Biafra: A War of Greed or Liberation?

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I remember watching Half of a Yellow Sun, which is a Nollywood movie that portrayed the Biafra struggle. I have also read a lot about the Biafra war, both on Google and across several profiles on social media. Technically what has been portrayed in history is quite far from reality.

In my search for the true account of what went down with the Nigeria vs. Biafra history, three incidents started to make me think differently of the Nigeria civil war.

The first was a conversation I had with an old man who witnessed the war. According to this old man, Mr. Francisco, he was a teenager at the top of the cathedral in Onitsha when the bridge collapsed in a loud explosion.

The next thing he heard was people speaking in their dialect that they were almost invaded and taken captive by the Nigerian soldiers and that they were thankful their leader, Ojokwu, was a step ahead, as he gave the standing order for the explosives in the bridge to be activated.

This account made me cringe because from most of what I have read out there, I have been informed that the Nigerian soldiers, on the advice of Awolowo, were the ones who destroyed the Onitsha bridge so as to employ the starvation warfare, and this has been recorded as the tactic that brought about the Nigerian soldiers' victory.

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You see, the Onitsha Bridge was the only viable access that the Easterners had to the South, which eased and facilitated food supply from the South to the East. So destroying it made the Easterners sitting ducks waiting to be slaughtered.

While I felt that deploying the starvation warfare was inhumane, I soon realized that what has been penned down as history goes beyond what meets the eye, and listening to several eyewitness accounts proved my thoughts wrong, and in all honesty, Ojukwu was more of a coward who caused the death of over 3 million Easterners than a hero emancipating his people from oppression.

To further add salt to injury, Ojukwu fled the war scene when the going got tough, leaving his deputy at the mercy of the Nigerian soldiers, and then after several years, he returned to Nigeria to form a political party and contest for presidency in the same country he claimed to want nothing to do with.

The second account was how Ojukwu executed his commanders at the time who failed to capture Lagos State. This action of his didn't really sit well with me, especially given his act of cowardice at the end. The worst he would have done to punish them was to jail them, not kill them. To me, killing them simply made him worse than the Nigerian government he claimed were the monsters.

In the third account, I listened to several non-Igbos share their displeasure over the war. In Abonnema, Rivers State, Nigeria, they have a celebration, more like a fest, titled GO TO 9JA. My service year was expended in Abonnema, and I was fortunate to witness this colorful event. The streets of Abonnema were decorated with the Nigerian flag, and people were adorned in their green and white attire.

Some even go as far as to paint their body in green and white. After the festival, I got chatting with one of the locals. I was curious and needed to know the purpose of the celebration, and that was when the man, aged but not as old as Francisco, narrated to me that it was a celebration of freedom.

June happened to be the month that the Nigerian soldiers invaded Abonnema and reclaimed the territory from the Nigerian soldiers. According to the local, it used to be a really big and colorful feast; unfortunately, since the emergence of the youth, it has since lost its color and meaning.

You know, for a while I wondered and I pondered as we were informed that the fight for Biafra is a fight for better life and opportunities for the marginalized, who in this case were not northerners. But then this third account has been confirmed by many non-Easterners/Igbos. Unlike the history, which stated that the three years that Biafra existed were blissful, reality begged to differ, as people of different tribes were more marginalized with little opportunity for growth made available to them.

In recent times, we see the agitation for Biafra ignite more fire, and technically, it is still on the same faulty foundation as the last time. The truth of the Biafra history was more about greed than anything else, which we see play out today by the so-called IPOB and MASSOB groups as they force their identity on neighboring states.

In my opinion, if there is any sincerity in their struggle for emancipation, we will see them start by building and developing the states allocated to them first before anything else because really charity begins at home.
The question is, how does one want a count ry when the states allocated to them are in ruins?

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PS
Kindly click this LINK For the go to 9ja celebration held 3 months ago.