Prof. Chukwuma Azuonye (1944-2022)

Professor Chukwuma Azuonye

BY OBI NWAKANMA

Chukwuma Azuonye, poet and Professor of African Literature, died in Massachusetts, the United States, on May 8, and his final remains were interred June 10 at the Milton Cemetery in Massachusetts, the United States. He joins an increasing list of iconic Nigerian intellectuals including Abiola Irele, Isidore Okpewho, Oyekan Owomoyela, Akin Euba and Fela Sowande, among many, whose earthly remains now lie in alien lands far from the homeland, from where they strayed, some in search of meaning, some in search of the golden fleece, and all ultimately into exile.

In the case of Azuonye, he will now lie by his second son, Nnamdi, who perished in an automobile accident a decade ago, and whose death shook Chukwuma to his very timbers. Born in Isuikwuato, now in Abia state, Chukwuma Azuonye studied English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka from 1965-1972. Quite early at Nsukka, his literary and intellectual gifts had come clearly to fore. He was editor of The Muse, the Literary Journal of the Nsukka English department, and Omabe, the Nsukka Poetry Monthly.

The civil war however interrupted his studies at Nsukka. Like other young men of his generation, on whom the holy task fell, to defend the shrines of their gods and the bones of their fathers, in a civil war that was brought to the East of Nigeria, Chukwuma Azuonye volunteered to serve the young republic of Biafra, not as a combatant, but as a publicist. He was deployed as a correspondent for the Biafran War Information Bureau. The work done by the Biafran War Information Bureau under the renowned poet and scholar, MJC Echeruo, who was also Azuonye’s teacher, has not been fully documented, but that bureau drew to it, some of the finest literary minds available to the republic.

It was certainly a nod to Chukwuma Azuonye’s gifts that he was shielded from combat, but tasked with documenting, archiving, and preserving the stories of the battlefront, and of the soldiers of the young republic. He was in a sense a war historian. But the effects of the war was to weigh on him psychologically too, for like most of his generation, he did not really, fully return from that war. There was something restless and unresolved in his mind – a quest for which even he did not have a name; but it drove him towards a full discovery of the Igbo world; its language and its lore.

At the end of the Civil war, when the dream of Biafra collapsed, Chukwuma Azuonye returned to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and earned his degree in English in the First-Class honours in 1972. In 1973, he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to the School of African and Oriental Studies of the University of London, where he did graduate work, and completed his doctoral on African Oral Literature, with a dissertation on the Ohafia War Songs.

In 1976, Chukwuma Azuonye returned to Nigeria, to the department of Languages of the University of Ibadan as Lecturer. By this time, Professor MJC Echeruo had moved as Head of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, to Ibadan, as the first African Head of the English department at the University of Ibadan, and subsequently, its first Dean of the College of Postgraduate Studies. Important work was going on at Ibadan, and the universities in Nigeria were still in their golden age. At Ibadan, in Languages with Azuonye were the likes of the famous literary critic Abiola Irele, and Isidore Okpewho who had also just returned from his studies in the United States, and was doing path breaking research in Oral literature, where he would earn his most significant plaudits. Echeruo was at the head of that pile, with his work, Victorian Lagos, just breaking into the scene, signifying one of the earliest works in the emerging methodologies of modern cultural studies.

Azuonye fitted naturally into the phalanx of stars in the Ibadan humanities, doing strategic work of recovery in the postcolonial era, with his own research primarily on Igbo Orality and African Diasporic cultures.

In 1981, he left the University of Ibadan and joined the faculty of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka’s Department of Linguistics and African Languages. He would subsequently serve as the Head of the Department from 1986-1988. The Nsukka phase of his life might be legitimately described as the most exciting and productive period of his artistic and intellectual career. The literary scene of the so-called Nsukka School was at its nadir. Azuonye was quickly made editor of Uwa Ndi Igbo, the journal of Igbo life founded by the famous novelist, Chinua Achebe then at Nsukka, and he was also one of the editors of the Okike Literary journal.

