- Says Soyinka spoke out of ignorance on June 12
- Reveals that: “The road to June 12 started in Abiriba in 1990
In this concluding part of the exclusive interview with IKECHUKWU AMAECHI, Prof Anya O. Anya, a chartered Biologist, who is distinguished for his work in Parasitology, 1992 Nigerian National Medal of Merit awardee, former Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria Economic Summit Group, former President of Nigerian Academy of Science, takes on Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, over his claim that Ndigbo did not support the struggle for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate.
Below is the first part of the interview
If we take China, from your analysis, the country went from the violent, regimented era of Mao Tse-tung to the huge success it is today. In Nigeria, the reverse is the case. For instance, in the days of Dr. Michael Okpara, the economy of the Eastern region was reputed to be the fastest growing economy in the whole Commonwealth …
(Cuts in) Not the Commonwealth but the world. I first drew attention to it with the data done from an American Think Tank based in the Michigan State University, I stumbled on it.
Considering where we are now, we have not made much progress as a nation, so what makes you so optimistic?
When changes are taking place in a society, it doesn’t happen in the market place and it doesn’t ring bells. Even Buhari will be surprised to hear me say this, but he is doing Nigeria a good turn right now in the things he is saying. This whole noise about anti-corruption, by the time he finishes, it would not have stopped corruption but it would have served notice that there is a fine line that decent people do not cross. In other words, a new thinking will be generated by these incessant bombardments, even though people think he is insincere but nevertheless, the mere fact that you keep on repeating it has impact.
Secondly, there are young men and women doing fantastic things in Nigeria despite the very bad situation; those are the intimations of the future I am talking about. When they start networking among themselves and it starts bringing change in leadership, it will come to a time where new leadership elite will emerge and they will be building on the experience of the exceptional things they have done in Nigeria.
Building an economy depends upon the productivity of the individual which you now aggregate and it becomes the productivity of the nation. A nation that is not productive cannot have a thriving economy; it is as simple as that.
Right now, we are in a situation where young men are thinking that you can get rich overnight, ultimately it becomes clear that for each person who has a short cut and was able to get money and was lucky to have some of it remaining with him because there is no way if you don’t get money the right way you will not lose much of it and they learn their lessons from there and then start building.
For the one person that does that, there will be 10 others who burn their fingers trying to get money through the short cut. That also will happen and when that happens, the thinking ones will learn a lesson from it.
Nigeria is not different from any other nation, all the fault lines you are talking about, when you get a leadership that can reorganise them, it becomes a source of strength not weakness, our diversity is an advantage but we have had leaders who don’t understand that and have not used it. The younger ones will discover it, will apply it and this place will take off.
Prof Wole Soyinka recently gave a narrative of the June 12 struggle, accusing Igbo leaders of indifference at best and worse, betrayal of the cause. Could that be true?
Wole (Soyinka) is my respected Egbon but on this matter he is speaking out of ignorance and if he wants the true facts of the situation, he should go and have a lecture from Ayo Opadokun. If he still has questions, he should then go to Ayo Adebanjo.
Let me start from the beginning. The road to June 12 started from Abiriba in 1990. What happened? Abdul-Aziz Udeh, Ebitu Ukiwe and I sat down to look at Nigeria. That time General Ibrahim Babangida had just added two more years to when the handover of power would take place, so we asked ourselves, if politics of Nigeria changes in two years’ time, how are we going to compete with the Yoruba, with the Hausa-Fulani because we came from the assumption that population-wise, the three major tribes were about equal.
In fact, we believed that there were more Igbo than Yoruba but we had only two states at the time and there were five states in the West. In the core north, there were seven states or more. This was before the proliferation of postage stamp states.
After that discussion, we agreed that we were going to call a quiet meeting of Igbo leaders. That meeting held on December 31, 1990 in Abiriba.
Pius Okigbo, Sam Mbakwe, C.C. Onoh, Evan Enwerem were all there. In fact, every who is who in Igboland was in Abiriba on that day. And the presentation that Ukiwe made was simple: Ndigbo are on the periphery of Nigeria and we have to decide whether we want to move into Nigeria or not …
Ukiwe was no longer in Babangida’s government at this time?
