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January 8, 2008Picture of the Week
January 8, 2008
The Governors of Yobe State
January 8, 2008| Name, Title | Took Office | Left Office | Party |
| Sanni Daura Ahmed, Administrator | 28 August 1991 | January 1992 | - |
| Bukar Abba Ibrahim, Governor | January 1992 | November 1993 | SDP |
| Dabo Aliyu, Administrator | 9 December 1993 | 22 August 1996 | - |
| John Kamio, Administrator | 22 August 1996 | August 1998 | - |
| Musa Mohammed, Administrator | August 1998 | May 1999 | - |
| Bukar Abba Ibrahim, Governor | 29 May 1999 | 29 May 2007 | APP; ANPP |
| Mamman Bello Ali, Governor | 29 May 2007 | Present | ANPP |
The Lesson of 888 days in Biafra
January 8, 2008PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Lesson Of 888 Days In Biafra
Late last month, the BBC World Service broadcast a documentary about Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Literature Laureate’s famous – or infamous, depending on which side you were on – journey 40 years ago to the Biafran enclave to meet with rebel leader, then Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu. Soyinka’s version of the story was that he went to persuade Ojukwu to rethink his rebellion. The Nigerian authorities thought he went there to conspire with Ojukwu in the rebellion. Consequently they jailed him for 26 months, 22 of them in solitary confinement.
In the documentary BBC’s Mark Richards accompanied Soyinka on a trip last month that retraced his fateful journey. At the beginning the Nobel Laureate, Richards reported, was collected by a group of “Sea Dogs” – a fraternity Soyinka and six other undergraduates of University College of Ibadan founded in 1952 and which is widely credited with sewing the seed of today’s terrible university cults – in Benin from where the group escorted him to Enugu via Asaba and Onitsha to meet with the former rebel leader.
According to Richards, Soyinka’s journey to Biafra, and eventually to his 26 month incarceration, started with a meeting of some Nigerian intellectuals in London which decided someone must meet with Ojukwu to ward off the impending conflict. “It fell to Wole Soyinka to undertake that dangerous mission to a jittery and volatile region,” said Richards. Soyinka went but on his return to Lagos, said Richards, the Nigerian authorities suspected him of involvement in the sale of military aircraft to the rebels and jailed him.
The Nobel laureate’s “emotional” return to Enugu to see Ojukwu and then come back to Lagos to meet with General Yakubu Gowon who headed the Nigerian government that jailed him, was yet another reminder that the concept of Biafra is far from dead and buried.
During the meeting with Ojukwu, said Richards, the former rebel leader “was polite but firm.” He was, Richards also said, “blind and infirm yet fiercely unrepentant”.
“If you want Nigeria” Ojukwu told Soyinka, “I do not think it is impossible – but you will just have to train yourselves into really believing the equality of citizenship. If you are not prepared for it, forget Nigeria.”
It was on this note that Soyinka left Ojukwu for the return journey to Lagos to meet with Gowon. The Nobel Laureate initially feared Gowon would pull out of the meeting at the last minute, but it went ahead in the end as scheduled.
During the meeting, the two talked through the background of the Biafran war and Gowon acknowledged that there was suffering on both sides. Soyinka spoke of “terrible atrocities” committed by federal troops which Gowon reportedly admitted.
Finally, Soyinka challenged Gowon on his own incarceration. “Ah, yes”, Gowon reportedly exclaimed, “You were my house guest.” Soyinka then told him of the hardship he endured in solitary confinment and Gowon seemed genuinely surprised. “I had no idea,” he said.
Soyinka then broke the “sombre mood” that ensued with a “flash of humour”. “Let me tell you publicly,” he said, “if the boot had been on the other foot, I would have slung your arse in jail much earlier.”
Thus ended Soyinka’s re-enactment of his journey to former Biafra and back to Nigeria straight into detention.. “It is,” concluded Richards, “where some of his finest poems were written. The ghosts of Biafra can be found in the pages of his work, scribbled on scraps of paper as the terrible history of the civil war itself was being written.”
Without doubt the most famous of Soyinka’s work written in prison was The Man Died. As a prison memoir of sorts the book was more emotional than factual and analytical. Too it was a difficult book to read. It did, however, provide an insight into the politics of Nigeria at the time, in spite of its unrestrained anger with those who jailed him.
