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The Igbos
in the Context of Modern Government and Politics in by Prof. Ben
O. Nwabueze Ọha na eze, ekene m ụnụ, I would like to begin by expressing My original choice of a topic for this lecture had
a distinctly legal leaning, but I felt that a topic with a more immediate
bearing on issues and problems in modern Igbo history might have more abiding
interest and utility. I have therefore chosen to speak to you today on the
position of the Igbos in the modern government and politics in Incorporation of the
Igbos in a larger For the communities comprised in the geographical
area now known as The incorporation of the various distinct
communities in one common government implies benefits as well as obligations
for their people: the benefit of protection, peace and ordered existence,
increased trade and economic activity and the benefits of modernity generally;
the obligation of allegiance, the duty of the inhabitants to be loyal and
faithful to the Nigerian State and to obey its law. It has also brought in its
wake profound changes in the social, cultural and religious conditions of the
component communities. For the Igbos, it has meant that, as Adiele Afigbo
points out in his Ahiajoku Lecture in 1981, they have the rest of How the Igbos are Organized
in The core of the Igbos is located in two states of
the Nigerian Federation – Anambra and Imo. In these two states dwell some ten
million people who give the Igbos their distinctive character and culture. But
the boundaries of Igboland extend beyond Anambra and The state boundaries in Outside their traditional habitats in Anambra and With only two states as against five each for the
Yorubas and Hausa/Fulanis, the distribution of states in the Nigerian
Federation is clearly unbalanced against the Igbos, given that the population
of the three groups is roughly comparable. (The demand for a third Igbo State
was rejected during the 1976 states creation exercise.) The effect of this
imbalance is particularly unwholesome since a state, rather than a recognized
social grouping, such as the tribe, is now used as the unit for the application
of the federal character principle in top civil service appointments,
appointment of ministers, revenue allocation, representation in the Senate, and
in the distribution of various kinds of government amenities. A situation in
which the Igbos have two shares as against five each for the Hausa/Fulanis and
Yorubas cannot make for harmony in the country, nor can it nurture in the Igbos
the feeling that they belong and have equal rights with the others. This
anomaly needs to be corrected. As Dr. Obi Wali said in the Constituent Assembly
in 1978, the creation of states has ceased to be solely a response to minority
problem, and has become “a means of the majority groups trying to adjust again
in order to square up.”[2] The use of the state rather than the ethnic group
as the unit for the application of the federal character principle in the
distribution of government benefits is of course a distortion of its underlying
objective. The tribes are the groups for whom participation and protection
against domination are sought to be provided through the federal character
principle. States are not part of our indigenous social organization, but
rather artificial political creation. Moreover, distribution according to
states in no way reflects the numerical strengths of the four social groups –
Hausa/Fulanis, Yorubas, Igbos and the Minorities. It is either the Igbos are
given at least two more states or the application of the federal character
principle is based on the ethnic group and not on the state. It is as well to note that some of the Igbo border
communities in The politics of modern A new pan-Igbo organization, by the name of Ohaneze, formed after the 1979 restoration,
was high jacked by the politicians of the The method of the 1984 Decree is rather insidious.