Yes, he had been bundled out. He left around October 1987, so that was three years after. When the matter was presented that way, we came to the conclusion that Igbo interest would be served best in the Nigeria that was developing. Since we tried to go our separate way and it didn’t work, we must make the most of the new situation. So, how do we recapture lost opportunities and lost time?
The second agreement was that we needed to make up with the Yoruba because they cannot throw us out of Nigeria and we cannot either. So, we must learn to live together. It was then agreed that a delegation be sent. That delegation which I led had Eustace Eke and Dr. Ishmael Anyadiegwu as members.
The meeting agreed also that before the three of us went to see Adekunle Ajasin to tell him what the Igbo decided, another three-man delegation which I also led and which included Mbakwe and Onoh would go to Uwana to see Eze Akanu Ibiam.
You couldn’t be talking about charting a new course for the Igbo and you have an elder like that and you won’t seek advice from him. So, we went to see him.
Something interesting happened that day. When Onoh and I got to Okigwe junction to wait for Mbakwe, guess who we saw? Ralph Obioha. When he saw the three of us, he was curious, and asked what was happening. We were friends, so I told him we were going to see Eze Akanu Ibiam, and he said just seeing the three of us, whatever it was must be important and wished us safe trip.
I am saying this because NADECO was still in the future. We then went on the journey and Akanu Ibiam agreed that it was a good thing. Don’t forget that his late wife was Yoruba, I knew them as a child. I used to be taken to his hospital in Abiriba and the wife was then shall we say the super wife that looked after all the Abiriba young wives including my mother. So, we had a family relationship.
So, with Ibiam’s blessing, Eke, Anyadiegwu and I went to Owo to see Ajasin. When I told him what our mission was, he was incredulous and suspicious. He said the Yoruba had been meeting with the Igbo, including Emeka Echerou and even Mbakwe and wondered what the new initiative was all about.
But I pointed at my two colleagues and told him that they were politicians and I was not. I told him that the fact that I, a non-politician, was leading the delegation mandated by active politicians like Onoh and others should tell him that what we had was not a political meeting but that our people and his people should get together and say how do we co-exist and work together in Nigeria, what vision do we have for this country. I told him that unless we do that, Nigeria was not going to go where we thought it could and should go.
He said he would think about it and two weeks later, he rang me up in Nsukka to say his people had agreed to the meeting. So, it now became when, where and how. After a lot of consultations on our side and on their side, there was a meeting in Asaba in the late Sunny Odogwu’s house. Abraham Adesanya, Bola Ige, and other Yoruba leaders were there. On our side, the people I have mentioned were there.
To cut a long story short, that meeting led to the formation of a group called the Council of Unity and Understanding (CUU) and we used that framework to interrogate the situation in Nigeria.
Then the changes in politics started. Let me even make this bold claim and I believe that Ayo Opadokun and General Theophilus Danjuma can confirm it.
The discussion with the Yoruba leaders was clear. They had an eye on one of them, that is a Yoruba man, succeeding to the governance of Nigeria and we said, yes, we will help them but we had to think about the Yoruba, who from the Igbo point of view would be broad minded enough and understand why it was necessary to now have a cosmopolitan leadership in Nigeria.
We all agreed that Abiola was the most approximation, of course there were people who didn’t like him, and we said in politics you don’t choose your friends, rather your interest chooses friends for you. So we decided that from the Igbo point of view, Abiola was the best choice.
Don’t forget that the people we were dealing with were mostly the Awoist School who obviously had their own candidate although it wasn’t clear but they took it for granted that we would pick their own candidate, so we kept on moving till we got to the point where having sold Abiola to them, they finally agreed but we had put a caveat: “If you accept Abiola, you must now present him as your candidate to the rest of us.”
So, how did General Danjuma come into the picture?
Yes, I mentioned Danjuma earlier. When the Igbo-Yoruba thing started catching traction, we thought it was necessary to bring the Middle Belt and a few of us including Ebitu Ukiwe were sent to discuss with Danjuma and of course, the Middle Belt Forum was so happy that this was happening.
