Gowon and co: Architects of Nigeria’s destruction: As the country reels from the whirlwind planted by Gowon and co, the chief architect of the destruction parades around with his invented toga of piety called “Nigeria Prays.” To which deity, I cannot tell.
By Lilian Onoh
Recently, I saw a clip where a Channels TV presenter called Nigeria’s current situation, “Renewed Shege.”
At around the same time, the person who planted the seeds that became Nigeria’s Renewed Shege, who fertilised and watered it, Yakubu Gowon, was busy celebrating his 90th birthday by whining about being ousted by the same people with whom he plotted, ousted and killed General Aguiyi-Ironsi and with whom he orchestrated the murder of thousands of his fellow Igbo officers, committed genocide against Igbo people and oversaw the death of 3 million Igbos in the only war that sanctioned starvation as an instrument of war, and the only war in which the three major military powers of that era, USA, USSR and UK, fought on one side after the 2nd World War – with Nigeria against Biafra.
I even saw a recent video clip in which Gowon claimed that he only had around £88,500.00 in his savings account at the time he left office as Head of State. Only £88,500.00? At a time his salary was around £300-£500 a month! Is that not a blanket admission of corrupt enrichment?
I wonder if this staggering “savings” was part of the huge bank balances belonging to Igbo people that he and Awolowo, his finance Minister, confiscated from Igbo people after the war and gave back only £20 in return.
His unthinking confession is simply further illustration of his spectacular lack of intellect and vision for Nigeria as Head of State when he announced to the world that “money is not Nigeria’s problem, it is how to spend it.”
And this vacuous admission and the actions they led to, lie at the heart of Nigeria’s current problems.
Many of our younger generation will be shocked to know that during the civil war, Biafran engineers created Africa’s first wholly indigenous missile weapons system – Ogbunigwe – with surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, anti-tank missiles, land mines and grenades. It was an engineering marvel created by Igbo engineers during a civil war of attrition, starvation and pure genocide. We created this system long before apartheid South Africa.
But where is Nigeria in the defence industry now? It is non-existent. Instead, Nigeria begs other nations to sell it arms with US Dollars that used to exchange at $1.50 to N1. We don’t even produce toothpicks let alone bullets, although the Kilishi making machine might hit the market in 2099.
Why did Nigeria become so backward?
Because of Yakubu Gowon and his colleagues, who were handed “victory” by Western powers but whose intellectual capacity did not rise to the level of anything other than to destroy all things Igbo, including the Ogbunigwe weapons system that killed more Nigerian troops than any Western made weapon during the civil war.
Instead of assimilating the genius Biafran engineers and their invention into the Nigerian Army after the war in the same way the Allied powers took the best of the Axis Powers’ scientists and their inventions after the end of the 2nd World War, the short-sighted, self-destructive hatred of the Igbos led Gowon and his colleagues to destroy the Research and Production Agency of Biafra and all the engineering marvels in Biafra, including Ogbunigwe and then treated these incredible scientists as enemies of the state in essence. Even the indigenous oil refineries in Biafra which ran more efficiently than any oil refinery in Nigeria were promptly destroyed. Remember this next time you are paying more for fuel in Nigeria than it currently costs in America.
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Gowon and his colleagues didn’t think that Nigeria, with all its superpower help, could not produce one single bullet. They didn’t even have the littlest sense of nationalism in their bones to recognise that preserving these inventions for Nigeria was a greater goal than destroying them because they were invented by Igbo engineers.
Instead, we now have a Raw Materials Research entity that had the audacity to tell Nigeria that they have invented a “Kilishi Making Machine” in 2020 – fifty years after the war – instantly turning Nigeria into a global laughing stock.
But the story would have been so different. Nigeria could have been Africa’s nuclear superpower if only Igbo hatred had not trumped national interest.
My late uncle, Dr. Sam Orji, our first nuclear physicist, created a small nuclear bomb in his basement in Germany during the war but was caught by German authorities before he was able to send it to Biafra for use on Nigeria. It took years of negotiations after the civil war for the Government of Gowon and co to allow him to return to Nigeria. When he did, he was effectively confined to Enugu and monitored as an enemy of the state – all because he was Igbo. They didn’t think of tapping his incredible genius to turn Nigeria into a continental nuclear superpower. Instead, South Africa became sub-Saharan Africa’s sole nuclear power until it voluntarily dismantled its nuclear weapons programme around 1990. But they have the residual knowledge to resurrect it any time they please. Nigeria does not.
So when the debate comes up as to who will represent Africa on a restructured UN Security Council, South Africa inevitably appears better than Nigeria because not only do they have a manufacturing sector, they produce and export weapons, have a power grid that generally functions and definitely have a better idea of where they want to go than Nigeria.
