Dear Chidi,
I read all the USA-Africa dialogue mail at the website since it would take too much space in my mailbox and furthermore, I don't read all posts, only those with headlines that I find interesting. I don't know why I find that my mail to you was truncated in mid-stream maybe because of what I said about Shlomo Hamelech – but that was only a mild joke (some rabbis I know are much harder and so isthe Torah). Anyway here is my mail to you in full – IN FULL because I believe that is some of what Ogbeni Kadiri is replying to and of course I stand by what I say and I'm going to respond to him shortly but before that, once again and for the record here it is again IN FULL:
Dear Chidi,
1981-1984 I knew the then Rivers State : Port Harcourt, Ahoada, Senator Francis Ellah's Umoku, the Ogoni man's land, Bonny, Buguma, Bakana and the rest of the Riverine areas and in the then Imo State, Aba, Owerri and Umuahia, fairly well. My only sources of information about "abadoned properties", hearsay, sometimes from very high levels of direct involvement, but unfortunately I never asked to see any signed documents
IBK may be imbued with the spirit of reconciliation, but given that much has happened since 1970, if his purpose in posting Jean Herskovits' article dated January 1973 was to give background information then that information does not wholly tally with what he IBK himself has postulated in this thread, (the big bold black letters for emphasis) .
IBK's words: "Sam Mbakwe came to prominence after the civil war in January 1970 as the lawyer who pleaded the Igbo cause and represented almost all the Igbo who genuinely owned properties in Port Harcourt and he either got compensation for their properties or he got the properties back.
For his exertions he became the first civilian Governor of Imo State.
Let the gullible continue to lap up lies! They shall be confronted by the truth and the truth if they love the truth shall set them free. For those who love lies, they will remain in perpetual damnation and end in purgatory."
Since it's credibility that we're talking about let me say this: Sam Mbakwe ( May the Almighty be pleased with him) was a good man and as far as I know, a good governor of Imo State right up to his last day as governor when Muhammadu Buhari & the Nigerian Military took over the reins of power from the Shehu Shagari government on 31.12.1983.
My main point has been that many of the so called "abandoned houses were never restored to their rightful owners, nor was justice – (compensation rightfully received, by all victims whose houses had been auctioned away at FIVE NAIRA each. Whereas IBK says that Sam Mbakwe "either got compensation for their properties or he got the properties back", the Foreign Affairs article is less categorical and a little more reserved about this issue (my underlinings for emphasis):
"IV
Precisely because of the prewar practice of investing outside Iboland, Ibo property is no less important an issue than Ibo jobs-and in Port Harcourt, the major southern city of the former Eastern Region, it is more important. After the events of 1966 and during the war itself, most states set up "abandoned property" authorities. The workings of those authorities varied: in the Mid-West, the buildings left by fleeing East-Central State Ibo were inventoried and assessed from November 1967; rents were collected, banked in the owner's name, and given over on demand at the war's end. In Benue- Plateau the Governor, asked continually about the matter during the war, replied: "I have an abandoned property authority-and the Ibo will come back." And, as he relates it, "they said, these outsiders, 'No, never.' But I knew my Ibo classmates [at the University of Ibadan] as intimates; I knew they'd be back, and they are back. Those who thought they would not be do not know Nigeria."
But the situation was far more complex in Port Harcourt, which has produced the most difficult postwar problem-some say the only intractable one. The major port of the former Eastern Region, and the center of the petroleum industry before the war, the city had a predominantly Ibo population, though it was located in the minorities region where feelings against majority domination had for years run higher than anywhere else. An area of enormous ethnic and linguistic intricacy, the Niger Delta, with Port Harcourt its only major city, felt the war with particular bitterness. For in Port Harcourt over 95 percent of the individually owned property belonged to Ibo. Most of the people in what would become the Rivers State were, with those of the South-East, the minorities of the former Eastern Region, which the Ibo had long controlled politically. Further, the vast oil resources of the region were located there, and the Rivers people feared that the resulting revenues would be used in Iboland rather than in the previously neglected delta area.[iv]
For the Rivers people, creation of their own state and control of its capital were overwhelmingly important, but Port Harcourt, to all Ibo an Ibo city, was no less important to those who had been born there, and to Biafrans generally. This issue, unresolvable, provoked bitterness during the war and ill feeling in postwar relations unmatched elsewhere in Nigeria.
