Former Governor of Enugu State and former National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo is a scion of the Nwodo political dynasty. He is the second son of Igwe J.U. Nwodo, a traditional ruler who hailed from Ukehe, in Enugu State. J.U. was appointed Minister of Commerce in the former Eastern Region under Premier Michael Okpara and was subsequently Minister of Local Government. Nwodo was elected Enugu Governor in January 1992 on the NRC platform during the botched Third Republic. In this interview, he talks about the exposure of IBB’s book on Biafra, the Igbo question, the crisis in PD,P and the way forward for Nigeria. Excerpts:
The recent book launched by former President Ibrahim Babangida exonerated the Igbo from the 1966 coup for which they have been suffering over their alleged complicity in it. What’s your take on that?
I think those who say that we have not been marginalized, this is further evidence coming from a former president of Nigeria. This shows how false information has led to monumental loss of lives and loss of what should belong to the Igbo in a fair Nigeria. The country has not been fair to us. Since the independence of Nigeria, we have not had an elected president from the South-East. And after the civil war, it was this narration that caused the coup and killed northern leaders without eastern leaders being killed, that there is an unwritten covenant that people from the South-East should not be given sensitive positions in the development process of Nigeria, and this went on for a long time.
And up to now, it is almost impossible that even when somebody from the South-East wins an election, they would not be sworn in as president of Nigeria. So, I hope that this narration by the former president helps us understand better.
Yesterday, I was watching how Odumegwu Ojukwu explained this coup, how he stopped the coup in Kano, and how Aguiyi Ironsi stopped the coup in Lagos. So, in every aspect of that coup, it was the Igbo that stopped the coup. When Ojukwu said it, nobody paid attention. Thank God that a former president of Nigeria who was active during the war has said it now. And I hope this will put to rest all the falsehoods that we have heard about the Igbo that deny them their rightful place in Nigeria, like any other Nigerian.
So, all the Igbo they killed were killed for nothing?
Yes, because it was all these that snowballed into the civil war. You can imagine, when they did the retaliatory coup, how many Igbo officers were killed, and how Igbo civilians resisted the program and the genocides against the civilians. All to revenge the Igbos organized this coup that killed their people.
Millions of lives, at the last count, at least three million Igbo were killed because of false information. Look at the way Aguiyi Ironsi was killed, a whole commander-in-chief, by assassination with bitterness, for helping to stop the coup.
That means somebody must have misinformed those who killed all those people…
I think it was just unfortunate that if you have been jealous of a certain tribe because of what God has given to them, you are looking for an excuse to deal with that tribe, by manufacturing one. And having manufactured it, the people in the highest point of governance in Nigeria used that reason to start killing their fellow army officers who then sensitized the civilians and other ranks to start killing civilian Igbo.
The whole thing was orchestrated all over Northern Nigeria. The person who assumed office as the head of state, General Gowon, would say that he did not know that Igbo officers were being killed.
All the efforts made by Ojukwu to stop the pogrom went on deaf ears.
When eventually he was expected to come to Ghana for the Ghana President to resolve the matter, and he agreed to resolve it, what happened? He came back and there was a need for all the agreements to be approved. And that’s how the Civil War came about. They were not sorry for what had happened.
They went ahead to do more. How can you impose blockades on children, anything, entering that part of the country? And you saw the pictures of children dying of kwashiorkor all over the television, all over the world, and yet, we have people ruling the country. And they thought that was okay.
Even the Nzeogwu who participated in the coup, when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was finally reinstated and became the vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council, and minister for finance, at the end of the war, he was the one who said that 20 pounds should be given to every Igbo man no matter how much he had in the bank.
He justified starvation as a legitimate instrument of war.
So, it’s difficult to exonerate anybody who was in government in Nigeria. Is that that they were misinformed? They couldn’t have been misinformed. They know what they did to the Igbo.
Even to date, the position of the Igbo man in this country has remained precarious. The young ones are growing up to meet these hatred and controversies. And to compound it, the Igbo too are said not to like themselves. Why is this still so?
What I don’t like in my life is generalization. I can’t say that all outside people are hypocrites.
In fact, in the North, many northerners were collecting rents from properties belonging to the Igbo, and at the end of the war, when the Igbo came back, they gave them their money.
Some of them, at the risk of their own lives, went into hiding from being killed during the pogrom. Now, the same thing I would say, If you don’t like an Igbo man, maybe because he’s aggressive in the way he looks for business and does business, it’s not generalizing that every Igbo man is like that, and because that, all Igbo should be hated. These generalizations don’t help. This is why there is law and order.
