You better seek clarification with the journalist who was quoting Madiebo, and what Madiebo actually said. I have come across many Nigerian newspapers of record of recent times mangling the English language in ways that betray the depths of influence that our various local languages have been exerting on the English language written and spoken in Nigeria. Nigerians with their penchant for speaking their native tongues in English is apparently the reason for this mismanagement. Madiebo must have meant "O nweghi akwukwo m dere". "I did not write any book"-when refering to Achebe's book and why he should be the one to answer to what Achebe clearly put his name and rock-solid reputation behind. That does not mean that he has not written any book. It means that he did not write this book in question.
Just a little lingual exegesis for non-Igbos who are not at home in the Igbo Weltanschaunng.
Franklyne Ogbunwezeh
* ************** *************** ****************** *************** ***********
What constitutes a disservice to our faculty of judgment, however, is to place obstacles in the way of assembling truth's fragments, remaining content with a mere one- or two-dimensional projection where a multidimensional and multifaceted apprehension remains open, accessible and instructive.
What constitutes a disservice to our faculty of judgment, however, is to place obstacles in the way of assembling truth's fragments, remaining content with a mere one- or two-dimensional projection where a multidimensional and multifaceted apprehension remains open, accessible and instructive.
Wole Soyinka, Between Truth and Indulgences
From: Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: "naijaintellects@googlegroups.com" <naijaintellects@googlegroups.com>; NaijaPolitics e-Group <NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com>; OmoOdua <OmoOdua@yahoogroups.com>; "nigerianid@yahoogroups.com" <nigerianID@yahoogroups.com>; Ra'ayi <Raayiriga@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2012 10:03 PM
Subject: RE: Gowon ceded Bakassi to Cameroun to win the civil war –Madiebo {Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: FROM THE ARCHIVES: An Interview with General Gowon [Time Magazine, July 4, 1969]
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From: Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Cc: "naijaintellects@googlegroups.com" <naijaintellects@googlegroups.com>; NaijaPolitics e-Group <NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com>; OmoOdua <OmoOdua@yahoogroups.com>; "nigerianid@yahoogroups.com" <nigerianID@yahoogroups.com>; Ra'ayi <Raayiriga@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2012 10:03 PM
Subject: RE: Gowon ceded Bakassi to Cameroun to win the civil war –Madiebo {Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: FROM THE ARCHIVES: An Interview with General Gowon [Time Magazine, July 4, 1969]
Dear All:
I do not understand General Madiebo, when he states thus in his interview below:
QUOTE
In fact, I went further to say that if I am to give my own account of the war and Awolowo's role, I would even have said more. But that is as far as I can go. I do not want to draw attention on Achebe's book to myself. This is because I haven't written any book and I do not want to steal the show or act for Achebe.
UNQUOTE
He must have been wrongly quoted, for was it not he who wrote the following book::
The Nigerian revolution and the Biafran warA retired general of the Biafran Army presents a post-mortem account of the events of the Nigerian civil war, 1966-70. He attempts to explain dispassionately why army officers toppled the civil government in the cause of stability, and the considerable civilian support they received; and the ensuing riots and counter-coup, in the name of reunification, which led to a civil war claiming some three million lives. He presents eye-witness accounts, and from an insider-perspective tells the story of how and why the Biafrans fought the war for almost three years under blockade and in isolation from the outside world, aiming to rectify much perceived misinformation about the war published outside Africa. |
I even did a 10-part serialization of it some time back, in January 1997 to be exact, which he endorsed when I met him personally in Houston some time thereafter! :-)
eg
Part 3: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!topic/soc.history.african.biafra/_05MqEwVw8A
On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 7:11 AM, elombah daniel <elsdaniel@yahoo.com> wrote:
--Interviews— 28 October 2012— Muyiwa Oyinlola, Ayo EsanMajor General Alexander Madiebo was a war commander of the Biafran Army during the civil war otherwise known as the Biafran War. In this interview with Muyiwa Oyinlola, News Editor and Ayo Esan, Senior Correspondent, he speaks about the controversy generated by extracts from Professor Chinua Achebe's book on the role played by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo during the Nigerian Civil War, the reintegration of the Igbo race, and the ceding of Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroun. Excerpts:It is now over 40 years since the civil war ended, would you say the Igbo have been reintegrated into the polity?reintegration of the Igbo has been a slow process. You can never reintegrate the Igbo fully as it used to be before the war. Now the Army was completely against the reintegration of the Igbo into the Nigerian society because of selfishness. The soldiers thought that if Igbo officers came back, they (Nigerian soldiers) would be relegated to the background because Igbo officers were, on the whole, senior to all of them. This is because after independence, most of the senior officers were Igbo. So, reintegration did not start at all until the military regime stopped, probably with the exit of Obasanjo. Now, since then, we have had some