Ojukwu was a visionary and a prophet’s prophet. When he saw our salvation and speedy freedom from servitude, we rejected his call for solidarity. When he saw the lies and sins of our high priests, we saw hope in their sermons just as some people are now embracing the lies of Bola Tinubu.
By Taju Tijani
Eleven years after Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Dikedioramma, Eze Igbo gburugburu returned to the timeless terrestrial, Ndigbo are still awed and serenaded by the aura, bravery, charisma, confidence, defiance, intellect, mythology, and vision of the lion of Nnewi. Today, foot soldiers are still hero-worshipping at the altar of his Biafran dream. Many Ndigbo still romanticise the birth of Ndigbo homeland someday and sometime. Ikemba remains in our memory for making a courageous armed rebellion for Biafran Republic. This is a timely tribute to Ndigbo’s hero of all time – our enyika-atu Nnewi, ezeifeneti Ndigbo, babannukwu, papa anata oyoyo and ogbatulu enyi Ndigbo.
Ojukwu was a visionary and a prophet’s prophet. When he saw our salvation and speedy freedom from servitude, we rejected his call for solidarity. When he saw the lies and sins of our high priests, we saw hope in their sermons just as some people are now embracing the lies of Bola Tinubu. When he saw the stark dichotomy between the North and the South, the measureless odium, and vexations, Ikemba made for a defining moment and confronted all the seeming oppressive tendencies with total determination. And like Frank Sinatra, he ‘did it in his own way’ through the shattering power of his ‘ogbunigwes’. General Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu this was your life.
Can any living Nigerian ever match the iconic Ikemba title-for-title considering what I borrowed below from Joe Igbokwe? Ojukwu was at various times known as: “Ogbataonuo Ndigbo, Ikemba Nnewi, Dikedioramma Ndigbo, Ezeigbo Gburugburu, Ochiagha Ndigbo, Agu, Odum Ndigbo, Okeeobulu-uzo, Agbawodikeizu, Onuo-onaa, Amuma na egbeigwe, Ijere, Otaka-agu Nnewi,Okemmiri Ndigbo, Ikenga Ngwoo, Udo eji akpu Agu, Odenigbo Ndigbo, Aha eji aga mba, Okputolokpu Ndigbo, Ochendo Ndigbo, Ebili mmiri, Dimgba Ndigbo, Aka na agbaji igwe, Ogalanya Ngada, Igwurube Okeotu, Anya Ndigbo ji ahu uzo, Okwulu oha Ndigbo, Ogene NDIGBO, Okwute Ndigbo, Utu nagba igwe, Kpakpando Ndigbo, Omekannaya, Omenyili Ndigbo, Ezeafulukwee Ndigbo, AGBAWODIKEIZU, DIKENAGHA Ndigbo, DIKENAMMUTA Ndigbo, Ogbu Agu Ndigbo, Ogbuefi Ndigbo, Mgbada gba onaa, Mgbadike, Ozuo omee Ndigbo, Mgbada gbachili uzo, Enenia nwite ogbonuo oku, Asikaebili ebili, Ife Ndigbo, Meekaodimma Ndigbo, Ozi uzo NDIGBO, Nwoketeghete, Afunze ebie okwu Ndigbo, Igwe Ndigbo, Mgbologwu Ndigbo, Obi Ndigbo, ONYENDU Ndigbo, Omenife Ndigbo, Ugwumba, Nwannedinamba, Omenuko Ndigbo, Anyanwu Ndigbo, Oko-okpa Ndigbo.
Despite his silver-spooned background, urbanity, lady-killer-good looks, charisma, and ivy-league education, he soiled his princely hands in the Biafran struggle with uncommon zeal. And because Ojukwu hated behind-the-scenes, softly-softly approach to the sufferings of his people, he embraced the direct-action orthodoxy called civil war as the last staging post for Biafran homeland.
By any standard, Ojukwu was a fine soldier and confident combatant. He was an enigmatic warrior and conscience of the common masses of Igboland. God had prepared him before he was born as a liberator, a Mosaican deliverer and a prophet from Nnewi. Ojukwu harboured no faithless timidity in his pursuit of an authentic Igbo republic. His famous apocalyptic Aburi rhetoric was a document of emotional grievances. Ndigbo’s fascination with the man is precisely the index of how he is revered. Ojukwu gave the Igbo a sense of Briafranness.
This is the classic case of how tribal identities are created and re-created through the struggles, statements, and actions of our leaders. And Biafranism gave rise to identity affirmation among Ndigbo. The struggle for the birth of Biafra later became the mean machine that articulated the vision of the Ndigbo. It was the Iroko tree they once perched on in their ceaseless quest for destiny-driven self-determination.
Contrary to the impenetrable logic of Ndigbo concerning Awo’s role during the war, millions of Ndigbo still believe that Yoruba did not support the spirit of Biafra. Millions of us supported his mission of rescue contrary to the voices of few Igbo leaders. Ojukwu was a Lagos boy and spoke the Yoruba language fluently and had many Yoruba friends. The argument for Yoruba rejection of the Biafran war may be forgivable. What is unforgivable is the strand of unpleasant populism that surfaces from time to time in gratuitous references to the Biafran war from the pro war camp.
