Jan 15: Still searching for closure

• Published date: 15 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Nigeria has had more than 50 years to bring closure to the Nigerian Civil War. But eight heads of state/presidents later, not only has a closure remained far-fetched, the crisis of nationhood faced by the country has become exacerbated, if not intractable. Nine constitutions have been deployed to the search for nation-building, stability and order - seven between 1914 and 1963, and essentially two since then (1979 and 1999) - to no avail. The first seven were undone by the January 1966 coup, whose anniversary, like the end of the war in January 1970, is marked today. And the last two constitutions have been inspired and shredded by borrowing from other climes as well as ignorance resulting from wrong diagnosis of the Nigerian condition and even wronger prognostications.

Had a closure been brought to the Biafra War, both the remote and immediate causes of the war would have been dealt with in a way that would enable the country build on solid foundation. The 1966 seemingly one-sided Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu-led coup and the inexpertly drafted January 4-5, 1967 Aburi Accord constituted the immediate causes of the war. Both raised fundamental issues about the politics and administration of the country, but no leadership since the war has grasped their significance, not to talk of holistically addressing them. The consequence was the July 1967-January 1970 war that followed. Sadly, and more deeply reflecting the failure of leadership since 1060 till today, no Nigerian leader has managed to avoid the bitterness and vengefulness, not to say the triumphalism, that have made a lasting solution difficult to attain.

If the immediate causes of the war were difficult to grapple with or understand, the remote causes have proved even more inaccessible to the unperceptive and emotive leadership the country has been saddled with for decades after the war. Some of the remote causes could be gleaned from the seven constitutions enacted since 1914, but many more of the causes were and still remain firmly located in the decisions of the 1884 Berlin Conference and policies and practices of colonial rule, two grave historical events improperly and imperially engrafted into the fabric of the new nation in 1914 and through the incrementally tinkered pre-independence constitutions. From Lugard Constitution to Clifford Constitution, and from Richards to Macpherson and to Lyttleton, and then from the Independence Constitution to the Republican Constitution, there was only a token admission of the disparateness of the Nigerian people, their different stages of civilisation, and their almost parallel worldview.

Yet the little concessions to some of the finer principles of federalism that could make a disparate people coexist, such as were innovatively enacted with the Lyttleton Constitution and reinforced thereafter, were summarily and ignorantly wiped out by the 1966 coup and counter-coup, both of which enthroned and entrenched unitarism. Worse, both the contentious Aburi Accord and its dismal aftermaths simply compounded the problem by catastrophically ignoring and abandoning the federalist principles that loosely but somewhat effectively knitted Nigerian people and cultures together. Until the Aburi summit, civil war, while a likely possibility, was not inevitable. But once the then head of state Yakubu Gowon was convinced that Aburi was a bad deal for...