progress. For instance, for the first time, we are having Chief of Army Staff as an Igbo man. The Igbo are getting attention in various senses, both in politics and in other ways, but there is a long way to go. There are people who are determined that the more you draw the Igbo into the society, the more they are threatened. I have the details of the reintegration of the Igbo but I can't give you all. What I am merely trying to tell you as briefly as possible is that the Igbo have not been fully reintegrated into Nigeria.What is your observation on Professor Chinua Achebe's comment on Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his book, There was a Country?What Achebe said, as I told some people, in all aspects, is correct. In fact, I went further to say that if I am to give my own account of the war and Awolowo's role, I would even have said more. But that is as far as I can go. I do not want to draw attention on Achebe's book to myself. This is because I haven't written any book and I do not want to steal the show or act for Achebe. Achebe is well qualified to defend himself but one thing you notice is that, of all the people who have been criticising Achebe, no one had said what he said was wrong. If there is anybody who has said that, then I have not been able to read or hear it. Nobody is saying that Awolowo did not give the Igbo £20 at the end of the war; that he did not starve the Igbo during the war, and all that Achebe had to say. This is because what he (Achebe) said are true. Awolowo's people agreed that he had to do them to win the war. So, what is the bone of contention? There is no basis for controversy because one person has given the facts, and the other person is trying to justify the facts. They are all entitled to that. Now, I have more. I keep a lot of documents and materials on the war and the participants. If I had to write my own, I might not even mention any of the things that Achebe said. I mean, he has written as a civilian and I will write as a soldier. What he said are all correct and everybody agrees, I mean all the tribes.The question now is, is he justified to do those things just to win a war. That is for anybody to answer.One of his followers, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, said that food supply was stopped because the soldiers hijacked the food being sent to the East and didn't allow it to get to the people. How true is that?Obviously, that is a talk of an idle civilian. How can you be giving food to soldiers? I was commanding the Army throughout the war. For the first two months, we had no problem of food. As far as I know, throughout the war, Nigeria did not give food to any warfront or any part under the control of Biafra. This is common sense. The only thing was that we had the support from the Caritas (it is a church organisation) and the Red Cross. I think Caritas is based in Rome. It is a very big relief organisation. To get food from them, their flight only came in the night and completely under bombardment by the Nigerian command to prevent the food from coming in. He said he was giving Biafrans food. If I were a Nigerian, I won't give Biafrans food. We did not have the means to hijack food coming, with the sophisticated planes from Nigeria. How could we have hijacked them with helicopters? The point is that, officially, unofficially or in any way, Biafra got no food from Nigeria at all.There was a brief period when we benefitted from Nigerian food by accident. It was when Biafran troops cleared Owerri and cut off a lot of Nigerian soldiers. The Nigerian Army started dropping food for their soldiers inside Owerri. Obviously, we discovered that what they were doing was that they asked their soldiers to spread white clothes in the areas where they were and they would drop food for them. The Biafran soldiers cleared other areas and spread white clothes and they were dropping food for them mistakenly. They soon found out. They didn't at any time during the war give Biafrans food. If they captured any part of the original Biafra, they had to feed the people there, but not Biafrans.The agitation for a Biafran nation is still ongoing. Do you think it is achievable?Frankly, if one wants to be realistic, you cannot achieve Biafra again as we used to know it. First of all, the old Biafra presently consists of eight or nine states. There are five in Igboland and four in the South-South. I am just saying this off hand. There are about eight states now made up of the old Biafra. How on earth are you going to start reuniting all these people who have enjoyed a lot of progress and have seen the fruit of local independence? How can you join them again under one state? It is not possible. It is not necessarily the political independence of about eight or nine states. They cannot lump themselves together again.Biafra stands for justice. People who are agitating for Biafra are, in fact, agitating for justice. They are agitating for an end to the marginalisation of a certain part of Nigeria.What would you now want to tell people like Chief Uwazuruike who is pursuing the project?Uwazuruike, in a way, is useful to the Igbo. As I told you, it is not useful to the extent of getting independence for the Igbo. He is the only pressure group now the Igbo have to let the rest of Nigeria know what our problems are. In fact, there was a time that I would say he achieved more than all the South-East (Nigerian) governments put together. Under these governments everybody is trying to get maximum benefit for himself and his family and not for the Igbo really. After the war, the Igbo who joined political parties were just the second fiddle, not hoping to achieve more than satisfying their families. Under Abacha, an Igbo man, Kalu, formed ' Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha, to have Abacha there permanently, not an Igbo man. Abacha