But something struck me: it was said that General
Yakubu Gowon should be commended for initiating the three Rs:
reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction after the
Nigeria/Biafra civil war. But I ask a simple question: how come
reconstruction started in the West when the war was actually fought in
the East? They started the Third Mainland Bridge, the National Theatre,
the international airport, and so on, in the West, while the war was
fought in the eastern region. And if we really wanted to ensure total
reconciliation, how come every account holder in the eastern region was
given only £20? It did not matter whether your father had £10,000,000 or
£50,000,000 before the war; you were given just £20. It was a take it
or leave it situation. If your family survived and there was an account
holder alive, he/she went to the bank, and collected just £20.
Could
£20 pounds solve the Kwashiorkor that we were seeing? Could it
reconstruct the houses that were burnt? Could it produce food? A lot of
other things happened that I did not mention on that occasion. Don't
forget that it was shortly after the war in 1971 that the policy of
indigenisation started, where most of the foreign industries and
companies were sold to Nigerians, and the war-ravaged eastern regions,
which include the entire South-South and the rest of them, could not
buy, because no one who did not have money to even feed or clothe
himself would have had money to buy any industry. So, I was just
wondering, as a young man, if that was true reconciliation, because one
would have thought that the government would have gone to any extent to
give them more money so that they could truly rehabilitate themselves.
They
needed money from reconstruction, and I would have thought that
reconstruction would have also started from the East. I just asked
because we were lucky to have the persona dramatis of the war right in
front of us: General T. Y. Danjuma, General Yakubu Gowon, General Buhari
and others. It is very rare to see three former heads of state in just
one place, so I had to ask. I said also that it is important, even for
the current-day leaders, that we continue to take actions that will
unite Nigeria. And we should purge ourselves of actions that tend to
cause pains to Nigerians. For me, I believe that because of certain
policies of the federal government after the war, the war did not cease
in the eastern region until about 30 years after the war.
I was a
victim of the Civil War. I was one of those who suffered the pains of
the war. I was born sometime in 1962; the civil war came really into our
area in 1967. So, I was probably five or six years old during the war;
and if I had been around nine years, I would probably have been
conscripted. I saw parents throw their children into pit toilets because
they did not want their positions to be made known to the enemy. I saw
devastation; I saw kwashiorkor; I saw hunger; I saw thousands of people
and bodies littered everywhere and smelling while vultures had a field
day every day.'
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