In Nigeria, he is prominent, yet he feels not of it. Retired Col. Mike Nduka Okwechime, from Ibusa in the present Delta State, has the rare privilege of both serving Nigeria and fighting to protect a territory whose interest clashed with that of Nigeria-Biafra. Think about the bridge, the balancing act…the engineer comes handy
Mike Nduka Okwechime
He has been involved, all his life, with playing the balancing act. As a poor man’s child, fate caused him to become a scholar whose tuition was paid to the university level. Fortuitous? Not quite. Just nature, or is it destiny at work?
After graduation, he became an engineer called into the British army. When Nigeria became independent, again he found himself located at the vortex of the newly declared state, not just as a spectator but also as an instrument for the transition from the coloniser to the colonised: the man on whose shoulder it fell to lower the Union Jack and to foist the green and white flag of the emergent nation.
Talk about balancing, then you suddenly see the young Mike Nduka Okwechime, who today is the Olikeze of Ibusa, Delta State, saddled with the responsibility of turning the technical team of the former West African Frontiers Force into the Army Engineering Regiment. That was shortly after moving into the Nigerian army from the British Royal Engineers.
Although he would claim to have been more useful to Nigeria as a retiree, his role in colonial Nigeria was equally momentous. How many know that the initial survey and mapping that identified the potentials of Abuja was first conducted by the young army engineers like Col.Okwechime and his team. The first road that opened the Mambilla Plateau, the forte of Nigeria’s high and mighty today, was constructed by the engineers led by Okwechime, and some of the roads that opened up the Plateau region to the world were made by the army of his time. Now, one is left wondering what the modern Nigerian army is doing. Indeed, you might be right to claim that since his days, the Nigerian Army Engineering Corps has been largely consigned to doing military engineering with little known impact on the civil population. That is as it should be.
When he left the Nigerian Army Engineering Corps, a baby he was so affectionately attached to, there were no qualified engineers to take over the new regiment. Indeed, the Engineering Corps was virtually vacant such that General Olusegun Obasanjo, who later became Nigeria’s military head of state and civilian president, had to be seconded to the unit as an inspector, not as a commander, despite not having the requisite engineering qualification. The result can only be imagined because those who took over were neither prepared nor had the same kind of passion as the departing team. Any wonder the impact of the military is no longer perceived outside the barracks? The army engineer by choice had a vision of an army that would continue blazing the trail in the development of the young nation and may have achieved even more but… providence!
By providence, he saw himself on the other side of the table – fighting the nation he had helped to build. He saw himself engrossed in a war that pitted brother Nigerians against each other and it was the most difficult thing for a young visionary, who by choice refused enlistment into the Infantry. He refused enlistment into the destructive arm of the force, but thought he could use the military to show the light for the new nation.
How? As a poor man’s son who never paid school fees throughout, he thinks his own personal challenge and triumphs provide a good template for the new nation. A country faced with the challenge of development without resources, a country confronted by her poverty but which could become a beacon if it applied the grey matter between the ears in the right manner.
He put it this way: “I have never paid fees anywhere at any level. So, my challenge is that my fees would be fully provided for by my brain. That is the challenge for today’s youth: to use their brain.”
Using the brain in the right manner turned out to mark out the rest of his adult life. Awkwardly, he transferred allegiance to Biafra. He had to. The Nigeria of the 1960s was not the ideal place for a Nigerian from the wrong side of the failed coup d’etat. He hails from Ibusa, a town that is a stone’s throw to Okpanam, from where the leader of the 1966 putsch hailed. With the venom and blindness of that era, Chukwuemeka Kaduna Nzogwu and every officer from the Igbo-speaking area were pencilled for elimination.