was not an Igbo man. Nobody has the ambition of reuniting the Igbo. They just became nuisance in a way, individually.But now, people are beginning to realise that you don't achieve much by trying to shine in the midst of poverty. The Igbo are uniting again.Why were you not promoted when Gowon and Unegbu were promoted?I don't know.People are asking why Professor Achebe is reliving the civil war issues after over 40 years. They believe we should not be looking at what divided us in the past but for something that will unite us. What is your view on this?That is the point. The issue of the civil war or Biafra is not coming back. One single person wrote a book. I haven't read the book. All I know about the book is what I have read in the newspapers or from different journalists. I am not aware that the issue of Biafra is coming up again except that Achebe wrote his memoirs. Nobody talked about many other things he wrote but only about Awolowo. As if he wrote about only Awolowo. Maybe, he did, I don't know. But I understand that he wrote a book called 'There was a country, Biafra'. Which is true. When Ojukwu died, he was buried as a General and Head of State. His coffin was carried by Generals. In fact, it was the first burial that looked like a Head of State's in the history of Nigeria. Ex-Heads of State came, those who recognised Biafra. Nigeria was, indeed, trying to recognise that there was a country.What are we arguing about? If somebody says it, he gets into trouble. If he went beyond it and said that Awolowo did this or that, he gets into trouble. He just said the truth but it is left for people to justify if Awolowo did it because he wanted to win the war. In fact, there were other things Awolowo may have done which are part of his job. This is the way I look at it. I don't think there is any need for controversy over it. If somebody had said that Awolowo never gave the Igbo £20 after the war or that he didn't change currency during the war, then I would start wondering whether I had forgotten. But nobody has said that. All they are saying is that he did this purely to succeed in his job. He was given a job. Whether he did it in order to punish the Igbo, I don't know. After all, he never consulted the Yoruba for any decision he took. He was acting as an individual, not as a Yorubaman, but as a Minister or Commissioner of Finance. It has nothing to do with his tribe. Why should his tribe be angry if he took wrong decisions or if he showed any overzealousness in anything he did? After all, there were other things credited to him. To start revealing those things now would obviously try to draw blood. I know that if at any time that there was anything necessary to say, that would be in my own memoirs. I am not going to support somebody else's book. Supporting a book that you have not read, one must be carefully moderated. What I am saying is that, as far as I am concerned, everything already credited to him by Achebe are absolutely correct.As a commander during the war, you were familiar with every section of Biafra and, perhaps, Nigeria. Was Bakassi within the geographical zone of Nigeria?Bakassi is an example of the evils of inter-tribal politics, evil of colonialism and of North-South dichotomy. If I tell the story of Bakassi, it may take too long but we started losing Bakassi in 1959. That was when we lost South -West Cameroun. You know South-West Cameroun is Adamawa in the North and Barmanda in the South. They were part of Nigeria because the League of Nations after the Second World War shared Cameroun into two. It belonged to Germany. It gave the East to France and the West to Britain. Britain then shared its own into two, administered the North as Adamawa Province with the Northern Nigeria and the South with Eastern Nigeria. In 1959, most colonies were to get independence and the British thought of what to do with this Western Cameroun being administered by Britain under Nigeria. Britain decided to give the Southern Cameroun back to France and the Northern one, Adamawa to Nigeria. Do you know why? Britain was adjusting population so that the North should have overall majority in Lagos. I took part in the United Nations plebiscite which was to decide who goes where. I was the only Nigerian indigenous officer that took part in that exercise. The British realised that South-West Cameroun under Hendeley was NCNC. That was why they called it National Council for Nigeria and Cameroun (NCNC). They had 14 seats in Nigeria in the Eastern Region and one seat at the centre. That seat at the centre was won by Hendeley and he became Minister of Labour. Hendeley won 13 of the14 seats in Enugu. Funcher was being used by the British to remove Cameroun from Nigeria. Funcher won only one seat, yet when the plebiscite came, he defeated Hendeley who had 13 seats. It was possible because Sardauna and Awolowo saw it as an opportunity to reduce the representation of the NCNC both in Lagos and in the East. You know this is shortsightedness. I won't dwell much on that, so eventually we lost that. Having lost that part of Cameroun, Britain and Nigeria were rejoicing that NCNC's wing had been clipped. They didn't realise that after losing it they had given the North over 52 per cent representation over the South. They didn't need anybody in the South to rule Nigeria. That was the beginning of the end. When the civil war came, having taken that part of the Cameroun, they were too happy to bother about demarcating the area. We decided to bring all our weapons from the Cameroun. Ahidjo, the president of Cameroun said he didn't know where the boundary was, so we should carry on. He was blackmailing Nigeria. If that place had remained open, Nigeria would have defeated Biafra, but it would have taken about 10 to 15 years.Gowon told Ahidjo to select the boundary and close it after the war, 'we shall