If somebody goes against the law, the law should catch up with him, and he’s punished. But when you say all Igbo, all Hausa, all Yoruba, all this, is not true. What I know is that, following the civil war, and the narration that the Igbo caused the coup of 1966, there was an official conspiracy to deny Igbo high positions in government.
And I know somebody who was president of this country from the South-West, said that the Igbo were recovering too fast from fighting a war with Nigeria, that it should take us 50 years before we should be allowed to take a serious position in Nigeria. There was a policy to exclude us from the commanding heights of government.
Today, there is no reason we should have that policy against us. If anything, Nigeria should ask for forgiveness, for starving many Igbo to death, and reintegrating them.
Their property was destroyed, and lives were destroyed. You promised to rehabilitate them and reconstruct the road, but you never did. It is only now that a commission has been set. More than 50 years after the damage has been done that is when Nigeria has woken up, to set up a commission to try and reconstruct the damages done by the civil war.
The Federal Government needs to reach out. The Igbo have equal rights in Nigeria, like every other person. That is the only way the agitation for Biafra will stop. That is the only way the civil war and the pogrom will stop. It is not by continuous marginalization.
And wherever we show interest in Nigeria, we are blocked. We have reintegrated ourselves because we are traders and we need a big market. He wants to bring in 10 containers and he doesn’t even have the road to bring them to the East to sell.
He doesn’t have the railway line to bring them to the East to sell. He can’t bring them to the border that is near. So if he brings them to Lagos, he has to hire warehouses to keep those things.
He has to build a market in Lagos where he will sell those things to traders from West Africa. And doing so he is developing other places other than his place. That’s why we dare to bring those things to Onitsha.
And by the time they finish paying bills at the toll gates every hundred yards. Everything becomes expensive when it gets to Onitsha. There is a lot of reparation that the Federal Government owes to the Igbo.
It’s not that we are even saying that unless this reparation is paid we will not be part of Nigeria, allow us to contest for the number one position and give us the freedom to be voted for. So that we know that we have the right like every other citizen to aspire to that position.
But the South-East East has been contesting for that position. For instance, in the last election, Peter Obi was there and he was prominent too in the election.
Whether anybody wants to believe it or not, Peter Obi won that election. I’m PDP. I’m not Labour but even though I’m PDP and he is Labour, he won that election and he was rigged out. And our courts turned justice upside down.
Many have been blaming the INEC and Judiciary for what went wrong in that election.
It’s not just only INEC and the Judiciary. Did you see how people were frustrated from voting in Lagos and despite the frustration Peter Obi still won in Lagos?
Did you see how they were being frustrated from voting in Port Harcourt? Port Harcourt used to be a place where PDP used to get one million votes and above. The votes from Rivers State this time were not up to 40,000 votes.
People were not allowed to come out freely to vote. Because they wanted to stop them from voting for Peter. That is what we are talking about that people should be allowed to express their mandate freely. It’s not that an Igbo man is on the ballot and he may win then there is every effort to stop the supporters from voting for him. That’s not one Nigeria where we should be happy to be part of.
On reparation as you said, do you think the South-East Development Commission can right a lot of wrongs?
It will do a little but not quite a lot if you look at the budget that was given to them. Considering the budget that was given to the North-East or North-West, for example, it’s peanuts. But they will tell you we are five states, the others are six or seven states. But when you talk about the actual problem that needs to be solved following 50 years of neglect, you should have given more money to the South East to solve the problem there. You have built a rail line from Lagos to Niger, but there is no rail line from Port Harcourt to Enugu.
Look at the state of the roads in the South-East, the worst in Nigeria. Enugu -Onitsha has been under construction for more than 25 years and remains uncompleted. Enugu and Port Harcourt are the same thing, uncompleted. You can’t move from one state capital in the South-East to another state capital, with no roads. And these are federal roads. Are all these the problems that this money they brought will solve? It cannot solve all of them.
The Southeast governors, they representing the Southeast the way they should currently? Or even before this time?
I would say that every governor is trying to do his best in his state.
But it would have been better if they were working together, even this South-East Development Commission would not have been as urgent as it is for Federal Government intervention. Because, we have held so many Southeast Summits, and made so many blueprints for the economic development of the Southeast; but because governors in the Southeast have never come together to implement any of these blueprints, collective development has not taken place as it should. No state can build a rail line alone. But the five of them can do something about the seaport, and generating electricity. It was the powerhouse that gave electricity to the whole of Eastern Nigeria, which is today 12 states.