The book, as far as I know, remained the only – and probably the most authoritative – prison memoir on events surrounding the Nigerian civil war until this year when a little known retired radio engineer, Mr. Samuel E. Umweni, published the account of his prison experience inside Biafra.
Umweni, an Edo, was born in 1930. After his secondary education he joined the then Department of Post and Telegraph (P & T) (today’s NIPOST) as an assistant technical officer. After attending several courses at home and abroad, he eventually left the P & T and joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in Lagos in 1962. Four years later he was posted to start the new NBC station in Benin City, capital of the then Mid-West Region that had been carved out of the old Western Region in 1963.
It was as the Officer-in-Charge of the Benin Station that he was “abducted” on August 12, 1967 to Enugu by the rebel troops that had invaded the region on August 9. Along with Mr. Joseph Adeola, the region’s Commissioner of Police (famous as the “Flying Policeman” on account of his athletic prowess), Mr. Joseph Imokhuede, the region’s head of service, and Chief Olu Akpata, the Permanent Secretary of the region’s Trade and Industry ministry, the four were taken to Enugu under the false pretence of an invitation to an executive council meeting under Ojukwu for only a day. Their misfortune was that they were the few who responded to a radio announcement that invited the political and bureaucratic leadership of the region to meet with the military administrator Ojukwu had appointed for the Midwest.
The four did meet with Ojukwu all right, but the executive council meeting in question never held. Instead they became detainees in Biafra for the next 887 days.
As a piece of wartime literature, the book hardly compares to The Man Died in its composition. It is also unlikely to become as famous, especially given the author’s relative obscurity.
As a piece of literature the book also contains many avoidable punctuation and grammatical errors. In page 53, for example, the author writes, “I started weeping became (instead of because) I just could not believe what was happening to me.” Again on page 55 he writes, “Within the first ten minutes. I started to feel some irritating bites on my back, arms and legs…” (Note the full stop instead coma between “minutes” and “I”).
Yet again on page 63 the author writes “Cells that were not normally expected to take more than 34 prisoners were now made to accommodation (instead of accommodate) 60 – 70.”
All told I encountered no less than a dozen of such irritating, if not unpardonable, punctuation and grammatical errors for a book which, bar arguably Soyinka’s The Man Died, is the first of its kind on the events leading to our civil war.
Despite these errors, the 220 page book reads well and, much more than The Man Died, has a simple narrative which is easy to digest.
What truly makes Umweni’s book a first is that, as its blurb says, no book about our civil war had provided an account of the prison conditions in war time Biafra. However, beyond the rebel enclave’s prisons, the book also provides insights into the interplay of forces in the enclave with the usual mix of greed, betrayal, abuse of power, sex, ethnic and even sub-ethnic persecution. The book, for example, exposes the deep divisions between Onitsha Ibos and Ika-Ibos who claim descent from the old Benin Kingdom and hinterland Igbo – divisions which Ojukwu manipulated to remain in power, something which in turn showed that the rebel leader did not practice the “equality of citizenship” he preached to Soyinka in their encounter last month.
Umweni begins his book with his “invitation” to Enugu to meet Ojukwu, along with the three others on August 12, 1967. It then takes us through their “house” detention for weeks at Presidential Hotel, Enugu, and finally to their conviction without trial as “saboteurs” (the most dreaded status in Biafra) and their subsequent harrowing experience in various prisons at Aba, Okigwe, Umuahia and on to Biafra’s most dreaded maximum security prison at Ntueke where Chief Superintend of Prisons Okeke, “the devil – incarnate,” to use Umweni’s words, reigned supreme.
The book also gives us some insight into how Colonels Victor Badejo and Emmanuel Ifeajuna and others involved with the ill-advised Biafra invasion of the Mid-West fell from the grace of being Ojukwu’s most trusted lieutenants into becoming saboteurs who had to pay for their change in fortune with their lives at the hands of a firing squad.
The book paints a picture of Ojukwu as a “vainglorious braggart” who boasted that even the Biafran grass would fight the northern “vandals” and also said that if he had wanted he would have followed his invasion of the Midwest with a march on to Lagos to snatch Gowon.
Umweni quotes Ojukwu as saying oil from Biafra and the Midwest would easily fund his war to success. On the other hand, he reportedly said, “By the time Gowon finishes selling all the cattle in the north, we shall see who will come on his bended knees.”