In these endeavors, Chukwuma Azuonye helped to extend and enrich the cultural environment and output from Nsukka. It was in this period that he became a collaborator with the legendary critic, Professor Donatus Nwoga, on the project of the recovery of a lost tradition of the Igbo Script, which resulted in one of Azuonye’s most intriguing works: “The Nwagu Aneke Igbo Scripts: its origin, features and potentials as a medium for alternative literacy in African languages.” It was a most sophisticated and daring work, whose scope remains even now, overwhelming and complex. Unfortunately, it was work which he could not complete, owing to circumstances, which including the sudden death of his co-investigator, Professor Nwoga, and Azuonye’s slowly failing health, stymied the work.

in 2007, which had brought together one of the largest body of writers, scholars, and poets to celebrate the life of one of Africa’s greatest poets of the 20th century. It was a most impressive outing which had also led to Azuonye’s relentless and methodical work that led the UNESCO to adopt Okigbo’s papers as an important part of world heritage. It was also in a sense, Azuonye’s last hurrah. His rapidly declining health forced him increasingly to seclusion. He fought bravely but death undoes us all.

He was married to Dr. Chioma Azuonye, whom he met in London as a student, and they shared a devotion that was pagan and fierce. Chukwuma Azuonye’s death closes an important chapter on the life of one of those really remarkable figures of Nigeria’s modern intellectual tradition. He was an impressive intellectual: eloquent, and precise. He had the rare gift of subtlety which often came to light, for instance, in dissecting a poem like “Sophia,” that very difficult work by Echeruo, with its matrix of imagery, as no one else possibly could among his peers, with such elan and aplomb. A star indeed has departed.

Zik’s Anguish, Nigeria’s Failure

Nnamdi Azikiwe

BY OBI NWAKANMA

Dr. Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe was the leader of the African nationalist resistance to colonialism from 1937 to 1957. He spearheaded it. He theorized it. He catalyzed it.

In spite of the puny attempts by characters whom Azikiwe himself would have dubbed “Lilliputians” to revise the history of African nationalism in the 20th century, and diminish Azikiwe’s work, the great Zik continues to glow because he is preserved in the documents of the 20th century.

What he said; where he said it; who he fought, who fought him, why they fought him; what those who fought him said and wrote about him, and why they said and wrote what they did about him are all parts of Imperial and Post Imperial history and the struggles for Black freedom preserved in the great libraries and archives of the world. In 1943, Azikiwe issued a timeline within which he said the British must decolonize and leave Africa. He gave them fifteen years.

The independence of Ghana in 1957, and Home rule in Nigeria in that same year saw the culmination of Azikiwe’s sustained pressure using the “parliamentary” method. The African Nationalist movement was part of a global Black Freedom movement in the 20th century, which played out at key metropolitan epicenters. One part was the West Indies, and the other part was the Black Civil Rights movement in the United States.

Zik activated the African movement, working in concert with a global network of allies – George Padmore, C.L.R James, I.T. Akunna Wallace-Johnson, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Ladipo Solanke, and in the US, WEB Dubois whose 1915 essay, “The African Roots of War,” may have impressed a young Nnamdi Azikiwe very early on the question of decolonization; Alain Locke, Azikiwe’s teacher at Howard, and for whom he would be research assistant, whose path-breaking book “The New Negro” made an impression on Zik and inspired his own 1937 book, “Renascent Africa”; Leon Hansberry; Thurgood Marshall, Walter White, Rayford Logan, Ralph Bunche, and the biggest of them all, that melodic brass baritone, actor, all-round sportsman, orator, lawyer, and renaissance man, Paul Leroy Robeson, whom Zik called, “my leader.”

In 1945 Zik challenged Churchill’s interpretation of the Atlantic Charter, and vigorously called out the attempts to subvert African freedom at the newly formed United Nations meeting with his powerful essay in the West African Pilot challenging Churchill, “There is no New Deal for the Black man in San Francisco.”

He deployed the argonauts – young men he had specially recruited to go to school in America as the “advance guard” of the “new African”: Nkrumah, Ojike, Orizu, Mbadiwe, Ikejiani, Okongwu, Akpabio, K.A.B Jones-Quartey, who went round the United States giving talks on the imperative of African freedom. Mbonu Ojike relocated to San Francisco where the new United Nations was being formed, leaf-letting and canvassing for the African position.

That year, Nkrumah left the US and moved to London, with an introductory note from CLR James and Azikiwe who had talked to his friend George Padmore about him. He joined up with Padmore and organized the Secretariat of the 5th Pan-African Conference which Padmore was planning for Manchester.

In 1947, as a result of the persistent agitation of Zik in West Africa, and the “Zikists” abroad, and their contact with Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Bunch who worked in a very key position in the Roosevelt administration, they got the US President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to get Churchill and the UK government to concede to political independence and the rights of Britain’s African colonies, just like India.