Going to Biafra was therefore, sadly, a matter of self-preservation. He found himself heading the Biafran National Planning Committee. Part of his duty was to fashion out a model of national survival for the country that was the last bastion for those whose backs were on the wall. In Biafra, there was not much difficulty coming up with ideas that, literally, made the young republic an enigma. The secret of Biafra’s resilience that has remained an enigma for years is that the entire Nigerian Army corps of engineers, who were doing the exploits that the military had been created with, was largely made up of officers of Biafra extraction. So having found themselves on the other side, it behoves them to use their brain to keep the population alive, and there is no doubt they did. Accounts of the war from local and foreign sources attest to that.
Invention after invention adorned the eastern side of the battle field and it was a major shock for the massive army of Nigeria to discover that what was meant to be a “police action” turned into a full three years of turf battle that astounded the world. Biafran engineers began to produce amazing technology products that revolutionised petroleum refining, food and crop engineering and military hardware manufacturing. Although there was a half-hearted effort by the Eastern state government in 1970 to institutionalise the achievements of the Biafran engineers through the establishment of PRODA, the project development institute, no deliberate effort was made to reconcile the superior military feats of the defeated republic with the Nigerian development effort post the civil war.
If Col. Nduka Mike Okwechime has any regrets about the war, it is not fighting on the side of Biafra, neither is it the termination of his flourishing military career prematurely; rather it is the failure of Nigeria to benefit from the war, as other great countries of the world did. According to him, what makes the United States of America a great country today is nothing short of the amalgamation of the military resources produced by the North and South of the country during their civil wars. That failure remains a lacuna in the mind of Nigeria’s first Commander of the Engineering Corps, which he thinks the country needs to find a solution to. Why? He maintains that the war can only rightly be said to have ended when the fears, ambiguities and ambitions of a diverse country are channelled into a collective dream. This vision was what he witnessed as a child: the possibilities in the power of the human brain which should be fuelled rather than cowed. In his assessment, Nigeria may pride herself in the fact that the war had ended in 1970, but “has the war ended really?”
Not quite resolved about the end of the war, he maintains that what happened was that Nigeria cobbled a peace effort that scattered the original schema, the Nigerian cognitive framework that sought to build the greatest nation of black people. That is why he sees himself as a man perched in a nation but not quite a fitting part of that entity. A man, in the latter part of his life, not reconciled to the Nigerian narration that the war ended in 1970 because in the North East of the country, he sees the war continuing, albeit, in another part of the country. And unless this paradox is resolved, he thinks Nigeria will still fight another war, perhaps even greater than the ones she has fought so far. In that light, the death of Biafra cannot be seen as the end of the war, but the end of one battle. The greater battle is the search for the soul of the country that was lost in the battle fields of the late 1970s, and unless the soul, that enterprise and the candour are brought back, he will continue to see himself as a man living in Nigeria but who is not of Nigeria. Perhaps, if we have a political class that would allow the military do their job, he thinks this Nigerian army is capable of quelling the insurrection in the North East. What is required is the political will and honesty of purpose to do the needful, for, according to him, “I want to make it clear here that the army, a well-equipped and trained army, will stop Boko Haram.” What is lacking, he maintained, is the “political will”.
November 12, 1934 in Ibusa, Col. Okwechime told TheNiche that, like his friend, Obasanjo, he was born at a time there were no accurate records, so he cannot say with exactitude that his official 1934 birth date is accurate. He is married to the first Miss Nigeria (1961), former Miss Clara Emefiele. The marriage is blessed with three children (two men and a lady).
His military career began in 1953 when he was enlisted in the British Royal Army as an engineer. In 1960, he shifted his loyalty to newly independent Nigeria and became the first Nigerian to lead the Nigerian Army Engineers. He retired from the army at the young age of 37 and has led a successful civil life of many achievements. He has lived a fulfilled life, but he wants a good life for his countrymen. As he once told a reporter, “I want them to live their lives not relying entirely on politicians and government. They should be able to become whatever they choose to become in life – to be able to be themselves; to believe in themselves and whatever they can do or whatever they want to do; to achieve their goals as they believe it.”
No doubt, that would be his desire for the ongoing national conference.