In the end it was Ojukwu, not Gowon, who ate crow, as Umweni’s book vividly documents in the last of the book’s 11 chapters. It does not give an account of how Ojukwu left the enclave for Ivory Coast in “search of peace” but it gives a vivid account of how rebel soldiers and their officers guarding the prisoners, most of whom were minorities from the Delta region, threw away their weapons on Biafra’s very last day and even begged the prisoners for their civilian clothes to escape capture by the federal troops.
Umweni’s book is significant not merely because it is the first to provide an insight into what went on in Biafran prisons. It is also significant as a timely reminder that those who canvass for war or finance and fan its embers are invariably those who are well shielded from its terrible consequences.
This probably best explains why 40 years after Ojukwu started our civil war, he remains “fiercely unrepentant,” in the words of BBC’s Richards.
Umweni’s book is one that all Nigerians, especially those insistent on re-enacting the break-up of Nigeria, must read.
People and Politics
January 8, 2008PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
2007 At Home and Abroad
Easily the biggest event of 2007 at home was the general elections of March/April. In the run-up to the elections in late 2006 all the signs were that they would, like those of 2003, be neither free nor fair: the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), could not produce any voters’ register – never mind a credible one – ahead of the elections; the commission showed it was prepared to defy court orders not to bar certain candidates from the elections; not least of all it did not order ballot papers, indelible ink and several other electoral materials in time to meet the election deadlines.
Even then no one could have guessed the gargantuan scale of the electoral fraud it finally inflicted on the country in April. For the first time in the country’s history we held an election with ballot papers that were not serially numbered and with ink that was easily washable. The bottom line, of course was that those in power, which mostly meant the ruling party, connived with the security forces to simply allocate votes regardless of how voters voted. One predictable outcome of all this was an unprecedented rash of petitions to the election tribunals. According to INEC itself there were 1250 elections this year as against 560 in 2003 – and this in a country where people are typically fatalistic, leaving every injustice done them to God.
TO make matters worse, we have as chairman of the commission someone whose arrogance and head-in-the-sand attitude truly beggars belief; it beggars belief that Professor Maurice Iwu would have the courage to waste public resources shuttling across the major capitals of the world spinning the incredible tale that but for him the evil forces at home and abroad that never wanted the elections held would have succeeded.
The surprising thing is that in spite of all the universal condemnation of the elections Iwu and his team are still in office, raising the frightening prospects that they will be the ones to conduct the re-runs of the elections that the courts have ordered.
True, the top brass of the commission cannot be fired by fiat. But surely it is not the most difficult job on earth for the authorities to persuade any one who has shown the insensitivity displayed by Iwu to jump out of his seat quietly.
Trouble is those who should be doing the persuasion are themselves the beneficiaries of Iwu’s brazen living in self-denial.
There is, however, a consolation of sorts in all this sordid affair and it is in the way the judiciary under a new Chief Justice, the perpendicular Idris Legbo Kutigi, has defied the odds to find for ”losers” in the electoral farce in spite of rumours of huge bribes flying around.
Hopefully at the end of the day the judiciary will upturn enough of the results such that for once politicians will be forced into thinking twice before making for their power grab by hook or crook.
If 2007 witnessed the worst electoral fraud in Nigeria’s history it also exposed once gain the shallowness of the widespread belief that fraud has gender and academic qualification. Before the disgraced and unlamented Mrs. Patricia Ette, the first woman Speaker of the House of Representative, came along the conventional wisdom was that women, being supposedly more compassionate than men, were more likely to be more trustworthy and honest leaders.
Then when Ette shattered that belief by her brazen inflation of the contract for the renovation of her official residence and that of her deputy, many pundits put it down as to her half-literacy. The inadequacy of this explanation was soon exposed when it transpired last month that long before Ettegate a certain Mrs. Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, a former health commissioner in her native Ogun State and now a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as well as the daughter of President Olusegun Obasanjo and a holder of a PhD to boot, had engaged in an even more egregious financial fraud.
That Iyabogate which involved the highly educated daughter of the former president acting under false pretenses and abusing her office and family status was kept under raps for two years or so spoke volumes about the double standards with which her father ruled Nigeria all these eight years. For, while her father hounded the children of former heads of state, Generals Sani Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida over suspicions of shady business deals, his own children were apparently busy cutting dubious business deals right under his nose.
The days may be early to pass a definitive judgment about his eight years in office, but if the sordid details coming out of Iyabogate is anything to go by then chances are his government, as well as conducting the most fraudulent election in Nigeria’s history, may yet turn out to be the most corrupt and hypocritical Nigerians have had to endure.