This is the story of Nigeria’s independence that Nigerians were never told. That Nigeria’s independence and of the West African colonies were won by Azikiwe and his men in 1947. In other words, decolonization was secured in principle by the Zikists in 1947. What happened in 1960 was a formal transfer of power following a transition which allowed Britain to secure its own key interests and not leave in a hurry as they were forced to in India. It was the culmination of the work Azikiwe began to do, starting from when he arrived Ghana, or the Gold Coast, to become Editor of the West African Morning Post in Accra. Azikiwe’s arrival radicalized the press in the Gold Coast and activated the era of radical or militant nationalist discourse. Until Azikiwe arrived Ghana, there was no nationalist movement.

I’m not even sure that Ghanaians are taught this history. That is also because Nigerians have never been taught. We have been fed lies about “three nationalist founding fathers.” Ahmadu Bello was not a Nigerian nationalist leader. He, in fact, did not want independence for Nigeria and allied with the British frequently against the nationalist agitators.

Neither did Awo fight for Nigerian nationalism. He fought for a regionalist mandate – what Zik called, “Pakistanism.” Awo had an intense disdain for the North and an intense fear of the East. The facts are clear. Their writings speak for them. The tenor of their political negotiations speaks for them. The archives of their debriefings speak for them.

But in the need to maintain a false “kumbaya” and a feel-good “national history,” we have immortalized falsehood. The founding nationalist imagination of modern Nigeria is Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and his followers. Period. They sacrificed for this nation. Their ideas for a coherent, modern nation based on a secular republican idea, based on the equality of individual citizens, rather than on an ethnocentrism that bred religious and tribal bigotry were defeated by those who fought them and who took charge of this nation. The nationalists who fought for freedom were subverted and eventually sidelined. And here we are today.

Azikiwe’s idea of Nigeria was subverted and defeated. The current state of Nigeria is the clearest evidence of Azikiwe’s political failure. He dreamt of a nation welded together by the power of mutual trust. A nation built on Citizens sans Frontiers. Zikism has been described by so-called realists as utopian and built on unreconstructed idealism and naiveté.

Those who won the argument have bequeathed to us today’s Nigeria: poor, broken, divided, backward, unproductive, insecure, outlandish, and dangerous to the health and survival of the human person. To them the irreconcilable differences among Nigeria’s various peoples make it impossible for Nigeria to meld and exist as a single, coherent nation. Today, Nigerians hate themselves as never before.

The Hausa hates the Igbo; the Igbo hates the Yoruba; the Yoruba hates everybody; and the minority groups are as confused and degraded as everyone else. Here is Nigeria that still practices an esoteric kind of feudalism which it calls democracy. Here is a constitutional republic which still maintains pseudo-monarchies and mud-empires. I will give just a recent example.

Two weeks ago, the “Presidency” went around meeting with what it called regional “leaders” to discuss the security issues arising from the fall out of the ENDSARS protests. This is straight of classical Feudalism. The Feudal lord has a habit of convening a meeting of his “Tenants-in-Chief” so that they would keep the peasants quiet. It doesn’t occur to the dinosaurs in the presidency that in the 21st century, and in an increasingly urban, and digitized society, and a republican democracy, there are no “middle men.”

That a Legislature exists through which people in various constituencies elected their representatives, and empowered them to speak on their behalf. That the “kings, queens, and leaders” of the people are not exactly whom the government actually think they are. In the specific example of the South- East, anyone who claims to be “the leader(s) of the South East,” is playing dozens with the gullible presidency.

The true leaders of the Igbo are diffuse. They rise by the day and change by the night as circumstances dictate. The true leaders of the Igbo receive Congressional mandate once the Igbo gather.

Their mandates end with each Congress. That is why the Igbo themselves say, “Oha Wu EzeNdi Igbo.” That is, “The gathering of the Igbo is the King of the Igbo.” Once the Igbo gather, they constitute the “Igbo sovereign.” Everybody – irrespective of title or stature become equal, subject only to their “CHI” in that gathering. That is also why, if you press them a bit more, the Igbo will say, “NaniChukwuwuEzeNdi Igbo.” That is, “Only God is the true King of the Igbo.

That is to say, the leader of the Igbo is an idea, not a thing, or a person. The only person who ever came to near-universal acclaim as “leader of the Igbo” was Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. But even he would have said, “Come off it!” If the Igbo publicly place a crown on your head, run! They want to kill you. So those who say they are meeting with “Igbo leaders” are on their own, because when true “Igbo leadership” meets, they do not gather in obvious places.

