And The War Lingers – By Chinedu Ekeke

This land, in its entire length
and breadth, is soaked in
blood. It has sucked up blood
of millions; millions of
innocent lives cut short in
their prime.
Between 1966 and 1970, the
land of Nigeria drank the
blood of one million Igbos
from the South East. The
blood flowed in the streets
and trails scattered in towns
and villages in that region.
Some accounts say it was
between one million and
three million. But nobody has
argued that it was less.
Amongst that shocking
number were inventors,
leaders, mobilizers, scientists,
communicators, touts,
drunks, clowns, doctors,
teachers and even the
illiterate. People in various
walks of life, or those who
would have been excelling in
many today, were all lost to
that tragic period of Nigeria’s
history. Some of the
slaughtered, at a point in
time, were students of the
University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Young, and with their future
ahead of them, those lives
were wasted, and their blood
shed to please the god of
oneness of Nigeria. To
maintain our nationhood, a
grievous evil was committed
against the people of the
South East. Even after the
war, hunger and starvation
were unleashed on the
vulnerable, children and
pregnant women, further
increasing the casualty
figures during the war.
Those deaths were the
beginning of sorrow and
agony to the families of the
victims. The trauma lingered,
even years after the chaos
ended. In victory, no
consolation, in form of visible
rehabilitation and
reintegration, came the way
of the survivors, the
vanquished. Till today, every
Igbo family tells their
children the story of the
harm done their people.
There is no family which
didn’t lose at least one life in
that war. It was a dark period
in the history of an ethnic
group, and the killings didn’t
discriminate against men and
women. My father told us
stories of how he hid in the
bush for weeks, sleeping and
waking with wild animals,
birds of the air and serpents
of the earth, just to avoid
being killed.
We may not have to blame
anybody now, but we would
be doomed if our
carelessness causes history to
repeat itself.
And history is repeating itself.
Today the war lingers, and
one Nigeria is still shaky.
The UpNEPA! generation
hadn’t been born when the
civil war was fought. The
story may just be to us what
it exactly is: a story. But it
happened, and in it humans,
with flesh and blood like us,
were affected.
Yet there is a maze we have
to suss out. The head of the
Nigerian government during
that civil war was the head of
the government after the civil
war; until someone else took
over. He philosophized on the
possibility of a war ending
without any side turning out
the victor or the vanquished.
That war ended with that
proclamation. But the task of
accelerating the healing
process was left undone. Why
was the man who oversaw
the war unable to invest in
the critical rehabilitation of
both humans and
infrastructure? Why were
equity and justice, the two
key ingredients that
guarantee peace in all human
dealings, not pursued
vigorously after the war?
Nobody valued the
significance of the volume of
blood that was shed for
Nigeria.
We just moved on.
Since after that historic strife,
Nigeria has been,
“fortunately”, ruled longest
by those who even fought the
war. Yakubu Gowon fought
the war, Babangida fought,
Obasanjo fought. Yet each of
them treated the country like
it didn’t need any special
attention, like we didn’t need
to do something fundamental
if we wanted one, strong,
peaceful and prosperous
nation. No particular
attempts were made by these
people to distribute our
national wealth, to build
infrastructure massively, to
educate the citizenry
qualitatively. From Yakubu
Gowon to Ibrahim Babangida
to Olusegun Obasanjo, it’s
been a tale of public failure
but personal wealth – all at
the expense of the good of
the land; the land of blood,
the blood of millions.
The war is still on. And the
land drinks even more blood.
Our people still die in their
numbers. The Lagos-Benin
expressway has been
collecting blood from our
citizens in over a decade and
half. It is not just that route.
Abuja-Lokoja expressway has
taken enough lives. It is
supposed to be a national
embarrassment to a country
that appreciates shame.
Enugu-Port Harcourt
expressway kills by the
minutes. The road is an
address for untimely death.
There are others in same – or
even worse – state spread all
over the country. The money
allocated for their repairs, in
all those years, are standing
as mansions and personal
estates of the government
officials and contractors
involved, in choice cities
within and outside Nigeria.
Nobody respects the blood of
the innocent, or the cries of
their devastated relatives.
Rather than be compelled by
the reality of that war to
invest in public good, we
steal government funds with
impunity.
On air, our people perish.
Nigeria has the worst aviation
safety history in the world. In
June this year, this record got
highlighted by the Dana Air
crash. The blood of over 150
Nigerians, including children,
got shed. Today we have
forgotten, and we carry on
like it never happened.
