We Must Resolve That Never Again Shall We Spill Our People’s Blood

Opinion

Opinion

Perhaps at this point it will be remiss of me and dangerously ominous not to take a position about the still raging controversy back home, at least by the accounts in the local papers as of the last weekend.

My host, Professor Chinua Achebe had chosen to document his account of an indelible personal experience in a new book titled, There was a country – a personal history of Biafra”.

It received and continues to receive mixed and in some cases hostile reception.

In fact some commentators suggested that the work had contributed to restoring old tensions and brewing new hostilities, prefacing possible inter-ethnic conflict.

Wherever your personal view may lie, we cannot but observe, from the tone of the commentary, that our national governments continue to fail us in the crucial duty of being repositories of information, data, records and archives as historical records are indispensable tools for policy development.

Certainly the discourse would have been richer, less acrimonious and not predestined for tension if institutional national archiving and information disclosure was responsibly discharged by the Federal Government of Nigeria.

I am sure there are other examples across the West African sub-region. States must begin to see the connection between information management and inter-religious, ethnic and sectional tension across Africa.

That publication has put me in some difficult straits and I will explain.

I speak here today not in person but by virtue of my office as Governor of Lagos State.

The invitation from Professor Chinua Achebe to me is therefore an honour to the people of Lagos and on their behalf I thank him.

My first invitation was actually to speak here in December 2011 but previous commitments made that impossible.

When I suggested to Professor Achebe that I will write the speech and have somebody deliver it he was emphatic in saying that he would rather wait for a year until 2012.

Sometime early this year, I wrote to confirm my acceptance and my attendance.

I am Yoruba and interestingly a product of his seminal work “Things fall Apart” as student of literature in a Nigerian Secondary School.

You cannot imagine my excitement as I prepared for this occasion sometime in August this year, when I heard of his new book.

I ordered a copy online and requested that it be delivered to me in London in October whilst I was attending an event there.

I was halfway through the book when I checked the local news online and saw that things were no longer at ease back home in Nigeria.

Some leaders of my ethnic group had very strong views about parts of the book.

 

Professor Achebe is from the Igbo ethnic group. As you can also expect, there were spirited responses from leaders of opinion from his own ethnic group.

My thoughts were to write to Professor Achebe to decline the invitation and profer some excuse.

I wonder if it crossed his mind to find a reason to ask me not to bother to come.

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But I resolved that a commitment I had made in honour to attend was more important than what anybody might say or feel.

Those were the values on which I was raised.

More importantly, this was a generational disagreement between the principal parties of the events that took place when I was barely four years old.

As I said, the management of the National Archives and the publication of what really happened at that time will certainly help to ensure that nobody creates his own facts.

But beyond that, my own generation has moved on. We see our country differently.

It also seems to me that many years after the conflict, that some of the principal actors in the conflict such as Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Yoruba leader and Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu had decided to move on.

This was what Ojukwu said when Chief Awolowo passed on in the late 1980s:- “the best President that Nigeria never had”.

It might interest you to also know that one of the active military leaders of the time, a Yoruba General, did not object to his daughter subsequently marrying an Igbo man.

My own aunt, a Yoruba Muslim, had a son for an Igbo Christian man and he is as much my cousin as the others are.

Today, the story of our progress in Lagos State cannot be complete without acknowledging the role of Ben Akabueze, an Igbo man from Anambra State, who has been my Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning for the last 5 (Five) years.

Interestingly, it is only in Yoruba land, and I stand to be corrected, where the problem of abandoned properties did not afflict the Igbos.

They returned back after the war to rightfully claim properties they had deserted in flight in the aftermath of the crisis.

It is instructive to also re-call that, when Lagos State Military Government many decades after the war tried to expropriate Ojukwu’s property in Lagos, it was a Yoruba lawyer who prosecuted the case successfully on his behalf.

In my own home, Ojukwu was most welcome. He and my uncle started primary school the same day and remained lifelong friends until he passed.

It was therefore a duty to honour him as I did at his funeral when I said:-

“Ikemba, as he was fondly called was an illustrious Nigerian, a dogged fighter and an accomplished individual, whose footprints and legacies on Nigeria’s political landscape have earned him a secure place in its Hall of Fame”.

Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I hope I speak for my generation if I say we understand how difficult things were at the time.

We salute the men and women who kept our nation together, especially those who paid the supreme price to do so.

The only way we can honour their memory is not to re-open the old wounds, but to resolve that never again will our people’s blood be spilled by their own people in order to harness the diversity of our people and make our union more perfect.

It is by making this kind of resolve that we can gain from that conflict and use the lessons to surmount the challenges that stand in the way of our journey to the promise of our nation.

By Babatunde Raji Fashola

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