They are selected by lot. They are emissaries. They speak in parables, and they are also sometimes, the most unlikely folk whom no one suspects to carry a scared mandate. And the point is that this is so because the Igbo have practiced an ancient form of democracy, and a republic, for so long- indeed some scholars might say, long before Athens.

The truth also is that increasingly, most Nigerians are becoming a bit more like the Igbo, driven by the desire for liberty and individual freedom, and far less than primordial allegiances. This generation is the last that will fall prey to crass ethnocentrism.

The newer generation of Nigerians are coming round to the Zikist idea that all Africans are the same and owe each other the duty of mutual-respect; that the nation in its simplest idea is the largest mutual aid society.

Nigerians are increasingly exhausted by persistent and needless rancour. They will fully come to realize that one’s greatest ally is his or her next door neighbour. People want the same things – secure streets; passable roads that are not flooded regularly; good schools for their kids; neighbourhood parks for recreation; a sense of safety; regular supply of electricity and clean water; clean, well-run public transportation; well-equipped hospitals; equal and affordable housing; good paying jobs; a regular source of income; a sense of one’s dignity; a sense of well-being that annuls the pressure of needless competition that makes one citizen detests or envies his fellow citizen, and kills to get ahead because of the very limited opportunities that casts one citizen against the other. This was Azikiwe’s dream for Nigeria: a nation where our very differences would meld into the beautiful colour of the rainbow. A prosperous and humane nation where no man is prey against the other, and man’s inhumanity to man is abolished.

There's No Justice In The Supreme Court Of Nigeria

BY OBI NWAKANMA

For months now, I have been in a fog. As a newspaper columnist I came to the rather inevitable conclusion that Nigeria is really not worth the waste of weekly saliva. There was not much else to say. One was repeating oneself, and there was this sense of ennui, or more accurately, I’ve felt like Sisyphus rolling the rock up and down the ledge.

Nothing will change in Nigeria. Nothing can change until this generation dies off, and a new consciousness dawns on the following generation. I resolved to stay away, keep my peace, and keep my sanity. But this is not to be, because every day, something new comes out Nigeria. The Buhari era is our dark ages. 

We have witnessed corruption before. But nothing on the scale of the current moment. This regime has corrupted everything, including the most sacred institution that kept the madness at bay in Nigeria: the judiciary. Okay, the process was a slow burn. But the courts often provided the lone, independent voice that, when the occasion arose, put a stop to the excess of the state even in the most difficult years of military tyranny.

They say Sani Abacha was mad. But even in his so-called insanity, Abacha never tampered with the judicial branch. It took a mad Nero – in the form of the current president, Muhamadu Buhari, to slash and burn everything: the institutional framework that kept Nigeria on the balance, and made it possible to contain the fissiparous forces intent on dismantling it. Buhari and his party, the APC, are not playing for ducks. In fact, they are not playing at all. They have devised a brutal agenda to create a one-party state, framed within an extremist ideological move that will either leave Nigeria charred, or prostate. 

The plot is unfolding right before our very eyes, and it is a plan that takes for granted that Nigerians have been reduced through strategic impoverishment to docility. And that is the dangerous point about Buhari’s faith and method: all power in his view belongs to God, and his God gives power to whom he pleases, namely, Buhari. This is of course very false. It is the product of a feudal mindset, promoted by self-regarding potentates. But it is a mindset spawn of a religious and cultural agenda.

Under the ethos of republicanism, God has no business with power. God does not anoint rulers. God especially has no voting card in Nigeria, and is, therefore, not registered to vote, or influence the outcome of voting. Power belongs to the people. It is the axiom of enlightened politics: “power to the people!” Perhaps through the people, God exercises His mandate, because once they gather as one, the people become deity. It is why the Bible says, “where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am.” The collective will of the people is the will of God. Not the other way round. And that is why we came to inherit that other sagely truth, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” first uttered by the poet and teacher, Flaccus Albinus Alcuinus, also known as Alcuin of York. 

And that will is what the Supreme Court of Nigeria, under the current chief justice upturned when they embezzled justice and handed the governorship of Imo State on Monday to Hope Uzodinma from the duly elected Governor, Emeka Ihedioha. It was a shocking and brazen judicial robbery! It was injustice emanating from the highest court of the land. It was a coup d’état staged from the high Bench! And it has left Nigeria reeling. 

