The major problem with history is the stubbornness with which it repeats itself, especially when people fail to learn from the lessons which it so amply showcases. There are many people who swear by whatever they hold most sacred that Nigeria would not be wallowing in this labyrinth of woes, if it had learnt from the nations and societies that had trod the path we are currently threading.
The late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the ‘rebel’ that I once served as a speech writer and media aide, was a man for whom history and its lessons are almost everything and he implanted much of that attitude in me. It was not a mere happenstance that the Biafran leader became the first university graduate to join the Nigerian Army. It was rather out of a deliberate plot by a man who had studied history at and obtained a Masters degree in political history, from the Oxford University in the United Kingdom, before voluntarily enlisting in the colonial army of Nigeria and became commissioned in 1958.
So intent was he to join the army that when his very influential millionaire father swore that his son would never join the army, convinced by the wisdom of his Igbo people that, “nne mulu soja amuro nwa”, meaning that the mother of a soldier ischildless[UE1] , the young Emeka had other ideas. Because his father had the reach and connection to frustrate his joining the army through the officer cadre, his son put away his university qualification and enlisted as a recruit, alongside the ordinary sons of other ordinary Nigerian parents. (The scope of this short piece would no accommodate the well-known process of him transmuting into an officer cadet and being sent to Sandhurst for training, thus becoming the first university graduate to join the army). That account belongs to another time and place.
During the two and half years that I served the ‘rebel’, he intimated me with very private things about him that are not readily available to a wider audience, for which I will remain grateful for as long as I live. The most cherished aspects of the trove of information was letting me into the reasons why he embarked on many controversial decisions he took in his life, before and during the Nigerian civil war. One of those was why he joined the army, even though myriads of opportunities lay before him in and outside Nigeria, not just because of his educational attainment, but also because of whose son he was.
The recent and distant political history of Latin America was the propelling force for his joining the army. As a student, the history of the Latin American countries held a lot of interest for him, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. He was particularly enthralled about ‘militics’ or military politics. Emeka Ojukwu had seen that the Latin American countries went through several decades of colonialism under Spain and Portugal. They were later to win their independence from their colonial masters and had gone into pseudo democratic regimes that were characterised by the influence of powerful individuals that were propelled by entrenched interests like the Catholic Church and companies that were owned by colonial interests, much like the UAC in Nigeria, which was an offshoot of the Royal Niger Company through which the British had colonized Nigeria. In other words, the independent Latin American countries, on independence, practised weak democracies that could be better described as dictatorships. Those regimes were run by individuals and minions that were handpicked by former colonial overlords.
One by one, those newly independent Latin American regimes were overthrown by the military that usurped political authority for several years or decades. At the time when he was at the university, Ojukwu foresaw that the colonized African countries would soon start getting their political independence from their masters, in a matter of few years, judging from the tendencies that were obvious. It was obvious that for the key colonial masters – Britain and France, something had to give.
He further reasoned that once political independence was granted to African countries, the situation would not be different from what had happened in Latin America, because, as he was often very fond of quoting, Alexander Pope had said that “the proper study of mankind is man”. One by one, he had reasoned, the newly independent countries in Africa would be taken over by the military, under several pretexts. In his calculation, it would be a matter of few years after independence. Ghana became the first key African country to gain independence from Britain in 1957, 60 years ago…a year after Ojukwu finished from Oxford. He had made up his mind that he would be part of the new crop of African leaders, and the only way he could ensure that was to enlist into the military and work up to its elite ranks, in imitation of those who had overthrown the Latin American regimes.
History was his faithful guide, as, a few years later, and after he had found himself in the army, the newly independent countries and their weak governments started to fall, one after the other like dominos.
Ojukwu, the historian, had made history his guide and it had paid off handsomely for him and his colleagues when the military made their first incursion into the politics of Nigeria on January 15th, 1966, just eight years Ojukwu was commissioned as an officer of the Nigerian Army.
(To be continued next week)
Monday, 3 April 2017
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OPINION: When Will Nigeria Learn from History? By Uche Ezechukwu
OPINION: When Will Nigeria Learn from History? By Uche Ezechukwu
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