Nobody respects those we
killed out of our greed and
criminal actions, nobody
honors their grieving
relatives.
The war still rages on. And
we keep quenching the land’s
thirst for blood.
Last week, the gods of
Nigeria drank to excess in
Okene, Kogi State. The
merchants of death, a
testimony to the glaring
dysfunction that we have
become, bombed
worshippers in a Deeper Life
church. We have long got
used to it. Nobody is shocked
any more. Bombs have come
to live among us. A couple of
days before that, it was in
Yobe. Within a month,
serious attempts were made
on the lives of two Emirs;
inside Mosques. They
survived, but those around
them didn’t. Innocent lives
were sent to early graves.
Their blood wet the ground,
and soaked it. In the last two
or so years, it’s been harvest
of blood, in places of
worship, in hotels, in parks,
everywhere. Day by day, our
Nigeria hands out misery to
her citizens, under the watch
of rulers who maintain
criminal silence while they
steal every money in sight.
The war rages on. The only
condition necessary for it to
thrive, injustice, is still
resident here. Within a week,
injustice and neglect have
forced two new countries out
of Nigeria. The Ogoni people
declared their indepence,
hoisting their national flag.
And few days after, the
people of Bakassi peninsula
followed suit. They also
hoisted their flag made up of
a mix of blue, white and red
colours, with 11 stars on the
blue colour. They launched
their radio station through
which they will be
communicating their citizens.
They are Nigerians, but they
have opted out of the union.
The Nigerian government is
obviously in a fix. They are
adopting the silence
approach, wishing – or trying
to wish – the reality away.
Do we roll out the tanks and
reduce the people of these
regions to dust? Do we feed
the ground with more blood,
their blood? For expressing
their frustration with an
entity that has given them
nothing in return for all their
years of loyalty, do we
annihilate them? Do we
declare them rebels? How do
we treat these new
dissentions that threaten to
reduce Nigeria into
fragments?
The war rages on. It’s even in
the North.
The North gives every one of
us a bone to chew. Boko
Haram has declared the
region a special war zone and
ensured a remarkable steady
decline in economic activities
there. Yet, even before the
advent of Boko Haram, there
was no meaningful
development in that region.
Many citizens were not
educated. Poverty bites hard
in a region that has produced
more rulers for Nigeria than
the other regions put
together. But in the lives of
each of the rulers and their
families and friends, it’s a
galore of unbelievable –and
inexplicable – wealth.
Poverty in the North, in the
face of mega wealth of their
elites, is the reason for the
spread of the war in that
region. It’s easy to get new
members enlisted in the
army of extremists trotting
the landscape. The injustice is
not about to be addressed.
Those who became rich and
accessed the good life
through the bridge of
injustice and corruption,
erected for over three
decades, aren’t willing to let
go of their primitive
acquisitions.
The wonder is that we have
had people from various
regions of the country occupy
Nigeria’s very powerful
presidency, yet the evil of
misgovernance has lingered.
Stealing the money for
bettering citizens’ lives is the
rule, and no president in
post-war Nigeria, except
General Buhari, has taken the
issue of good governance
seriously. Governance for the
others means plain stealing,
and impoverishment of the
citizens.
The war lingers. The
individual parts of the union
we call Nigeria want out of
the marriage. Also, the blood
of those we killed out of
greed and stupidity demands
justice today, more than ever
before. The only justice we
can do them is to build
prisons and start jailing every
person involved in the
stealing of this country’s
resources. We must include,
amongst those to be jailed,
judges who acquitted rogue
public officeholders and
upheld rigged elections. We
must not leave out military
generals who rode on the
regime of unaccountability to
inflict injury, through
treasury-looting, on our
national psyche. Those for
prison must be sent there
fast. Once we are done
recovering their loots and
throwing them into jail, then
we commence immediately
with massive welfarist
schemes, starting with
expansive infrastructural
development; building houses
for the poor wherever they
are, taking care of their
health, providing qualitative
education for their children
at affordable prices and
giving them convenient
means of moving from one
point to another.
Some of us have committed
ourselves to one Nigeria, but
not one in which by-gone will
be by-gone. This nation can
afford to ignore every evil
done to it, but not the evil of
corruption. Corruption takes
the wealth meant to give life
and happiness to many and
replace such with death and
misery. That is where Nigeria
is. And that is the challenge
before the present ruler.
Mr Goodluck Jonathan is
presiding over a nation at
war with itself, and the end
of that war can only be
guaranteed with good
governance as defined by the
people, not government
apologists.

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#CONSENSUS 2015