So the CUU became a tripartite group with the East, West and Middle Belt. To concretise that, we had three co-chairmen – Danjuma representing the Middle Belt, Ajasin representing the West, Ukiwe representing the East. That was how the CUU operated.
Now it got to the point where at a meeting in Danjuma’s house in Victoria Island, Ajasin told us they had convinced Abiola to come and see us, but when he presented it, it was as if all of us would now join to interview Abiola.
And we said that was not the understanding, which was that we yielded to them that their son would with our support run for the presidency of Nigeria, but they would bring and introduce him to us. When this developed into an argument, the eastern delegation actually pretended a walk-out with the exception of Ukiwe who sat back.
Then, of course, Ayo Opadokun and a few others came to plead with us to come back. We came back and Ajasin now agreed that they had adopted Abiola and soon after Abiola came in and we started discussions.
To cut a long story short, the three sides agreed that we were supporting Abiola. And at that point I became the spokesman for the East in interviewing Abiola and I told him: “If the election was held today, you know that you will probably get 70 to 90 per cent of the votes in Yoruba land, probably 50 percent of the votes in the North, probably 60 percent in the Middle Belt, in the East I don’t want you to have unwholesome expectations, we won’t give you more than 10 percent, however that 10 percent is costlier than even the 90 percent you would get from Yoruba land.”
And you know how Abiola talks, he cracked a joke and we all laughed. He then asked why? I told him the reason was simple: Where we were starting from was farther than where the other people were. We also told him that we were being realistic, because we may not presume we were speaking for all Igbo because the Igbo society was not like the others where everybody takes to one tendency.
I told him that we were hopeful that we may give 40, 50 per cent or more but that we don’t want him to be unrealistic.
He said that was okay, Later, Abdul-Aziz and I had a meeting with Abiola and we told him clearly that if what we were planning worked out, political offices would be shared equally. However, we specifically demanded that the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) which would be completely under his control, must be reserved for the Igbo.
He asked why? I told him Ndigbo had been excluded from the mainstream for a long time and we needed to have something that would give our people hope. We also told him that at some stage, he may have to make that promise public and that was what happened. So, we all now returned home to make sure that we prepared the ground and that was how the journey to Abiola’s aborted presidency started.
As time went on, even two weeks to that election, nobody was sure but we had our own polling system in the East. Nma Agbagha, a Journalist, was the one that was coordinating the meetings between the leaders and the discussions on how people were feeling. Until two weeks to the election, it was not very clear that Abiola would win but in the last two weeks or so, it started looking like a seismic. Our contacts in other parts of Nigeria started indicating the same. The rest is now history. He won the election but then the crisis began.
Now, this is where the story changed because what now happened was that after the election and changes in government took place and it became clear that Abacha was not going to yield as easily as was presumed, we had a meeting in General Adeyinka Adebayo’s house in Ikeja.
When you say we, who are they?
The leaders of the CUU. At this time, I was the assumed chairman of the strategic planning committee which included Ayo Adebanjo and Ayo Opadokun; occasionally Olu Falae would come because that time I was then special consultant to the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology, so I had a guest house at the Bar Beach area, that was where we used to meet.
We would brainstorm and you must give credit to Ayo Opadokun, his passion was full and he was so happy that the Igbo and Yoruba could sit together and he was prepared to give anything to make sure that the entire thing went well.
So, at what stage was NADECO formed?
It was at this stage because we said with the way CUU was structured, it would not be capable of fighting the next phase of the battle which may entail public demonstrations and all kinds of things. So we agreed that we would now engineer the formation of a new organisation with the CUU still remaining as the steering committee but this other one will now be a mass movement.
We then agreed to invite Anthony Enahoro to the meeting because he was more experienced with trying to mobilise people and so on. It was at that meeting that we formed the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO). If you go back to The Punch newspaper of that period, you will find the names of the 50 people who signed it. I was the only one holding a public sector office at that time. Adesanya, Ige, etc., were on their own and some people asked me why I signed and I said I had to because I was part of the leadership that planned it.