discuss'. Ahidjo said, okay thank you sir. Ahidjo then went and told Biafra enough is enough. He marked the boundary and policed it. Eventually, we lost the war. At the end, Nigeria went back and said that was not the boundary. Ahidjo reminded Gowon that he told them to mark the boundary. ''We marked the boundary, you won the war forget it''. Ahidjo, being a Fulani, each time he wanted to discuss the Nigerian border with Cameroun, he might even go to Sokoto and speak in vernacular. Journalists wouldn't even know what they were saying. That was how they took Bakassi. We tried from 1972, they started enforcing it with soldiers. People would say you can't eat your cake and have it; you sacrificed Bakassi for Biafra. If you say take what you want, we want Biafra, you have got Biafra, so you have lost Bakassi. It is unfortunate that they are our brothers. My troops were there and, if we are to be truthful, that place is Nigeria. But if you have in anyway given it to them, let them have it.Daniel Elombah+44-7435469430Every Nigerian that has something important to say, says it on www.elombah.comDaniel Elombah+44-7435469430
Every Nigerian that has something important to say, says it on www.elombah.com
From: Mobolaji Aluko <alukome@gmail.com>
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>; NaijaPolitics e-Group <NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com>; OmoOdua <OmoOdua@yahoogroups.com>; "nigerianid@yahoogroups.com" <nigerianID@yahoogroups.com>; naijaintellects <naijaintellects@googlegroups.com>; Ra'ayi <Raayiriga@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2012 11:04 AM
Subject: [Naijaintellects] FROM THE ARCHIVES: An Interview with General Gowon [Time Magazine, July 4, 1969]
--Friday, Jul. 04, 1969World: An Interview with General Gowon
The air-conditioned office of Nigeria's leader, Major General Yakubu Gowon, is on the second floor of a villa in the Obalende quarter of Lagos. A well-thumbed copy of Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln—The War Years lies amid a clutter of radio equipment and six telephones. A devout Methodist in a largely Moslem and animist nation, a member of an insignificant tribe in a federation of tribal giants, Gowon clearly sees himself in the Lincolnesque role of healer of his nation's divisions.TIME Correspondent Charles Eisendrath recently talked with the general. The subjects discussed and Gowon's replies:On the War's EndI hope it will end within a year. But if it doesn't, I assure you that this country will continue to prosecute this war until we have dealt with the problem of secession.On Nigeria's Reasons for FightingThis is a war with a difference. We do not take the Ibos as our enemies; they are our brothers. As far as I am concerned, I'm fighting a war to keep the country one and united. I therefore cannot afford to be callous in the way I prosecute this war. I have got to think of the problems of reconstruction, reconciliation and winning the heart, if we are to have a happy country in the end. It would be quite an easy thing to say, "All right, we will call them enemies, and we will fight them as enemies." But then, honestly, it would remain with us for quite some time that they really are enemies.On Biafra's General OjukwuWhile we do not take the Ibos as enemies, we are enemies of evil. Anybody who is the embodiment of evil, of course, will be an enemy. This man [Ojukwu], fighting total war with Nigeria, is a typical Hitler, and he will fight with everything he has in hand. He does not mind killing, eliminating, destroying anything to achieve his end.On Mastery of the SkiesHonestly, there is no magic about our downing a Red Cross plane. Right from the beginning we told all those who broke into our airspace that they were doing so at their own risk. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of our air force, we were not in a position to seal off the air completely. It was the Joint Church Aid group that once said: "We don't care what you say. We're not going to obey your instructions to respect territorial airspace." They told us that if we dared shoot down one of their aircraft, world opinion would be against us. But now people see that we can shoot, and I hope it will be a lesson to any wild gunrunner.On Relief FlightsGod knows, we will do whatever we can not to endanger a relief aircraft. But this means no flights day or night without clearance. Relief services have been offered facilities from Nigeria for either time of day, but nobody was interested in our offer. Now anything they do, they do at their own risk.On Aid from the SovietsGoing to the Soviet Union, I assure you, was just a way of dealing with Ojukwu's threat. After all, Ojukwu started the air war. Even Abraham Lincoln went to Russia for help to win his own Civil War.*On the WestOur friends' doors have been shut to us and opened to Ojukwu, even though we offer to pay cash for help, and he doesn't have an economy. Where is the morality of this world? We remove the word hate. We remove the word victory. We remove the word enemy. What we get back is poison.On Civilian GovernmentI have given my word that we will return this government to civilian rule, but I will not hand it over in chaos. I'll hand it over to a democratic government when I am sure that anyone can move about freely and that, irrespective of your ethnic origin, color or religion, you can express your opinion without being intimidated.* Lincoln, through Bayard Taylor, the U.S. minister to St. Petersburg, in 1862 sought and obtained a pledge of Russian support for the Union, should either Britain or France intervene on the side of the South. The Russians actually dispatched warships to the U.S. to demonstrate their support.__________________________________________________________________________________________________
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