Watch this…there is this tragic emblem still being worn by Biafran paganists i.e. the Neo-Biafranists who grind out greasy judgement, condemnation and canting rebuke of the role of the Pan-Yoruba universe in the civil war.
What then now? Awolowo had long gone home. Ikemba, the hurricane, is also resting at the feet of his maker. Awo and Ojukwu the duo contestants for our tribal loyalties may have departed, what remains among the Yoruba and Ndigbo is the yawning clannish intolerance that really threatens our mutual bond. Liberty and freedom are the agendum of the Biafran war. The Yoruba are still searching for this twin Holy Grail in our polity almost on daily basis. Consider the fights of Soyinka, Sowore, Bakare, Falana, Braithwaite, Fela, Fawehinmi, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Sunday Igboho and many other Yoruba warriors still screaming on the streets. The sharp division, injustice, intolerance, and corruption of 1966 are still with us and in far more savage forms but where is the Ojukwu or the messiah to call us to arms?
Today, pacifists, saboteurs, oppressors and anti-Ojukwu are restigmatising the Biafran war as needless and a mistake. For embracing an iconic paradigm, enemies called him arrogant and impatient. In many pathetic, cack-handed attempts to denigrate his warrior oeuvre, implacable critics like Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida and Yakubu Gowon called his resort to armed rebellion as sheer exercise in delusion and military infantilism. These critics reasoned that the honour, bravado, and machismo of the Biafran war left unhealable scars and lingering wounds without achieving the Biafran project.
The enemies of the Biafran war see no contradiction in projecting countercultural statement. They are unafraid to call the war an unpopular disaster from the crazed soul of a war mongering fantasist. Ikemba was accused of going for the sweepstakes of warfare without pausing to map alternative lines of peaceful separation before choosing his own track. These revisionist lions and evening wolves will not allow his body to rest without feasting.
On the other hand, we must admit that the Ojukwu’s armed revolution and his energetic clamour for a Biafran homeland exemplify the fragile nature of our unity as a nation and exposes the complex and uneasy bonding of different tribes into a contraption called Nigeria, where we eye one another with fatal hatred and uneasy jealousy. It is these mutual tribal dissonances that allowed Ikemba to proclaim, with strident equivocation, the virtues of a future Republic of Biafra. Even today Biafrans are still saying that the enforced ache of unity must be separated by force and not by peaceful means.
In response to the critics of the civil war, late Dr. Tunji Braithwaite fired the first salvo to debunk Babangida, Gowon and Obasanjo’s claim that Ojukwu fought against his fatherland. Hear Braithwaite: ‘Ojukwu fought against injustice, lies and corruption. We are still fighting against these things till date. And the fight will continue until victory is achieved.’
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An anti-Biafran purge may be on the rise in the minds of some demented leaders and revisionists, but the idea of Biafra will never die in a badly managed entity of many nation-states called Nigeria. However, I must warn that Ndigbo too are becoming anti-Ojukwu through the loss of their spirit of defiance, a spirit that rested on Ikemba to the end. Now that Fulani herdsmen are rolling out heavier dice of genocide against the Ndigbo, where is an Ojukwu to save his clan from extinction? The emerging prosperity of the Ndigbo and their creative renaissance are becoming tied to the imperfect unity of one Nigeria while the resurgence of a future Biafra recedes into oblivion. The human suffering of the Biafran war can never be forgotten. That is why we all share in the continual remembrance of departed ones which the war enforces.
But can the Ndigbo continue to affirm their conceited valour of the Biafran war while fastening their helplessness on political marginalisation? The immediate challenge for the Ndigbo or freedom loving Biafrans is to reinvent an Ojukwu icon that will embody the approving qualities of valour, tenacity, industry, genius, long suffering and hardwork commonly associated with an average, hardwired Igbo modern man. The relevance of another Ojukwu is crafted in Sonny Odogwu’s tribute. “Nigeria is still looking for direction. Inequality and social injustice he fought against are still there. I urge Nigerians and the leadership to correct structural deficiencies and social injustice.” The need for another Ojukwu cannot be more urgent. Can Peter Gregory Obi be the answer to Ndigbo leadership renaissance?
Pacifists may view the modus operandi of the Biafran project as egomaniac, eccentric, rascally and bloody, but what was not in doubt was the timeless message and the urgent call to arm which today is still resonating in the pliable minds of sympathetic, young generation of Ndigbo who are still nursing the dream of Republic of Biafra.
After the death of Chief Obafemi Awo, the Yoruba are still in that quagmire of reinventing an Awo icon that had remained elusive ever since. We want to remember Ojukwu not as a titular hegemonist but a gallant warrior and a prophet we all failed to heed his prophetism. The next Igbo leader may not be a warrior but must possess a commanding and unifying charisma. He must be Olympian, transforming, radicalising and fearless like our dear Okputolokpu Ndigbo.
Peter Obi is loading…The Apunanwu Ndigbo, Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu was born on the 4th of November 1933 in Zungeru, Niger State, and died on the 26th of November 2011 in the United Kingdom after a brief illness. He was 78 years old. Adieu, the lion of Nnewi. Continue to rest in peace the great Ikemba of Nnewi, the President of Republic of Biafra.