And on a trip to Ghana, they took my passport at the Ikeja Airport, I wrote them a very short letter that if my passport was not released in five days, I would internationalise the issue. Luckily, they sent it back to me in seven days. They just phoned me and said, come and pick up your passport.
Then Olu Falae came to me and said what did you do? Of course I knew that in the minds of some of them, to have gotten back my passport so fast, I must have done a deal with the government?
So, that was how NADECO started but all kinds of people now joined it and it became what it became.
But as we say, failure is an orphan nobody claims it but success is a bastard. NADECO is a bastard situation now and everybody is claiming it.
At what point did the struggle become ethnicised?
So, that introduced a new element, NADECO, into the struggle. Now, all kinds of people who never attended any meeting related to NADECO, started claiming to be the great apostles of democracy.
But something happened that was to transform the nature of the NADECO that was formed. At one of our meetings, it was agreed that a statement should be issued, in that statement, there was one sentence that looked like an ultimatum to the government, I remember that Danjuma asked that the sentence be removed, Ukiwe also said the sentence should be removed and our argument was quite simple: that you are dealing with a military government and an ultimatum to a military government is a declaration of war, if they now decide to take you on, do you have the armament? Have you made the preparations?
So unanimously we agreed that the sentence should be removed but one of those things that happens in history, when the statement was published in The Punch, that sentence was still there. Of course, it upset some of us. I knew it upset Ukiwe and Danjuma.
So, what happened? Why was the statement not expunged as agreed?
It turned out that after we had met, three people met again, all Yoruba, and decided that the sentence must be there.
I can’t speak for Ukiwe and Danjuma but I speak for myself. For me, it was a dangerous signal because what we were involved in, we were now going into a situation where any of us could be arrested, where it is even possible that any of us could be executed, the least you expect is that those people you are working with you can trust them, that whatever was agreed as our collective wisdom will be obeyed. That was dangerous because it means that you can get into an understanding and you go away doing certain things that was agreed and then the results will be different because some people are doing something else. So it undermined trust.
The result was that I started distancing myself from NADECO, but we were still maintaining contact with CUU. It also meant that Ukiwe, I didn’t discuss it with him, he didn’t discuss it with me, but he also distanced himself. The same thing happened with Danjuma. The result was that it became more ethnic Yoruba than the broad national thing that it was originally meant to be.
But Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu and some other Igbo people continued despite all that?
In the article you wrote in your column in the Vanguard newspaper, you mentioned Ndubuisi Kanu but he was not part of the group that formed NADECO.
I brought Ndubuisi into the system and I will tell you why. When things started moving, much of the mobilisation activities were here in Lagos and I was in Nsukka, I was flying in from there, so it became clear that I ought to be nearer so that there will be easier consultation, so I asked for a meeting with Abiola in his house in Ikeja, I had discussed with Ukiwe on the need to bring Ndubuisi Kanu into the picture so that he can do some of the running around that Ukiwe couldn’t do because don’t forget having left the government of Babangida, he was obviously on a watch list.
I was the one who took Ndubuisi and introduced him to Abiola, and said because I was in Nsukka and events were moving faster if it was necessary to make contact, he should contact Ndubuisi Kanu, he will know how to reach me and others.
At that meeting in Abiola’s house, not only was Kudirat there, but Beko Ransome-Kuti was also there because we were already thinking about how to mobilise the public, so Beko had to come into it.
You said Soyinka spoke out of ignorance but he is a deliberate person, why would he make this type of intervention at this time?
Maybe because, a man of great achievement as he is gets to the point where he thinks he is an oracle. Don’t forget, from the CUU to NADECO, the serious decisions that I narrated to you were taken quietly in private and nobody knew such things were happening, so I am prepared to accept that he may not have known either the origin of NADECO or even of the thinking of the Yoruba leaders – the Afenifere group, Awoist group – and don’t forget that he and them were not necessarily the best of friends. So he can speak based on the limits of his understanding but you can see from what I have said, he was a late comer to the NADECO story.
Looking at all that you have narrated and the role Ndigbo played in pushing the Abiola candidacy and founding of NADECO, why is it that some Yoruba still perceive Ndigbo negatively?
