metropolitan city where all Nigerians will live together. The cities in Abuja and Lagos were built from oil royalties expropriated from the South-East South-South. Why should people of the South-East/South-South travel and sojourn in other lands to enjoy what comes from their places?
– Uwalaka is a former special assistant and policy analyst