There are a number of dramatis personae in this high drama. It is actually badly written drama because the outcome as well as the characters are rather flat and obvious. First is the Reverend Ejike Mbaka, a Catholic priest, whose day job has become muddled with the work of “Seer.” A week to the judgment, Mbaka “prophesied” that Ihedioha will be removed and Uzodinma will replace him as governor. Well, his prophesy came to pass. But folks know that this man is a ventriloquist used by the ruling party to test and soften the ground. 

There are of course many who are seduced by his falsehood, and woe to him who misleads the sheep and who come as lamb in the clothes of the wolf. But there is also Justice Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad, and the six justices, who in a “unanimous decision” disenfranchised the entire voters of Imo State. In doing that, they set a very dangerous precedent, and this is that justice at the Supreme Court of Nigeria is no longer to be trusted. 

Fellow Nigerians think: this was the Supreme Court of the Adetokunbo Ademolas, Danley Alexanders, the Atanda Fatai Williams, the Sowemimos, the Bellos and the court of Uwais. It was a court where brilliant justices sat – J. I. Conrad Taylor, Akunne Oputa, Akinola Aguda, Kayode Esho, Daddy Onyeama, Louis Nwachukwu Mbanefo, Taslim Elias, Egbert Udo Udoma, Augustine Nnamani, Okay Achike – so many whose distinctions first as scholars and as philosophers of the court left a tradition of juridical sanctity that sustained the integrity of the highest bench in Nigeria.

 Through those years, Nigerians trusted that whatever happens, once a matter came to the constitutional court of the republic, justice at least could still be seen to be done. Thoughtful, honourable, and learned men sat on that bench. They embodied the sobriety of justice. Then it all changed. Buhari came. First, he went after the most independent minded judges of the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, and tried to blackmail them with the EFCC. 

He sent armed men in the dead of night to rouse Supreme Court justices, handcuff them, and threw them in jail on false charges of corruption. The public uproar stopped him for a moment. Then he went for the jugular of the man who stood between him and the independence of the judiciary for a moment: Justice Walter Nkanu Onoghen. The story is familiar to many. He refused to appoint Justice Onoghen as the substantive Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and left him acting, while he was at it. But in his absence, during one of his near-death misses that took him to medical vacation in London, the vice-president, then acting as president, sent Onoghen’s name to the Senate, and he was promptly confirmed chief justice. Buhari would have none of it. 

Using the attorney general, they used some faceless petitioners, and a blackleg, in the form of my old university pal, Okoi Ofem Okoi, who clearly had an old ax to grind with Onoghen, and charged him with corruption, and false declaration of assets. Fellow Nigerians, you are all witnesses that Buhari himself has not declared his own assets, real or false. Yet, Onoghen who declared his asset was falsely accused, and forced to resign by Buhari, who engineered it all, and appointed Tanko Muhammad as Chief Justice. Now, there is something about Tanko Muhammad. He is not a real judge. He is a Sharia judge. That is his specialty. He did not go to a prestigious Law school. 

He is not Muhammad Bello, for instance, who first studied Classics in Ibadan, before going shortly to London, where he was admitted to Gray’s Inn. Tanko Muhammad studied Law at Bayero University, Kano, in those years, when all it took to get admitted to Bayero if you were a Tanko, was a promisory note. Serious men did not go to Bayero. If you really wanted to study Law, you went to Nsukka, or Jos, maybe Ife, Lagos, Benin, Calabar, or even ABU. But here we are. 

This president has violated the sanctity of the Nigerian judiciary by his attack on it. 

He did so by imposing Justice Tanko Muhammad on it. And the result is what we now see: a court which overwhelmingly makes legal pronouncements on justice which a sophomore Law clinic in a decent university will find elementary. A temple of injustice. 

How could the Supreme Court of Nigeria commit such a brazen electoral fraud? How could these judges in clear conscience hand the governorship of Imo State to Hope Uzodinma, who came fourth in the polls; whose party has not a single member elected to parliament, and whose only argument is that some fraudulent numbers were not added to his poll numbers, if it were not driven by a partisan impetus? The Supreme Court has become the judicial arm of the APC and the CJN, the poodle of the presidency. 

It is a judgment that brazenly overturned the democratic rights of the citizens of Imo State. It is a stolen mandate. More than anything ever done before, it has subverted the integrity of the judiciary. This is the most corrupt judgment ever made in that court. We are back to Western Nigeria of December 1965: a stolen election which led to the coup and counter coup of 1966. It is a crying shame that Buhari and his party learnt nothing from history, and seem intent on forcing reactions that will give this president the excuse to declare a state of emergency in the Eastern heartland. He might just have his wishes more than fulfilled. 

