Opinion 4: There WAS a country.
On the 1st of October 1960, Nigeria got her independence from Britain. Unlike other colonies, we needn’t have to fight so hard to get freedom. It was given us on a platter of gold. We should have known that freedom should be won and not given on a plate.
The last governor-general that ruled Nigeria, Sir James Robertson was discovered to have helped in the rigging of Nigeria’s first election that produced Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as the first prime minister.
We didn’t start our Independence story on a clean slate. One might say that popular faith in genuine democracy was compromised from its birth.
Our euphoria that stemmed from independence was short-lived first by the Nigerian census crisis of 1963–1964, the Federal election crisis of 1964, followed by the Western Nigeria election crisis of 1965.
Within six years of the tragic colonial manipulation, Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth, elections were blatantly rigged, the Jan 15, 1966, coup, led to the death of some prominent leaders like Ahmadu Bello, Samuel Akintola and others, this birthed the idea of a civil war. Nigeria was disintegrating.
May 30th 1967 marked the beginning of Nigeria’s civil war as Chukwuemeka Ojukwu proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Biafra from Nigeria which was governed by Yakubu Gowon.
The war lasted for three years, scenes and pictures of blood, guts, severed limbs from the war front flooded into homes around the world through the media. It was revealed that 300,000 Biafran children were suffering from kwashiorkor and 3 million children were near death. Bodies laid rotting under the hot sun by the roadside and the flapping wings of scavengers could be seen circling, waiting, watching patiently nearby.
The agony of the war was pungent, it was everywhere. Bruce Mayrock, a young college student was said to have set himself ablaze to protest the killing of “innocent Biafran babies”. He died later from his wounds.
The headcount at the end of the thirty-month civil war was perhaps 3 million deaths, which was approximately 20% of the entire population. This high proportion was mostly children. The high loss of human lives made it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.
It has been fifty years since the war, sixty since independence, yet we are still here battling corruption, religious bigotry, nepotism, terrorism and a whole lot of other vices.
Some months earlier, the Federal Government of Nigeria released 601 allegedly repentant terrorists. They were paid twenty thousand naira each forgetting those at the receiving end of their bloody attacks.
As at the time ‘There was a country’ was published, the World Bank released numbers indicating that about $400 billion had been pilfered from Nigeria’s treasury since independence. Nigeria has plunged herself into an abyss of debt and she’s still borrowing, adding to the already insurmountable number of debts amassed.
Each time I think of what posterity will have to read about us, I die.
“…what heart will listen to our clamouring?
What ear to our pitiful anger?
Which grows in us like a tumour
In the black depth of our plaintive throats?…” (Birago Diop)
If we had been left alone and Africa continued to be viewed as a country and Nigeria as a village in it, if they still thought of us as humans living in huts with wild animals as our companion, perhaps we’d have turned out better.
Maybe if we weren’t ‘discovered’ we would have found a way painstakingly to lasting growth and development.
Maybe, maybe not.
SAMUEL EUNICE