Whereas the 1966 Decree left no doubt as to the identity of the associations
affected, under the 1984 Decree dissolution hangs over practically every tribal
or cultural association of which it could be said by any one, however
ill-motivated, that it is "meant to promote ethnic differences or likely
to destroy or disrupt the unity of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” With the
risk of imprisonment for not less than five years, a tribal or cultural
association can continue to function only at its peril. I believe that tribal or cultural associations
fulfill a useful societal role. They are not really a danger to the unity of
the country. On the contrary, they do provide strong support for the Nigerian
unity. They may have exerted pressures on government on behalf of their
respective groups, but such pressures would be there and have indeed continued
without the tribal unions. It seems rather ironical that the military rulers
who proscribed tribal unions for their role in sponsoring and promoting ethnic
interests and conflicts in the political days should, without: the prompting of
the tribal unions, have fallen easy victims to the pressures of the very same
ethnic interests. We should certainly eschew tribalism, but we cannot abolish
the tribe any more than we can abolish our individual existence. “Any
idea,'" writes Arthur Lewis, “that one can make different peoples into a
nation by suppressing the religious or tribal or regional or other affiliations
to which they themselves attach the highest political significance is simply a
non-starter. National loyalty cannot immediately supplant tribal loyalty; it
has to be built on top of tribal loyalty by creating a system in which all the
tribes feel that there is room for self-expression."[5] The Igbos are among the most adversely affected by
the proscriptions. The tribal unions of some of the other groups have continued
to function, not openly, of course. The Igbos cannot take such chances without
running the risk of being branded as subversives. There is a Leader of the
Yorubas publicly so styled and acknowledged. The Hausa/Fulanis acknowledge the
leadership and authority of the Sultan of Sokoto, at any rate in matters of
religion, but religion happens indisputably to be the most critical single
factor in Nigerian government and politics. The Igbos have no leader of any
kind, religious or otherwise. They are left to drift without proper direction
and guidance. Chinua Achebe is right when he says that “the real problem with
the Igbo since Why the Igbos are
feared, resented and hated in It is indeed remarkable that some Igbo communities
have repudiated their Igbo identity. I know of no other group in So intense indeed is the fear, resentment and hatred
of the Igbos in Nigeria that no Igboman, however good his credentials, not even
Zik, the widely acknowledged father of Nigerian nationalism, can today expect
to command nationwide acceptance as a leader in the government and politics of
the country. His every action and utterance will be misunderstood and
misrepresented. He will be hounded from pillar to post, until he is got rid of,
which will be sooner than later. In present-day The question, then, is: Why are the Igbos feared,
resented and hated in Perhaps the most outstanding quality of the Igbo is
his innate receptivity to new ideas and adaptability to change which, under the
stimulus of Christianity and western education imported into By this “fantastic burst of energy”, the Igbos were
able, in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950, to challenge the lead which
the Yorubas had enjoyed in the field of education by reason of being the first
to come under western modernizing influence, and to threaten to neutralize the
dominance which this had given them in the public service, commercial firms and
in business. Igbos had become a menace to the Yorubas, and a danger to the
other Nigerians, exciting in all the fear of domination. Next
to the Igboman’s zeal for self-improvement and modernity through education
comes his economic individualism and his spirit of enterprise and competition
which have found ample expression and encouragement in the individualistic and
libertarian ethos of the modern government. His individualism is apparently a
product of his social and political system in which the village-group was the
largest political unit, and in which within the village-group authority was
diffused among the heads of the numerous families, lineages and villages. The
society was an egalitarian one in which everyone counted equally and was
entitled to a say in public affairs. The Igbo was therefore very little
inhibited by authority or by any stratification of society based on birth.
“Unlike the Hausa/Fulani”, writes Chinua Achebe, “he was unhindered by a wary
religion and unlike the Yoruba, unhampered by traditional hierarchies. This kind
of creature, fearing no God nor man, was custom-made to grasp the
opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensation.”[7]
They saw therefore in the larger Nigerian community a welcome outlet for their
spirit of enterprise and adventure. Taking advantage of the free mobility of
people, the free enterprise system and the peace and security afforded by the
modern government, they moved out of their “forest home”, and soon established
themselves in various kinds of business a]l over the country – shops, hotels,
garages, market stalls and even schools and hospitals. Their competitive energy being such as only few, if
any, other groups in the country can match, they soon “virtually seized the
floor” from the people among whom they settled, buying them out of their lands
and shops, and again exciting in them fear of domination. Only few other groups
in In their enterprising spirit and aggressive
individualism, the Igbos may appear to be exploitative, grasping and greedy,