The PDP must, however, act, organize, and force a review of this judicial fraud. It should not just talk and make empty declarations. It must walk the walk as a serious party whose mandate has been brazenly hijacked by a partisan court.

What Do The Igbos Want?

Obi Nwakanma image via STIAS

BY OBI NWAKANMA

In Biafra, under three years, they were making their own rockets and calculating its distances; distilling their own oil and making aviation fuel, creating in their Chemical and Biological laboratories, new cures for diseases like Cholera, shaping their own spare parts, and turning the entire East into a vast workshop, as Ojukwu put it.

At the end of the war, the Ukpabi Asika regime brought together these Biafran scientists and set up PRODA. The initiative led, in the first five years between 1970-1975 under the late Prof. Gordian Ezekwe and Mang Ndukwe, to designs of industrial machinery models and prototypes for the East Central State Industrial Masterplan, which remain undeveloped even today. The Murtala/Obasanjo regime took over PRODA in 1975 by decree, starved it of funds, and basically destroyed its aims.

Secondly, Federal government policies centralized all potentials for innovation and entrepreneurship. Before 1983, states had their Ministries of Trade and Industry. These were charged with local business registration, trade, and investment promotion, and so on. But today in Nigeria, if you wish to do any business, you'd have to go to Abuja (it used to be Lagos) to register under the Corporate Affairs Commission. It used to be that local business registration was state and municipal functions. The concentration of the leverage for trade utterly limited Igbo entrepreneurs, particularly in the era of import licensing, once your quota was exhausted, you could not do business.

This affected the old Igbo money in Aba and Onitsha, who were the arrow-heads of innovation and traditional partners in the advance of Igbo industrial economy. It is remarkable that as at 1985, a least by a book published by the Oxford Economist Tom Forrest in 1980, The Advance of African Capital, the Igbo had the highest investment in machine tools industries in all of Africa, and the highest depth of investment in rural, cottage industries. In his prediction in 1980, if that rate of investment continued, according to Forrest in 1980, the Igbo part of Africa would accomplish an industrial revolution by 1987. Now, by 1983/85, Federal government policies helped to dismantle the growth of indigenous Igbo Industry through its targeted national economic policies. As I have said, there is a corollary between industrial development and innovation.

Thirdly, the severe, strategic staunching of huge capital in-flow into the East starved Igbo businesses and institutions of the capacity to utilize or even expand their capacities. There were no strategic Federal Capital projects in the East. There were no huge infrastructural investments in the East. The last major Federal government investment in Igbo land was the Niger Bridge which was commissioned in 1966. Any region starved of government funds experiences catatony and attrition. Private capital is often not enough to create the kind of synergy necessary for innovation. Rather than invest in the East, from 1970 to date, the Federal government has strategically closed down every capacity for technological advancement in the East and stripped that region of its capacity.

By 1966, the Eastern Nigerian Gas masterplan had been completed under Okpara. But in its review of a Nigeria gas masterplan, the Federal government strategically circumvented the East. Oil and Gas are under Federal oversight. The Trans-Amadi to Aba Industrial Gas network/linkage had been completed in 1966, to pipe gas from Port-Harcourt to Aba. The Federal government let that go into abeyance and uprooted the already reticulated pipes. The East was denied access to energy with the destruction of the Power stations during the war.

The Mbakwe government sought to remedy this by embarking on two highly critical area of investment necessary for industrial life: the 5 Zonal water projects, which were 75 completed by 1983, and set for commissioning in 1984, which was to supply clean water for domestic and industrial use to all parts of the old Imo state, and the Amaraku and Izombe Power stations, under the Imo Rural Electrification Project. These were the first ever massive independent power projects ever carried out by any state government in Nigeria which would have made significant part of Igbo land energy independent today. The supply of daily electricity was possible in Imo as at 1984. The Amaraku station had come on stream, and the Izombe Gas station was underway, when Buhari and his men struck.

The first order of business under the Buhari govt in January 1984, was to declare all that investment by Mbakwe "white elephant projects." They were abandoned, and left to decay.