So there are many things that they can do together if they cooperate, but everybody wants to concentrate on his state.
Is it not caused by the division between the parties? For instance, Enugu is PDP, Ebonyi is APC, Abia is Labour Party, Anambra is APGA, and Imo is APC. Those are the things that are dividing the governors. They cannot stay together to work as a team.
There was once all of them were PDP and the situation was the same. Even now, nobody says you should not join the party that would help you to win the election and realize your ambition.
But when we are talking about Igbo interests, all of us were Igbo before we became PDP, APC, APGA, whatever. So, something that benefits every Igbo man, you as governor of one state, should champion it, just like you are championing development in your state.
Let’s look at Nnamdi Kanu’s detention; even though Mbazulike Amaechi died on the matter, Iwuanyanwu died on it, Ezeife died on it, and even Clark and Adebanjo died on it, he has remained in detention. But the South-East governors have been docile about fighting that cause.
I can speak for the governor of Enugu State. I know that, publicly and privately, he has championed the release of Nnamdi Kanu with the Federal Government. And the only thing is that he says we cannot be causing more damage to ourselves by sitting at home every Monday because the economy of our people is a day-to-day economy. They wake up in the morning go to the market and struggle to make a living. And any day you stop them from going out there to make a living, it means the man has no income that day, and therefore there may be no food to eat that day. So, we are damaging our economy massively by sitting at home. We can find other ways of putting pressure on the Federal Government but not something that is causing us more pain and suffering.
Having said so, just like I said if all the governors cooperate, we can move the economy of the South-East faster than it is being moved now. If all of them cooperate, pressurize the Federal Government, and put the pressure they are putting on the public, so that all those who wish to support them, put more pressure on them, maybe by now Kanu would have been released.
There was a time they said they would meet the president, but they didn’t meet the president.
I will not blame it on them, because I know before Iwuayanwu died how many times we tried, as Ohanaeze to see the president on this matter. And if we tried five times, we failed five times, we would be promised that he would see us, and he never saw us. So, if the governors have been trying to see him on this matter, and they have not been given an audience, I will not say that from here, that they are not trying, I don’t know how much they tried, but at least I know about Iwuayanwu’s own. The day we went to see Nnamdi Kanu, there were a number of us who accompanied Iwuayanwu to that place but when we got there, the DSS refused to allow us to go with him. They said it was only him they would allow to see Kanu. And he went and discussed with him, and came out. So sometimes, it’s not that people are not trying, but the government. You can’t force them to see you if they don’t want to see you.
Many people have been agitating for an extra state for the South-East, is that what we need?
The agitation for an extra state in the South-East is long-standing, starting from the Oputa panel, set up by Obasanjo. The most important thing that the South-East requested from that Panel was the creation of an extra state. Because, if you deny us a state, you deny us an extra governor, three senators, seven members in the House of Reps, many local governments, councilors, and money that goes to the local government and the state, and you are not even thinking about our population. So, it is a major injustice for the people of the South-East that they have five states.
And every government that has come since this administration, we have done everything to persuade them to create that state. However, it is not as easy in a civilian dispensation to create a state as it is under a military regime. The process is more difficult, again, the fact that every part of the zone wants that state to come from its place, they have not had the magnanimity that this is the one that all of us want and all of us are pursuing that one.
IPOB said the South-East does not need another state, that what it needs is a referendum for Biafra.
IPOB is making its case, which is how they see it, I am not for Biafra I am for the South-East and for Nigeria to bring reparation to the South-East and to give us an equal opportunity like every other Nigerian; justice and fairness for every Nigerian, so we would be able to take care of ourselves.
We need Nigeria more than Nigeria needs us and like I said, we are traders, and we need a big market to sell our goods. The Republic of Biafra may not give us that wide latitude for our trade. The South-East controls the economy in the whole of West Africa not just Nigeria.
Secondly, we have suffered in Nigeria; I am one of those who said we go nowhere until we get the benefit of our suffering in Nigeria. We were at the forefront of getting independence for Nigeria and we have shed blood for Nigeria we must reap the benefits of our suffering in Nigeria and after that, if Nigeria wants to divide, let them divide into as many countries as they want. But we are going nowhere until we have reaped the full benefit of what we have invested in this country.
Some of the leaders from the South-East seem to be sabotaging the Igbo cause.