You have to go back to 1920s, 1930s and the early 40s, have you ever heard about the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM)? You see, to the Alakijas and those other well educated Yoruba of that period, the Igbo, particularly represented by Nnamdi Azikiwe were upstarts who were now arrogating to themselves things they did not know. They were the ones who had the grace of how to deal with the white man. So because that strand of thinking had never been expunged, it has now developed a life of its own. The truth of the matter is that it also suited Awolowo’s politics at a certain stage of his political career to build on that and he took the same side during the debacle over the Nigerian Youth Movement with the other people.
So, there is no point belabouring it, the truth of the matter is that to the average Yoruba of the old school, these uneducated ones just came out of nowhere and were now taking over Nigeria and it must be stopped.
But because we ourselves have tended not to interrogate the situation even in my going to see Ajasin, most Igbo thought it was not in the Igbo interest to sit down and talk with a Yoruba man about the future of Nigeria because both sides see themselves as competitors.
But it is the two ethnic groups that have what it takes to develop a proper vision of the future for Nigeria. It suited the politics of the North to keep them separate and we fell for it and from being the talk among the leaders it became the talk among the ordinary people but those ordinary people despite listening to what their leaders say, when they meet in the market they make friends, they interact with themselves. So it became more or less something that is within the elite, either you are struggling for the same offices in the public service or you are struggling for the same contracts in the private sector.
Which was part of what I told Ajasin. It was now time that leaders from both sides are seen working together so that we can now tell the story to our people that this was not the way of the future.
I illustrated it the time he was telling me that it was not necessary and I said, “Sir, you are older and more experienced than me. Why is it that when you have an office, and there are Igbo and Yoruba there, they see themselves not as people who can cooperate but people who must fight. Is that healthy? Is that good for the Yoruba or for the Igbo?” He thought about it for some time and said okay, I have seen what you mean. I told him that we were looking for ways to remould the psychology of both peoples to start looking into a different kind of future.
That was my argument and that was what finally, I believe, made him to align himself with our position and the rest is history.
What then is your take on the June 12 Democracy Day? Do you think that has finally brought a closure to the ugly saga?
I do not think it has brought a closure and the reason is that just declaring the day does not teach the lessons of what the entire experience should teach the nation because if we learn the proper lessons from it, it will now be codified in rules and regulations and values that guide the leadership of Nigeria.
So, I don’t think it is closure. It is still a matter to be interrogated, but a platform has now been set where we can interact to learn the lessons. It is a historical situation and some of the things I told you now, are not in the public domain. And those who change societies, are not the people in the market place, changes come slowly but steadily. At times, those who make the fundamental changes are not even known. It just happens that I am still alive when these things are happening.
Was there any particular thing that happened at the meeting in Asaba that made a lasting impression on you?
At that meeting, Bola (Ige) and I had a head-on collision. But I think after that confrontation, he went to find out who I was, and when he did, he respected me to the point that he put every effort for us to become friends and we became very good friends.
If you remember, when he died, the ceremony at the stadium in Ibadan, it was Wole Soyinka and I that spoke. There are three books that he wrote and I chaired the launching of all three including the ones that we started and security people came and chased us away. And he visited me the December before he was killed, he came to Abiriba, spent a night with us there in the village and we agreed that it would be my turn to visit the next year. But that was the December he was killed.
He made contact with me when he decided to leave the Obasanjo government, he confided in me and told me the reasons. When my son Chidi got married, it was Bola Ige that chaired the occasion. And the relationship is still there. His son, Muyiwa, and daughter still relate to me, though it is not as regular as I would want it but the relationship still exists.
What was the point of disagreement in Asaba between you and Ige?
It was also the presumption that they understand the politics of Nigeria better than we do. But that is not true. The fact that I don’t express an opinion when you are shouting doesn’t mean that you are more committed than I am or that I do not know what to do or that I will not even do what I have decided to do. So, we should not jump into conclusions like that.
What is your take on the quest for Igbo presidency in 2023?
Again, dealing with the Igbo, it is difficult not to be at times blunt and offensive. For instance, my late junior brother, Ojo Maduekwe, remember the trouble he got into for saying that the idea of Igbo presidency was idiotic. Of course, his choice of words might be the problem but the strand of idea is that let us be honest, Ndigbo won’t make one of their own president. Other Nigerians will.