but these are attributes which characterize all aggressively enterprising
people everywhere. They are not therefore proper grounds on which resentment
can justifiably be nursed against the Igbos by other Nigerians. Fear may be
justifiable, but certainly not resentment. Resentment based on these grounds
simply tantamounts to envy and jealousy. I believe also the Igbos are
democratic and fair-minded people, always prepared more than any other group to
concede to others the right to share equitably in what belongs to all. Accusation
of nepotism often leveled against them seems to me therefore unjustified. However, his success in education and trade has
inclined the Igbo toward a “noisy exhibitionism”, over-assertiveness,
over-confident and too-know air, an over-weening pride and to a patronizing and
condescending attitude towards the less successful communities among whom he
settled. The latter are despised and mocked to their face for not being as
successful. For all this I think the Igbos are justifiably resented. But this is only a manifestation of a more basic
strand in the Igbo character – his lack of diplomatic sense in dealing with
others. In his relationship with others, especially people in authority, the
Igbo is incapable of displaying anything of the fawning obsequiousness of the
Yoruba or the submissive humility of the Hausa/Fulani, which is all part of the
techniques of social diplomacy that has enabled them to get along so well in
Nigeria. This lack of diplomacy in the social relations of the Igbo may often
appear to others as a mark of disrespect and discourtesy. In so far as this may
be considered a defect, I confess to being a typical Igbo, for I am quite
incapable of fawning on any one, however highly placed, even as a matter of
social diplomacy. The social relations of the Igbos are characterized
further by a certain amount of thoughtlessness and lack of tact. That seems
clearly to be exemplified in the rather idiotic killings during the first coup
in January, 1966. An undertaking, nobly nationalistic in conception, was thus
needlessly given a tribal colouration on account of the fact that, with one
exception, all the people, civilian and military, killed in the course of it
were non-Ibos. It should have occurred to a more thoughtful group of people
that in a military coup led almost entirely by Igbo officers, killing involving
only non-Igbos would be open to this kind of interpretation. In any case, most
of the killings, especially those of the military personnel, were both
unnecessary and senseless. I am not sure whether the killings
could be explained simply in terms of thoughtlessness. I think they also
suggest something, of a headstrong disposition. Was it mere thoughtlessness
that propelled us into rebellion knowing, as we did, that the inevitable outcome
would be war for which we were thoroughly ill-prepared? It must be something
more than thoughtlessness that made us insist on fighting the war over every
inch of Igboland, instead of negotiating an honourable termination of it at an
appropriate time earlier. I think that rebellion and continuation of the war in
those circumstances betray both thoughtlessness and a headstrong disposition. The Igbos are undeniably a headstrong
people, stubborn and violently self-willed. “A certain stubbornness seems to be
built into our psyche; an instinctive preference to break when perhaps it is
possible only to bend."[8]
This headstrong disposition is well depicted in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart when the principal
character, Okonkwo, in true Igbo character, “took his matchet oft its sheath,
chopped off the court messenger’s head and walked home, proud that he had acted
like a man but disillusioned to know that his people had allowed the other
messengers to escape.”[9]
But, as Mike Echeruo remarked in his brilliant Ahiajoku Lecture in 1979, the
headstrong disposition in Igbo character is both a source of strength and of
disaster.[10]
Rebeliion and the civil war are the worst disaster it has brought to the Igbos. Again we read from Elizabeth Isichei's
A History of the Igbo People, that
resistance to colonialism was fiercest and longest in Igboland. It took the
British “over twenty years of constant military action” to subdue the Igbos.
With only capguns, Dane guns, machetes and the occasional rifle, they flung
themselves, heedless, against the British, heavily armed with rifles, machine
guns and unlimited supplies of ammunition and were slaughtered in their
thousands. In this, they were mindless of the simple truth that discretion is
the better part of valour. As late as 1905 when the British had
smashed almost every resistance to their colonial penetration, the Ezza of
Abakiliki were reported to have told an emissary of the colonial government
that they “recognized no superior authority except the Heavens above and the
Earth beneath”, and that between these two awe-inspiring super human potentates
they constituted a third force.[11]
What a defiant spirit, but it also betrayed a certain pig-headedness and
self-delusion. The worst in the Igbo seems perhaps to
be his lack of political sense, his tendency to look at issues in Nigerian
government and politics in a purely idealistic context and to apply to them
purely idealistic solutions often based on acquired book knowledge but without
sufficient regard to the realities of the Nigerian situation. Politics being
simply the art of the possible, the Igbos may truly be described as poor
actors, utterly devoid of a political sense. With their background of a
diffused traditional political system, they have no traditional familiarity
with the techniques and tactics which the government and politics of a large
and complex political community like The Igbo political naivete is perhaps
best exemplified by Ironsi’s abolition of the federal system in favour of a
unitary system in the belief that that offered a short cut to Nigerian unity.