Ground had already been acquired and cleared on the Umuahia-Okigwe road to commence work by the South Korean Auto firm, Hyundai, under a partnership with Imo for the Hyundai Assembly plant in Umuahia, to cater to a West African market. The first order of business under the Buhari government in January 1984, was to declare all that investment by Mbakwe "white elephant projects." They were abandoned, and left to decay. The equipment at the Amaraku power station was later sold in parts by Joe Aneke during Abacha's government. Some of the industries like the Paint and Resins company, and the Aluminium Extrusion plant in Inyishi were privatized, and sold. Projects like the massive Ezinachi Clay & Brick works at Okigwe are at various stages of decay, as memorial to all that effort.

Forthly, you may not remember but Odumegwu Ojukwu founded and opened the first Nigerian University of Technology - the University of Technology Port-Harcourt in 1967, under the leadership of prof. Kenneth Dike. He had also compelled Shell to establish the First Petroleum Technology Training Institute in Port-Harcourt in 1966. All these were dismantled. The PTI was take from Port-Harcourt to Warri, while University of Tech, P/H was reduced to a campus of UNN, until 1975, when it became Uniport. You will recall that for years, up till 1981, the only institutions of higher learning in Central Eastern Nigeria were the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, IMT Enugu and Alvan Ikoku College of Ed, in Owerri. There is no innovation without centers of strategic research.

Mbakwe and Jim Nwobodo changed all that in 1981, when they pushed through their various states Assembly, the bills establishing the old Anambra State Univ. of Tech (ASUTHECH), under the presidency of Kenneth Dike, and the IMOSU with its five campuses under the presidency of Prof MJC Echeruo. The master plan for these universities as epicenters of research and innovation in the East were effectively grounded with the second coming of the military in 1984, and the diminution of their mission through underfunding, etc. As I have said, I have given you the very short version. After a brief glimpse of light between 1979-83, Igbo land witnessed the highest form of attrition from 1983- date, and the destruction of the efforts of its public leadership to restore it to its feet has been strategic.

Some have been intimidated, and the Igbo themselves have grown very cynical from that experience of deep alienation from Nigeria. I think you should be a little less cynical of Igbo attempts to re-situate themselves in the Nigerian federation: starved of funds, starved of investments, subjected to regulatory strictures from a powerful central government which sees the East in adversarial terms, and often threatened, the Igbo themselves grew cynical of it all. You may recall, the first move by the governors of the former Eastern Region to meet under the aegis of the old Eastern Region's Governors Conference in 1999, was basically checkmated by Obasanjo who threatened them after they called for confederation in response to the Sharia issue in the North.

Their attempts to establish liaison offices in Enugu and create a regional partnership was considered very threatening by the federal government under Obasanjo, that not too long after, they abandoned that move, and that was it. If people cannot be allowed to organize for the good of their constituents, then it only means one thing: it is not in the interest of certain vested interests in Nigeria for a return of a common ground in the Eastern part of Nigeria because establishing that kind of common ground threatens the balance of power. It is even immaterial if such a common ground leads to Nigeria's ultimate benefit. There are people who just find the idea of a common, progressive partnership of the old Eastern Region threatening to their own long term interests. This is precisely what is going on - its undercurrent. This of course cannot be permitted to go on forever. A generation arises which often says, "No! in Thunder."

The Trans-Amadi to Aba Industrial Gas network/linkage had been completed in 1966, to pipe gas from Port Harcourt to Aba. The FG let that go into abeyance and uprooted the already reticulated pipes.

Igbo population is quite huge, and people who truly know understand that the Igbo constitute the single largest ethnic nation in Nigeria. Much has been made about how this so-called "small" Igbo land space could accommodate the vast Igbo population. But People also forget that Igbo land accommodated Igbo who fled from everywhere else in 1967. So, the question of whether Igbo land is large enough to contain the Igbo is a non-issue. In any case, Biafra is not only the land of the Igbo. It goes far beyond Igbo land. But even for the sake of building scenarios, we stick to Igbo land alone - the great Igbo cities of Enugu, Port-Harcourt, Owerri, Aba, Onitsha, Asaba, Abakaliki, Umuahia, Awka and Onitsha are yet to be reach even 30% of their capacities.

New arteries can be built, facilities expanded; there are innovative ways of moving populations through new transportation platforms -underneath, above, on the surface, and by waterways. The East of Nigeria has one of the most complex and connected, and largely disused system of natural river waterways in the world. New, ecologically habitable towns can be expanded to form new cities from the Grade A Townships - Agbor, Obiaruku, Aboh, Oguta, Mgbidi, Orlu, Ihiala, Amawbia/Ekwuluobia, Elele/Ahoada, Owerrinta, Bonny, Asa, Arochukwu, Afikpo, Okigwe, and so on. The Igbo will be fine. The Japanese and the Dutch, for example, have proved that there are innovative ways of using constricted space.