Shouting that Nigeria deserves a permanent seat because Nigeria is the 220 million population giant of Africa cannot work when this massive population lacks food, access to clean water, electricity, healthcare and security; and the country’s military is out-gunned by armed robbers, kidnappers and terrorists, and has been reduced to rescuing cows for those lucky enough to have seen the kilishi making machine.
As other poorer countries like Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Dubai and South Africa caught up and overtook Nigeria, Gowon and his cohorts were busy ruling Nigeria with slogans whilst paying salaries of civil servants in the Caribbean and giving away money to anybody with a briefcase in hand as if it was going out of fashion instead of investing in improving the infrastructure left behind by the colonial rulers. They didn’t have the intellect to understand that power lines designed to give power to less than half of Nigeria’s 45 million pre-independence population would not magically expand and give power to its ever increasing population without massive investment.
They didn’t improve the infrastructure left behind by the British – not the power generating or distribution network, the water treatment plants, the universities, schools or hospitals.
Instead, they set about impoverishing all Nigerians by first of all destroying the education sector and introducing an infernal Federal Character policy, which impossibly invented negative entry marks for so called “disadvantaged states” in Northern Nigeria.
I still cannot comprehend how somebody with a starting point of zero can have minus seven (-7) points in JAMB and pass. This is the verifiable cut off point given to one of the Northern States in 2023. Others had sundry negative figures as well. Meanwhile, 200 points in any of the Southern States is almost certainly guaranteed to leave you without university placement. The outcome of this odious policy is so bad that the only thing the immediate past education minister could think to do was to penalise bright students by denying them the right to take JAMB if they were not 18 years old – the inevitable result of enthroning the uninformed over the intelligent.
This policy of enthroning stupidity was elevated by Buhari and Osinbajo who appointed a Permanent Secretary from the FCT who never passed a single civil service confirmation or promotion exam! Because I did my NYSC in the FCT at the time that this permanent secretary was in secondary school, I can attest that they all passed with automatic promotion, including JAMB students who could not spell their names. Thank God Tinubu did not make him Head of Service!
Buhari, a multiple coup plotter who ruled Nigeria twice, took Gowon’s hatred of the Igbos to the stratosphere during both his first and second dictatorships and referred to the East as “a dot in a circle” that he could annihilate in a way he failed to during the civil war. He sent in bloodthirsty beasts masquerading as soldiers under what he called “Operation Python Dance.” At that time, there was absolutely no security issue in the East – we were living in relative peace and watching those he called his brothers – Boko Haram – destroying the North-East. Operation Python Dance was the cover under which Fulani herdsmen were implanted in the East and our farmlands taken over with full State protection. Under his “security” policies, he turned all Nigeria into a replica of the North-East and now wants to return to his cousins in Niger Republic after destroying Nigeria.
This bone-marrow deep hatred that Gowon implemented has continued to this day. Airlines that wanted to fly into Enugu were repeatedly denied approval during the Buhari era and Enugu Airport, that was purportedly upgraded for billions of Naira under the same Buhari, was reopened looking worse than it was before the multi-billion Naira “upgrade”. The Federal “roads” in the South-East are death-traps. All other regions in Nigeria have six states but the East has only five, so there are fewer Easterners represented at all levels in the entity called Nigeria, including the number of Senators, Reps, Ambassadors, Ministers, Local Governments, Fiscal Allocations, et cetera, et cetera.
But whereas the Igbos have accustomed themselves to living without any Federal presence, the Renewed Shege of post war Biafra has now mushroomed to envelope all of Nigeria and the outcry is deafening. But the biting hunger in the land is mostly caused by the brethren of Buhari who were planted in our farmlands during his tenure, preventing the villagers that make up the bulk of our farmers from venturing into their farms without being raped or killed. Their cows eat up everything so that the kilishi making machine can be useful. Until they are removed from the farmlands and villagers have the security to re-enter their farms, food security will remain elusive.
Meanwhile, as the country reels from the whirlwind planted by Gowon and co, the chief architect of the destruction parades around with his invented toga of piety called “Nigeria Prays.” To which deity, I cannot tell. But I can definitely say that Jesus Christ, in the Lord’s Prayer, clearly made it plain that you have to first ask for forgiveness before it is given.
So, I will do my Christian duty by telling Gowon and his crew an unpleasant truth – you owe Nigeria an apology for turning the beautiful land God gave us into a wasteland.
This is different from the apology you owe all Biafrans for reneging on the Aburi Accord, murdering our brethren in a sustained genocide that has effectively lasted from 1966 to now, and enriching yourselves with Biafran blood money after the war. God has given all of you long enough. Eating humble pie on this side of eternity is much better than facing a minute in Hell.
But one thing we ask of all of you – stop pontificating.
Nigeria is what it is today because of you. And God made sure you lived long enough to see and experience the fruit of your actions.
- Ambassador Lilian Onoh, former Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the Republic of Namibia, wrote in from the U.S.