In the circum-stances of We all know the cost to the Igbos of
the thoughtlessness of the killings in the January, 1966 coup and of Ironsi’s
unitary scheme. It was in order to settle scores with the Igbos for th6se
killings and to counter the threat of Igbo domination implicit in the unitary
scheme that thousands of Igbos resident in the North were massacred in May,
July and September, 1966. The massacres were certainly too genocidal in their
extent and too savage in their methods to have been warranted by the
provocation, but we did give some occasion for it. There is so much in the present
political situation in the country that makes it necessary that the Igbos
should be extremely circumspect and cautious so as not to become scapegoats for
whatever might go wrong, and thereby invite yet another massacre on themselves.
Those Igbos in sensitive or critical public positions should carefully weigh
their actions and utterances in the light of this. It is perhaps wiser for them
not to express themselves too soon on explosive public issues. Igbo propensity for
self-hate, self-destruction and intra-group discord The Igbo society is really a plural one comprising
various sub-groups between whom there is little common identity beyond that
based on a common language and broad cultural patterns. There is, for example,
the division between the riverine Igbos and the upland Igbos (Olu and Igbo) and, in The relations between the members of a village or
village-group, and between one village-group or clan and another are marked by
social discord. They are always disputing over one issue or the other – land,
water, ceremonial rites, traditional offices and titles, etc. None is prepared
to accept the leadership or authority of the other. Everyone is king unto
himself. The quarrels are embittered by the poverty of the traditional Igbo
society. The Igbos thus come to the politics of modern And so we find, as l think everybody acknowledges,
that the political feud of the The Igbo capacity for self-destruction was again
well demonstrated in what has been referred to as the “saboteur mania",
which had seriously undermined the ability of their new state of The Igbo propensity for intra-group discord has
been further aggravated by the modern government in two other respects. At the
time of the advent of the modern government in Igboland, slaves and their
descendants formed a large element of the societies of most Igbo communities.
They even outnumbered (and still do) the free-borns in some of the riverine
communities, notably those in Ogbaru district where I come from. This had
resulted from the stoppage of export trade in slaves from the 1830s (the last
slave ship left the Delta in 1854) which meant that, since the internal trade did
not thereby cease, the slaves had then to be absorbed within the communities.
In the result “slaves became cheaper, and their number increased vastly."[16]
They were accumulated “partly as a status symbol." As a result of the large increase in the number of
slaves, the societies of the affected communities had become polarized. For,
slaves were without any legal rights whatever, being the absolute property of
their masters and as such subject to their power of control and disposition.
They were subjected to oppressive disabilities and debasing treatment, like
being used for sacrifices or for the burial rites of titled masters, the denial
of the right to become the head of a family or village, the right to take
titles or to intermarry with free-borns. They acquiesced in the system,
although slave revolts did erupt from time to time. Over a period of time, the
slaves and their descendants began to be assimilated into the lineage structure
of the communities. The assimilation proceeded upon a social fiction where-by
slaves and their descendants were regarded as having originated from the same
ancestral stock as the free-borns, so that terms implying kinship, such as
“brother” and “sister”, were used between them and the free-borns. But the
disabilities remained in actual social life. There was thus in the system the
seed of social discord which eventually germinated and grew under the stimulus
of certain measures of the modern government implementing its democratic ethos
of freedom and equality. There was, first, the proclamation of 1901 which
abolished slave dealing in all its various forms.[17]
Another proclamation of the same year, as amended in 1912, enabled a salve to
buy his freedom.[18]
And in 1916, the status of slavery itself was finally abolished.[19]
(The Slavery Act of 1833 enacted by British Parliament applied only in the
colony of Lagos, but not in the rest of the country which was a protectorate).