As a year defined by an electoral fraud of historic proportions it was no surprise that it ended on a note of a controversy surrounding the fate of the boss of the country’s most successful anti corruption outfit, namely Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, who has since been instructed to proceed for a year’s study at the prestigious National Institute of Policy and Strategic Study.
Many prominent Nigerians including the Nobel Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka, former governor of Kaduna State , Alhaji Balarabe Musa and the human rights lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, have condemned this development in the strongest terms construing it as an attempt to stop the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) dead in its track.
Others with little or no sympathy for Ribadu have dismissed such criticisms as shortsighted not least because no war on anything can be successful if it depended on one person. Even then this position misses the point that timing and symbolism too are important in winning any war.
Ribadu’s tenure was renewed only recently, albeit possibly without the input of the incumbent president.
And, warts and all, he has come to symbolize the EFFC as the most effective weapon in the war against corruption. To date there is no record to show he has done anything to discredit that symbolism. This makes it difficult, if not impossible not to conclude that his not-so-subtle sack from the EFFC is a sign that the new administration has lost the stomach for fighting corruption.
In the unlikely event that they change their minds about the move, 2007 may go down as the year in which the bravest and the most sustained war on corruption lost its steam.
Abroad 2007 was as crises ridden as it was at home.
Iraq, of course, remained the world’s top crisis. As much a child of human greed as our own crises, Iraq, once more, exposed the limits of raw power in imposing the will of a minority on an unwilling majority.
It is, however, a lesson that American politicians like their Nigerian counterparts seem unwilling to learn as their troops dig deeper into a war with no end in sight. It is this unwillingness to learn the lesson that you cannot win the peace without addressing the underling causes of a war which led the Americans to hedge all their bets on Pakistan’s erstwhile military president, General Parves Musharraf, which in turn eventually forced them to broker a power sharing deal between him and former Pakistani prime minister, Miss Benezir Bhutto, all in a bid to give Musharraf some semblance of legitimacy.
It is this deal that has now proved Miss Bhutto’s nemesis by violently claiming her life in the twilight of 2007.
It is again this unwillingness to accept that raw power – and subterfuge – has its limits that has led the Americans to send in the Ethiopians to fight their so-called war on terror in Somalia for no worse crime than being taken over by so-called Islamists. It did not seem to make any difference to the Americans that for the first time in decades the so-called Islamists had brought peace, security and stability to that war torn country.
Now that the country has descended back in to anarchy the Americans have been shopping around for more African countries to help Ethiopia pull their chestnuts out of the fire. No self respecting African country that value the lives of its citizens should oblige. I GOOFED Several readers have drawn my attention to my error in stating last week that Chief Olu Adebanjo was General Obasanjo’s minister of information who initiated the move to limit the reach of FRCN, Kaduna back in 1978. The gentleman responsible was Chief Ayo Ogunlade as Obasanjo’s commissioner of information.
I wish to apologise to my readers and to Chief Adebanjo for the error.
Hanaan, My Beloved
March 6, 2007
Hanaan, is a beautiful name that capture my attention wherever i hear the name, see it written, or even come across some one bearing the name. It makes me remember those days of excitement and joy, a moment when the whole world was quite, cool and peaceful. The love i have for this name cannot be quantified or exprressed in words because it’s beyond words and expression, this name continues ringing in my ear whenever i go to bed. To cut a long story short, this name means everything to me.
Hanaan was the fruit of a blessed marrige took place on 2nd January 2004 between me and my respected and God given wife. She was born on 15th November 2004. She was such a nice and a beautiful baby, her birth brightened our life and made us feel above the whole world. In fact i have never felt that kind of excitement before, i nearly jump out of my skin, because we have now somebody we can call ours.
Hanaan distributed smiles to everybody she saw, her hunble smile made people loved her and perpetually want to see her. They called her “Smile Distributor”. People congratulated me and ask Allah to grant them a baby like Hanaan.
18th September, 2005 was the day my beloved daughter Hanaan passed away, leaving us with broken hearts. The date is unforgetable in my life. But at that very time, i know it’s Allah who gives life to whomever he wishes and take away from whomever he wishes. It was there i remember the saying of a wise man “If you go through life without experiencing any pain, you probably haven’t been born yet”
I give thanks to Allah and ask him to give her soul permanent peace, and to give us courage to bear this great lost. Ameen
Abba Idris Adam
Father.
