Civil War was never meant to finish up the Igbo race - OBJ

Fmr. President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo said yesterday that the 30-month Civil War was never meant to exterminate the Igbo, but an altruistic attempt to bring “our brothers and sisters” back to the fold of one Nigeria.Although federal troops thought the war could be won within three months, they almost lost it, Obasanjo said.

The former president, who spoke of the need for the Federal Government to negotiate with Biafran Republic agitators, recalled that he was one of those who wrote the war’s operational manual.

He spoke at an event tagged “Memory and Nation Building: Biafra 50 years later”, organised by the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation,

He said: “We really never had a national leader. We had three leaders at the beginning of our journey as a nation who were mindful of their different regions and that remains our problem till today.

“Even in the process of our movement towards independence and when you compare with other countries, they were talking about freedom and unity. When you look at the speeches of our leaders, they talked of freedom, they talked of progress but they rarely talked of unity.

“So, the unity they never talked about, and scarcely worked for, has eluded us and that should be our starting point. So when of course the military, for whatever reason, and I have maintained that the young officers who struck in 1966 were naïve, but there was an element of nationalism in some of them.

“But, be that as it may, it set us back and we moved from the political instability to military coup and then the pogrom, the separation and the civil war. I was one of those who wrote the operation order for the civil war.

“We thought we would end it in three months, and then bring our brothers and sisters back; we allowed six months, just for the unexpected. The civil war took us 30 months and the federal side nearly lost it.

“Talking about reconciliation, right from the beginning of the war, reconciliation was on the minds of those of us on the federal side. If the plan was to exterminate the Igbos, the federal troops would not have operated by its own special code of conduct as well as the Geneva Convention, nor would the federal government have allowed foreign observers into the country.

“If it was a war to exterminate; a war that did not put reconciliation in mind, then what would foreign observers be doing? We had foreign observers who were filing reports and even empowered to investigate allegations and they did.

“Civil war is more difficult to fight than fighting in a foreign land or to exterminate because we were fighting to unite and if you are fighting to unite, how much do you have to do to prevent annihilation.

“All the people who are agitating for Biafra today were not even born during the war. They do not even know what it entailed. Nigeria must be loved and we must treat Nigeria as we treat love affairs. It must be massaged.

“Nigeria must be massaged by all of us. No exception. It’s like a husband and wife. If when you have issues, your wife would always say she is fed up and wants to go and everyday that is what you get, one day, you would become fed up and say, ‘ok you can go’, but if there is any misunderstanding and you come together to solve it, then you would almost live forever.

“And I will say that we should even appeal, if anybody says he wants to go; not that we will say, ‘ok, you can go if you want to go. Do not go’. There is enough cake for each of us. And if what you are asking for is more of the cake, then try to ask in a way that is pleasant, not in a way that could make others feel that you are not entitled to what you are asking for.”

Obasanjo, as the Commander, Third Marine Commando Division, accepted the surrender of Biafran forces on January 12, 1970, after three years of war.