In Eastern Nigeria, the Abolition of Osu System
Law, 1956 completed the process of emancipation by abolishing, not only the
status of slavery or osu, but also
all their attendant disabilities, and by making it an offence for any one to
enforce against any person any disability based on his previous status as a
slave or osu. Slaves and their descendants were naturally
encouraged by these measures to challenge the privileged position of the
free-borns, and to demand to be admitted to the kingship of the village-group
or clan and the headship of families or villages, to the wealth title societies
and to the other rights and privileges previously denied to them. Where their
demands were not conceded, as was the case in many of the communities, they
organized separate kingships, head-ships, title societies, festivals and other
traditional ceremonial rites for themselves. Many Igbo communities have thus
become thoroughly dichotomized into two antagonistic groups feuding among
themselves over practically every issue. Social and economic development in the
communities has inevitably suffered, as the energy and resources that would
otherwise have been channeled into development projects are wasted on feuds. Feuds over chieftainships instituted by the modern
governments are yet another factor that has exacerbated social discord in
Igboland. The modern government’s conception of authority as something
requiring, subject to checks and balances, to be more or less concentrated in a
single person, as opposed to the diffused or “massed” character it assumed in
Igbo traditional society, led the British colonial government in Nigeria to appoint
so-called "warrant chiefs" to assist the colonial district officer in
superintending the affairs of the village communities of Igboland. Those so
appointed were, for the most part, upstarts, people smart or bold enough to
come forward to meet the white colonial district officer. They quickly
established a regime of incredible corruption, rapacity and oppression,[20]
which created widespread resentment among the people, culminating in the famed
Women’s Riot of 1929, which at last forced the colonial government to abolish
the system, and to recognize in its place the traditional system of
administration by family, lineage and village heads and other elders. The conflict of authority created by the warrant
chief system between the government-appointed chiefs and the traditional
authorities was rekindled in 1950 when the government of Chieftainship continued to be a thorn in the flesh
of the government of Thus was unleashed on Igboland the struggle for
recognition as a chief. Rival contenders or rather pretenders to chieftainships
which either never existed before or originated in the discredited warrant
chief system, or which have been in abeyance for more than half a century
mushroomed overnight, splitting the communities into feuding factions. Few, if
any, communities in Igboland have been spared the embittering social discord of
chieftaincy feuds. And even after the contest was supposed to have been
resolved by the government recognition of one of the contenders, the losing
factions have remained unreconciled, so that the feuds have continued almost
unabated. Chinua Achebe’s remarks on the present situation
regarding chieftainship in Igboland seem to me most apt and worthy of our
attention: “The bankrupt state of Igbo leadership”, he says,
“is best illustrated in the alacrity with which they have jettisoned their
traditional republicanism in favour of mushroom kingships. From having no kings
in their recent past the Igbo swung round to set an all-time record of four
hundred “kings” in Imo and four hundred in Anambra! And most of them are
traders in their stalls by day and monarchs at night; city dwellers five days a
week and traditional village rulers on Saturdays and Sundays! They adopt
“traditional" robes from every land, including, I am told, the ceremonial
regalia of the Lord Mayor of The Igbos in
rebellion against It is an irony of history that the
Igbos who had been the most ardent champions of Nigerian unity should also be
the people to sponsor secession. Until 1966, Nigerian unity had indeed been an
article of faith with them. As Stanley Diamond has rightly remarked, “the Ibos
had nurtured the idea of common citizenship with all people among whom they
lived. To inquire into the precise identity of an Ibo was to insult his sense
of fraternity with other Africans in Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Igbo, is acknowledged by the
generality of Nigerians as the founder of Nigerian nationalism. His able
lieutenants were of course drawn from all over Nigeria, but the most
outstanding among them included many Igbos – Mazi Mbonu Ojike, Dr K. O.
Mbadiwe, Dr. Nwafor Orizu, Mokwugo Okoye, Osita Agwuna, Dr. M. I. Okpara,
Ikenna Nzimiro, to mention only a few. Why then, did the Igbos turn round to sponsor
secession? The explanation seems to be that secession was forced upon them by a
combination of tragic events. The planned massacre in 1966 of thousands of
Igbos resident in the North, the unwillingness or inability of the federal
government to protect them and their properties against such acts of wanton
destruction, the constant state of fear and insecurity in which they had to
live, the possibility that the pogrom might be re-enacted following the cyclic
pattern it had taken in May, July and September, 1966, the consequent mass
exodus of Igbos (numbering some one to two millions) from the rest of Nigeria
back to the safety of their homes in Eastern Nigeria, the failure to keep faith
over the agreement reached among the military leaders at Aburi, Ghana on the
form of association for Nigeria – these and other acts of oppression combined