As for the economy: it is supply and demand. New economic policies will integrated Igbo economy to the central West African and West African Markets. The Igbo will create a new vast export network, unhindered by idiotic economic and foreign policies. The re-activation of the PH port systems will for e.g. open the closed economic corridor once and for all to global trade. As anybody knows, it might take a fast train no more than 45 minutes to move goods from the Warri or Sapele ports to Aba and even in less time to Onitsha. As Diette Spiff once observed while playing golf at Oguta, all it would take to connect Warri and Oguta is just a long bridge, and the vast economic movement will commence between Warri and its traditional trading areas of Onitsha and the rest of the East.

The quantum of economic activity will see the growth of that corridor between Aba-Oguta- Obiaruku down to Warri as the crow flies. The impact of trade between the Calabar ports and Aba will explode. In fact, the old trading stations along the Qua-Iboe River (the Cross River) at Arochukwu, Afikpo, down to Oron and Mamfe in the Cameroons will explode and create new prosperity and new opportunities. I am giving the short version. So, the Igbo will be alright. They would simply be just able to define their own development strategies, deploy their highly trained manpower currently wasting unutilized, and the basis of its vast middle class will create new consumers, and generate an internal energy that will thrive on Igbo innovation, industry, and know-how, which Nigeria currently suppresses. This is exactly one very possible scenario.

So, Tanko Yakassi is wrong. May be if the Igbo leave Kano, the Emir will no longer need to buy his bulb from an Igbo trader in Kano. He will have to buy it either from an Hausa, a Fulani, a Lebanese, or some such person. But those will have to come to Igbo land to buy it first before selling to the Emir. There was a time when all of West Africa came to Onitsha or Aba to buy and trade because it was safe, and those cities were the largest market emporia in the continent. People came from as far away as the Congo to buy stuff in Aba and sell in the Congo. It could happen again, only this time on a vaster, more controlled scale. The network of Igbo global trade will not stop if they left Nigeria. In fact, they will have more access to an indigenous credit system that would expand that trade, currently unobtainable and unavailable today to them, because Nigeria makes it impossible for Igbo business to grow through all kinds of restrictions strategically imposed on it, including port restrictions.

However, although I do think that the Igbo would do quite well alone, they could do a lot better with Nigeria, if the conditions are right. This agitation is for the conditions to be made right; for Nigeria and its political and economic policies to stop being a wedge on Igbo aspirations. And Igbo aspiration is quite simple: to match the rest of the developed world inch by every inch, and not to be held down by the Nigerian millstone of corruption, inefficiency, and inferiority. The Igbo think that control of their public policies on education, research and innovation, economic and monetary policies, and recruitment, control and deployment of its own work force both in public and private sectors will give them the leverage they need to build a coherent and civilized society.

They point to the example of Biafra, where under three years, they were making their own rockets and calculating its distances; distilling their own oil and making aviation fuel, creating in their Chemical and Biological laboratories, new cures for diseases like Cholera, shaping their own spare parts, and turning the entire East into a vast workshop, as Ojukwu put it, while Nigeria was busy doing owambe, importing even toothpick, and creating new wartime millionaires from corrupt contracting systems by a powerful oligopoly. It is a fallacy much driven by ignorance that Igbo will not thrive and that Igbo land will not accommodate Igbo population if they leave. That is not true. There is no scientific basis for it.

The dynamics of human movement will take great care of all that. It’s a lame excuse. What people who wish for Nigeria to stay together should do is not to make such puerile statements, because it is meaningless. What we should all do is to find the strategic means of containing Igbo discontent by LISTENING to the Igbo, and seeking peaceful and productive ways of fully freeing their energy to instigate growth both of themselves and of Nigeria within Nigeria for everyone's benefit. Threatening them will not work. It has never worked, and it is important to understand a bit of Igbo cultural psychology: the more you threaten him, the more the Igbo person digs in very stubbornly. Igbo, with a long tradition of diplomacy, thrive on consensus not on threat of the use of force, or the like.

Frankly, those who continue to think that the Igbo have no options are yet to understand the complexity of this movement as we speak. They still look at the surface of events while the train is revving and about to leave the station. We need to work very carefully on this issue. I myself, I prefer Nigeria. I like its color of many peoples and cultures. That in itself is the very condition for growth and regeneration. A single Igbo nation may be more prosperous, but will be less interesting, and that is the more valid argument.