The Christ that we worship had 12 disciples and one of them betrayed him. You cannot have a population of almost 60 million people and you don’t have the Judas among them. I am not worried about those who talk down on the Igbo. If you talk down on the Igbo, you are talking down on yourself. As far as I am concerned, they are in the minority. Most Igbo people have self-confidence, they are proud of being Igbo. Any Igbo man who is not proud to be an Igbo man, that is his business, he can be whatever he wants to be but I am an Igbo man and I am proud to tell you, I will continue to fight for the Igbo cause. Whenever there is an opportunity, I will continue to do so.
What is being done to resolve the PDP crisis?
I think more people in PDP want to resolve the crisis in PDP. Those who are causing the crisis in PDP, you can count them with your fingers, they are not many but they are formidable because they are supported and encouraged by the Federal Government. APC knows that there is nothing they can do that would change the fortunes of Nigeria and have something they can use to campaign to win elections. One of their strategies is to make sure there is no strong party with a strong candidate to face them in the election.
Today, the press and APC themselves are the ones campaigning for PDP. It is the press that is giving us the shortcomings of the government every day. And it is the APC government that is failing in everything they promised to do for Nigeria and that is campaigning for the opposition. The PDP is not the one campaigning; the campaign is against APC now. It is the ordinary Nigerians and the press that are revealing the incompetence of the APC government. So, you can imagine what it will be like when you have a strong political party that is every day reeling out the shortcomings of APC. They know what they are doing. I think that if we are practicing democracy, there should be a level playing ground. If you don’t have strong opposition, you have a strong dictatorship and that is not a preferred form of government to democracy. I believe that what APC is doing is not fair to Nigerians and is not even fair to them. Because if we have a viable opposition, they will sit up because every day we would be citing their shortcomings and Nigerians would be on our side and we would be winning more support and they have to work hard. They cannot do so, so they want to silence all opposition parties.
The problem in APGA, they have a hand in it, the problem in PDP, they have a hand in it and many of us in PDP are determined that we must resolve this matter because it is not just for ourselves but for the future of our country and if we don’t give Nigerians an alternative platform that exists in every ward in Nigeria, then we would be doing a great disservice to Nigeria.
We must do what is humanly possible to put our party together and I think that slowly or steadily, we are winning that battle and once the party is reformed at the top, the support at the grassroots is still there.
For instance, in the South-East, PDP is the most popular party. When the PDP was formed, for example in Enugu, we won all the councillorship and chairmanship elections, we won all the seats in the House of Assembly and National Assembly, we won governor and the PDP presidential candidate won in Enugu State. The people are still there and they believe in the party. Once the crisis is resolved, our supporters are still there all over the country and now they are more hungry to come together and support PDP because of bad governance from APC
So you are confident that in 2027 the PDP or the opposition rather, would make any impact on the way things are?
It has no alternative, it has to, and Nigerians would blame themselves if they don’t support an opposition party to remove this government. Nigerians have to come together and fight this fight to liberate themselves from poverty, hunger, and all the dissipation that Nigerians are suffering from.
We have this problem with Nigeria, after they messed up during the election, the judiciary would be faced with a situation whereby about five people who sit as judges determine the fate of over two million Nigerians…
This is a task before the opposition; we have seen what the INEC, the police, the Army, and the judiciary can do. Anything that you are planning and you do not address these issues, you are just wasting your time. I believe that opposition politicians would have to work out a strategy to overcome all of these, and they would be supported by the majority of Nigerians.
Nigerians are dying of hunger poverty and hardship, how do we get the people to have faith in Nigeria again?
I believe necessity is the mother of invention; the white people are more innovative than us because they have very harsh weather during winter in particular. So, they sit inside the house and think of how to discover things that can make them live a comfortable life. What we are going through in Nigeria now should throw a challenge to all of us. How do we overcome this hunger, we have arable lands, it is not only when you have money that you can farm, just farm the little land around your house, it would go a long way to reduce what you would buy in the market to survive with your family. Young people should learn some trade. The person who tiled my house usually comes with a van and workers. The painter used to come with three people who worked with him, and the electrician used to come with some people. So, we need to learn a trade. Whether mechanic, making POP, learn something that every day you have something to offer you can earn some income to care for yourself. When they blocked Biafra from access to anything, we started inventing our weapons ourselves, we started refining our oil by ourselves, we started building radio stations in the bush by ourselves, we built an airport inside the forest and brought in people there to survive. It is not for us to start stealing, and doing yahoo or kidnapping people and asking for ransom. That is not the way to solve this problem. If security agencies catch, you they will kill you. We should think about positive ways of overcoming what we are facing today and that would make us stronger tomorrow. My advice is: let us look inward and find innovative ways to the difficulty we are facing. If government has failed us, we can’t fail ourselves