to produce in the Igbos a feeling that they were no longer wanted in the
Federation. Federalism in government is the aggregation of different
communities for the purpose of pooling together their resources, human,
economic, etc., for the common benefit of all. Of these resources, the human is
the most important. Once, therefore, the human element has been torn apart, the
Federation is like a disembodied object. While a desire for the exclusive
control of the oil wealth located in Eastern Nigeria might have been an
operative factor in the secession, the masses who demonstrated, demanding
secession, were moved by the bitter emotion of their relatives killed or maimed
in the North, and by the agonizing spectacle of the wretched condition of those
who managed to escape the slaughter to return home. It is generally conceded both by political
theorists and constitutional lawyers that a people may be morally justified in resisting by force a government which has
persistently abandoned its responsibility to protect them or to cater for their
material well-being.[28]
This view of the matter is predicated upon the rationalization that since the
purpose of government is the protection and well-being of the people, a
government which has become destructive or careless of that purpose forfeits
its claim to the allegiance of the people. Discussing the question whether a
constitution, by virtue of being the supreme law, is binding morally upon all citizens in all
circumstances, Sir Kenneth Wheare, the celebrated English constitutional
lawyer, has said: “There are circumstances in which it is morally
right to rebel, to refuse to obey the Constitution, to upset it. A Constitution
may be the foundation of law and order in a community, but mere law and order
is not enough. It must be good law and good order. It is conceivable surely
that a minority may be right in saying that it lives under a Constitution which
established bad government and that, if all else is tried and fails, rebellion
is right. No doubt it is difficult to say just when rebellion is right and how
much rebellion is right, but that it may be legitimate is surely true.”[29] The right of the people to throw off their
allegiance to an oppressive government or one that fails to protect them is
nowhere mere eloquently stated or more forcibly asserted than in the American
Declaration of Independence of We must hasten to emphasize that the legitimacy of
rebellion in appropriate circumstances is only a moral one. It cannot justify
rebellion as a matter of law. To concede that it can, would involve the absurd
proposition that the constitution can legalize its own destruction by force,
that there can be resistance to government under the authority of government
itself, and that the law sanctions violent opposition to itself. Consequence of
rebellion for the Igbos The primary consequence of rebellion for the Igbos
is that, with its eventual failure after a thirty-month civil war, they have,
like a conquered people which of course they are, been reduced almost to the
status of second-class citizens in their own country. That is the bitter truth
of the present position of the Igbos in One must, however, acknowledge the magnanimity of'
the Federal Military Government towards the Igbos after the civil war, as
manifested in the grant of general amnesty, the guarantee of personal safety
and security for property, and of the right to reside and work anywhere in
Nigeria, the re-absorption of public servants and the restoration of properties
and businesses abandoned in other parts of the country. The amnesty has been
honoured to the letter, as no prosecutions for the rebellion have ever taken
place against any one. Never before in history has an armed conflict, fought
with so much brutality and unbridled vituperation, ended with no reprisals, no
trials and no shootings. When one reflects upon the history of reconstruction
in the United States after the civil war in 1865, one cannot but be impressed
by the magnanimity displayed by General Gowon and his government towards the
rebellious Igbos. Despite all this magnanimity, however, it seems
that, fifteen years after the end of the civil war, the Igbos are still
begrudged equality of treatment along with the other tribes. Or how else
explain the imbalance in the distribution of states with the consequent
discrimination in matters of public appointments, revenue allocation, the
distribution of federal government investments, financial aids and other
amenities? How explain the neglect of Anambra a and Imo States in the siting of
industries, both publicly and privately owned, a neglect that has left the
economy of the two states much mote depressed than that of any other state in the
Federation? How in particular explain the non-inclusion of even a single Igbo
in the original membership of the Supreme Military Council (SMC) announced at
the advent of the Buhari military administration on Furthermore, there were two measures of the
military government which constituted a sad blot on its otherwise singular
magnanimity. One is the abandoned property saga in And by the Abandoned Properties Decree, 1979, every
such sale or disposition “shall be deemed to have been lawful and properly made
and any instrument issued by the Committee which purports to convey any estate
or interest in land shall be deemed to have been validly issued and shall have
effect according to its tenor or intendment." The sale operates to vest in
the "purchaser" the abandoned property in question "free of all
encumbrances." The registrar of lands is directed, upon presentation to
him of the instrument of sale duly signed by or on behalf of the Committee, to
expunge from the register the name of the registered owner and to substitute