But let me ask a question, all the Igbo that have held high offices – the four past presidents of Senate, in fact, let me remind you, under Jonathan, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was coordinating minister, which was just another way of saying she was the prime minister but in other not to offend the sensibilities of other people, she was designated coordinating minister, Pius Anyim was SGF – can you point to one benefit that occupying such high positions by Igbo brought to Igboland? Just name one.
Although this is now a personal dimension, I had very good personal relationship with Anyim and Ngozi. Both respected me. At one stage I had to intervene with them one on one and I was horrified to find out that in the two years they had been in office together, at the time I was talking with them, the two of them had never sat down together to say what is the one or two things that our people needed that we must do now that we had this opportunity. Just meeting to exchange views.
So, when you then look at it, it has led me to say, that we need a different approach and that different approach is simply to say, that between each election cycle, a group of Igbo people of sufficient intelligence, sufficient intellectual power, sufficient public spiritedness and patriotic in the Igbo sense can get together and say, what are the three or four things that the Igbo need at this point. We will now sit down and work out details of that so that you can now use that to negotiate with whoever is interested in office. Those are the things that the man who wants to be president must commit to Ndigbo. Anyone who wants office, let him go and negotiate and whatever he gets is okay. But we must now as a people ask for those things that will have impact on the lives of the ordinary people.
When you do that, our people are industrious. It will increase the productivity of individuals and therefore the productivity and economy of the southeast. That is more important to us. Is it even a good thing that we have the largest number of past senate presidents? It is failure not success. So, emphasis for me should not be on what individuals get. If individuals want anything, let them go and negotiate for it. What they get is up to them.
As a people, we should have a common vision of what society we want to build and at each stage what and what we need to be done for that society for our vision to materialise.
You see we keep on shouting about marginalisation, for me it is rubbish because even if you are being marginalized, the man who is doing it has his own purpose and when you start crying , you make him feel important. He has succeeded. What frightens people more about an individual or a people is that when they wrong you, you just ignore it as if you didn’t notice, as if it was nothing. Nothing is as painful to a person as being ignored. And for me that is the strategy I found very useful as a person. And that is the strategy I will always recommend to the Igbo.
The man who wants you to cry, why should you gratify him by crying?
So, we come back to 2023, four years is far away right now where we are in Nigeria. Will there be a Nigeria in four years? I don’t know and you don’t know. What kind of Nigeria? I don’t know and you don’t know because people are holding meetings as if this country is normal. This country is not normal. So, we do not know what is going to happen.
The politics of appeasement in history has never paid. Look at Nigeria. Yoruba have succeeded more by being in opposition than by agreeing with governments because when you make people uncomfortable, they are not comfortable and at some stage, they would want that discomfort to be removed and they are prepared to sit and talk with you. And you can reach an agreement provided you are realistic. You don’t ask for the moon. You ask for things that are practical and can be done. And they will do it and once they have done it, a new situation has emerged. In that new situation, it will dictate what you now need and you proceed from there.
Our problem really is that first we are too loud, second, there are not too many strategic thinkers amongst us, and third, we are too individualistic although I like our individualism because it is the seed of achievement.
But the important point is to recognise the Igbo values – ana etoro ihe etoru and igwe bu ike. Therefore, the communal ethos is important however important you are as an individual.
Don’t forget that in 1934 when Zik, Ibiam and others started emerging as the first graduates in Igboland, their classmates were the grandchildren of the first Yoruba educated people. So, there was that gap. But by 1948, the gap had been closed. By 1960 we were ahead. And we didn’t shout about it. Every community just settled down, looked for the best, if you were bright, the community will train you. Nobody will ask whose child you are. And that is the same principle that the Chinese are applying that brought them to where they are today.
If I may even go further, you know it is possible to develop Igboland as a country within a country. We don’t have to be separate from Nigeria to be an enclave of the greatest but you do it by doing the things that need to be put in place either by individuals or the government should create the environment where these things can thrive.
- Concluded