At the end of the war the capital of the Rivers State, Port Harcourt, was, as observers described it, a "ghost town." Further, the state government had to be run from a place where most of the property still belonged to people from outside the state. Though in time Port Harcourt showed signs of activity, as businesses reopened and oil companies returned and even some Ibo workers came back, the question of "abandoned properties" remained unsettled. Today, despite the release of a very small percentage of houses to their owners, the problem is far from solved. The Rivers' view is simply stated by one official: "Our government cannot be a tenant, nor can we abdicate; we must control our own land for our own people."
In the East-Central State, however, lack of capital is a major issue. Ibo who own property in Port Harcourt, each desperately needing at least rents to rehabilitate perhaps dozens of people in the extended family system, cannot understand the delay now nearing three years. Ibo are emphatic in telling outsiders that if civil strife ever erupts again in Nigeria, "It will not come from here." But some of the most thoughtful then add a qualifier: if the Port Harcourt issue remains unresolved then some future conflict just might draw in the Ibo.
In the Rivers State the general argument runs that the problem will take time to sort out, but some Rivers people see it differently. One man who suffered at the hands of the Biafran forces during the war says, none the less, that the prolonged impasse on the Ibo problem is not only unfair but will be self-destructive for the Rivers State. As he sees it, Port Harcourt must again become the port for the East-Central State, as it was before the war when produce also came there from western parts of the present South- East State. "But now ECS is turning to the Mid-West ports, and the South- East to Calabar; it's fine to say the Rivers have money, but there's more to a healthy economy than just oil, and before the war P.H. attracted industry from everywhere." Nor do all in the federal government, however understanding of the Rivers' position, appreciate a slowness that undermines the idea of "One Nigeria," the single blatant blemish on a reconciliation whose smoothness has impressed even those who believed in it most.
The Rivers' neighbor, the South-East State, was also originally proclaimed part of Biafra. Sharing with Rivers the problems of Nigerian minorities, its people shared with them also fierce divisions over secession, and severe war damage. Yet the tone of reconciliation is different, and the state's Military Governor says that this is precisely because there was in the area no Ibo city like Port Harcourt; there were fewer Ibo property owners and others in the state. That produced what he calls "very active neglect," but it also created a situation free of the extreme postwar tensions of Port Harcourt, which made reconciliation easier."
Gowon and what has been described as his magnanimity is not in doubt (not because he married an Igbo woman - a love act of the heart, not necessarily "magnanimity" (nor was she a prisoner of war) although one cannot rule out the possibility that like King Solomon (the champion, over 800 wives!) It could have even been regarded as a "political" marriage and on a personal level a seal to what has been described as his policy of post-war reconciliation.
In these days of Boko Haram and worldwide terrorism, here's the Torah on the treatment of female prisoners of war
One last little note on a real danger: Given that ostensibly Boko Haram wants to erect their caliphate over the North Eastern parts of Nigeria or indeed the whole of what is still the ( Federal) Republic Nigeria, hopefully any of their terror incursions into Igbo-land will be rigorously resisted by Nigeria's Federal Military, failing which the miscreants and street urchins and other good citizens of that area of Nigeria will have to defend themselves precisely as the Emir of Kano said not so long ago
I'm still trying to figure out the meaning of the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
Chidi, just now it's two degrees below zero outside my kitchen window….
Cornelius
On Saturday, 21 November 2015 07:49:40 UTC+1, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:
And the someone whose credibility is damaged by this comment IBK, is you.
CAO.
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