therefor that of the “purchaser”. Failure by any one to comply with these
stipulations is made a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment for one year
without the option of a fine. Finally, members of the Committee and any one
acting on its behalf are indemnified of all liability in respect of the sale of
an abandoned property or of anything else done by them in compliance with the
directives of the FMG on the matter, and no suit shall lie at the instance of
any person aggrieved by any such action, notwithstanding that such action is a
violation of a light guaranteed by the Constitution. The military government's
handling of the abandoned property issue is a rather distasteful chapter in the
history of The other measure was that enacted by the Banking
Obligation (Eastern States) Decree, 1970 which, while giving full effect to
withdrawals, refused to recognize deposits made into hank accounts within the
former Eastern Region after the date of secession. By the Decree, a bank's
repayment obligation was limited to the deposit balance as at It seems blatantly illogical to recognize
withdrawals and refuse to give a customer credit for payments-in. There is no
rational basis for so discriminating between them. The illogicality exposes the
punitive design of the Decree. The basis of obligation, as between the bank and
the customer, should have been whether withdrawals or payments-in were made in
lawful Nigerian currency. The Nigerian currency had remained in use as the only
legal tender in The cut-off date for the legal effectiveness of
withdrawals equally as of payments-in should therefore have been The punitive design of the Decree is also exposed
by the fact that the non-recognition of payments-in made before The Decree, unquestionably punitive though it was
meant to be, has to be viewed in the light of whether it is harsher than what
was necessary to punish secession and to deter its future occurrence. It seems
more crushing and ruinous in its effect than the secessionists perhaps
deserved. So ruinous was its effect indeed that many Igbos never recovered
financially from it, some even dying of heartbreak. Lessons of the civil
war The rebellion of the Igbos and the ensuing civil
war to crush it have an important lesson for the country. It is this – that a
country composed of disparate social groups should not so conduct its affairs
as to disaffect large sections of the community to the point where they are no
longer willing to be part of the system or to have their affairs regulated
under it.[32]
In particular, the headship of the federal government should be allowed to move
round. It must be borne in mind that, under the presidential system of the The federal character principle enshrined in the
1979 Constitution is predicated upon the view of Nigeria as a house on four
pillars, the four pillars being the Hausa/Fulanis, Igbos, Yorubas and the
Minorities, and that the edifice will begin to wobble and its stability
imperiled if the headship of the federal government is not made to move round
these four groups. Nigerian unity demands an acceptance and commitment by all
to the principle of rotation, i.e., that ordinarily
no two persons from the same group should hold the headship of the federal
government in succession. Unless the federal character principle is applied in
order to rotate the headship of the federal government among the four groups,
its application at the lower levels will not be effective to secure national
unity. The danger of disintegration and of demands for a confederal arrangement
will continue to stare us in the face. The civil war underscores, in the second place, the
overriding relevance and importance of justice in the administration of the
government of any human society. Justice, it has been aptly said, is the “bond
of society”,[33]
the “cornerstone of human togetherness.”[34]
Implying as it does an acceptance by all of “each other’s existence, respect
for each other’s rights, and rendering to one another his or her dues”,[35]
justice is the condition in which the individual can feel able to
"identify with society, feel at one with it, and accept its rulings.”[36]
An unjust society cannot maintain its unity and cohesion because it cannot
arouse in its members a strong enough feeling of loyalty and allegiance.
Injustice not only alienates the individual's loyalty, what is worse, it also
arouses him to intense indignation and disaffection. It is a denial of the
individual’s worth as a human person, a manifestation by society of an uncaring
attitude towards him. An individual or group denied recognition by society
cannot but feel alienated and disaffected. Thirdly, it serves to emphasize the point that the
conduct of public affairs should not be allowed to be unduly conditioned by the
leaders’ selfish ambition for power or by a propensity for an easy resort to
violence for the settlement of disputed issues. The civil war would have been
avoided but selfishness, intransigence and lack of good faith and of an
accommodating spirit on the part of the military leaders on both sides of the
dispute. I hold the view that the war was needlessly forced upon the country by
these leaders. With the reintegration of the Igbos into Conclusion This lecture is designed as a kind of
self-examination with a view to self-correction. It is a call on the Igbos to
re-examine themselves, and to try to correct some of the defects and
shortcomings in their character and manner of behaviour, particularly as they
affect their relations with other Nigerians. The Igbos need In the context of Our sense of common identity as Igbos
is too fragile, and must be strengthened. Igbos must learn to restrain the
propensity for intra-group feuds. It is a tragedy of Igbo historical
development in |
