Lekki Massacre Begins To Look Like Asaba Massacre

 By Tony Eluemunor

Give it time, and the Lekki Toll-Gate Massacre will assume the nature of the Asaba Massacre. Then, it will have no official mention but will live on in the memories of those directly affected. And like the Asaba Massacre, it could assume a life of its own, and refuse to die whether or not it received the Fed­eral Government’s confirmation.

Last October 10, I wrote in this column: “The Federal troops thun­dered into Asaba on the 5th Octo­ber 1967. The Biafrans had melted away as the immediate command­er, the late Col. Joe Achuzia (a son of Asaba), opted to retreat to Onit­sha as a lorry load of cutlass was all he was given to defend Asaba with. He blew up the Niger Bridge on the 5th. Then, the indiscrimi­nate killing started. It turned hor­rendous on the 6th and became fiendish on the 7th.

About 1, 000 persons died in Asa­ba in those gruesome three days. Yet, more died later as the town’s folks fled into the bush, trying to escape to the nearby towns and vil­lages. Many were caught outside the town while escaping and were decimated, others died from hun­ger and unhealed wounds inside the bush.

In fact, the killing spilled into Ogwashi-Uku, Onicha-Ugbo, On­icha-Olona, Ebuh, Illah, and sev­eral other towns in the Anioma Delta North Senatorial District. Ubulu-Uku people still mourn the murder of Paul Okocha whom the Federal troops killed at Onicha-Ug­bo and seized his Peugeot car, just as they remember late Lt. Patrick Nwajei (alias Nwaelengw0), late Captain Michael Ugbechie of Isho Quarters, and other decimated ex-Nigerian officers, who had returned home but did not join the Biafran Army. One night, the Federal troops visited Ishiagwu, a coastal village which Biafrans would travel to by canoe from around Oguta to buy food stuff, and simply killed 400 people who failed to escape and burnt down the village. Ibusa, just a few kilo­metres from Asaba, suffered geno­cide and the surviving population fled into the bush. Yet, Nigeria has not officially acknowledged this malfeasance.

As late into the war as 1969, the killings were still on. A Benin-City based medical Doctor, Patrick Any­afulu said: ‘In 1969, a company of Federal troops was ambushed and decimated by Biafran troops on the road leading to Asaba from Oko. That incident brought the horrors of war to my sleepy, rustic village. The whole village was razed to the ground. We escaped death through Providence…a heavy rainstorm the previous night delayed their advance from Asaba, and fisher­men who had gone to check their nets saw them and alerted the whole village. Shells were already landing in the village and the air was filled with the whine of bullets. We escaped into the forest and lived there until 1970!’

So, why has the Federal Govern­ment, which has recently acknowl­edged the evil inherent in denying the late MKO Abiola his June 1993 electoral victory, refused to even recognise the atrocity committed against Asaba and other Anio­ma towns? As hard as that insult upon injury is difficult to swallow, it is pertinent to remember that for years the Asaba massacre was a to­tally hushed up topic.

A London Times correspondent, Bill Norris, who passed through Asaba in mid-October 1967, sent back photos of hellish destruction there and noted that the town ap­peared to be largely abandoned. But he said nothing about the geno­cide. He explained in a 2012 inter­view that he did not know about the massacre. The first mention of mass killing in Asaba appeared in the London Observer, almost four months later, when Africa corre­spondent Colin Legum confirmed that sordid act. However, his (sec­ond-hand) account claimed that a group of ‘implacably hostile’ Igbo attacked troops by surprise as they watched the welcome dance, lead­ing to retaliation.

Even both pro-Biafra and pro-Ni­geria authors on the Civil War left the Asaba massacre well alone. The Nigerian Army made no attempt during or after the Civil War, to investigate it. Yet, The London Ob­server commented on it on 21 Jan­uary 1968, Le Monde, the French evening newspaper, wrote about it on April 5, 1968, LOOK, the Brit­ish magazine, did same and even a Canadian Member of Parliament, who served as the UN Observer, Stephen Lewis, was mentioned in the London Observer on Octo­ber 11, 1968 over the topic. Yet, the then Nigerian High Commission­er to Britain, Brig. B. O. Ogundipe called the reports “wild rumours”. The Times of London reported in 1968 that Biafran propaganda had instilled fear of federal soldiers in Igbo people, but these fears were unfounded. A year later, the Times reported that an international ob­server team had “been unable to find one single trace of mass kill­ings of Ibos”.

An Asaba indigene, Sylvester Okocha, then senior civil servant in Benin, wrote to the Internation­al Committee of the Red Cross de­scribing what had just happened. His letter was intercepted by the military, he was arrested, tortured and incarcerated in Lagos.

Now, the truth is out…and it is horrendous. There are only two choices left for Nigeria: to keep ig­noring this sordid fact and allow the sore to fester and become food for agents of national disunity or address it so that healing can begin. Yet, the silence has really ended, what continues is national self-deception.”

I wrote the above on Oct. 10 last year. Ten days later on 20 October 2020, Nigerian Army troops opened fire on unarmed #Endsars protest­ers at the Lekki toll-gate in Lagos State. Now, self-deception is on again about the fate of some luck­less protesters.

The world has seen a lot of mas­sacres, but rarely have members of a nation’s armed forces or pa­ra-military, massacred fellow cit­izens; the same persons they are paid to protect.

Massacre? That is a particularly dirty word for it involves an “indis­criminate and brutal slaughter of many people” as a dictionary de­scribes it. It involves mass murder, mass destruction, wanton annihi­lation, large-scale extermination, liquidation, decimation of peoples. It tells of unbridled carnage, of Dark Age butchery, a bloodbath or bloodletting unfit for the mod­ern age. And it hints of wildness, cruelty and viciousness; things not supposed to be found in the mind-set of trained soldiers and policemen.

As the to-ing and fro-ing con­tinue over who killed defenceless Nigerians at the Lekki Toll-Gate, and the Lagos State Panel Report, the state White Paper on it and Federal Government’s dismiss­al of Lagos State, its panel, its findings and the White Paper, Nigerians should remember that their country and its Army are showing their true colours. So, how could such persons turn their weapons against fellow Ni­gerians? And here we are talking about protesters who were sing­ing the National Anthem and waving the National Flag. Really, this beats all understanding. It be­fuddles all imagination and over­whelms the mind. How on Earth could anyone understand it?

I sincerely hope that those who have pointed out flaws in the re­port should go ahead and damage the credibility of that Report, for they would be doing Nigeria a world of good by really proving beyond every reasonable doubt that no security agents behaved with such animal savagery that night…at Lekki-Toll Gate.

I wish all those nay-sayers who are opposed to the report every good wish. They may not know it, but they are helping Nigerians to retain their sanity and their be­lief that we actually have a coun­try. But if they fail in their great duty and it becomes obvious that Nigeria actually killed her own children, her own youths, then Nigeria is dead. And a country that cannot tell itself the truth is no country at all for there is no future for her.

This fact alone has been the cause of the endless anguish any patriotic Nigerian should feel at that sad and saddening event. See it this way: there was already out­rage at the way some members of the Nigeria Police Force were behaving while on duty and such fell short of what was expected of members of Nigerian securi­ty agencies. And then, what hap­pened? Some of the same protest­ers who were complaining against Police highhandedness ended up being killed, by some members of the same Police Force, according to the Report.

Beyond that heartlessness, some soldiers also, according to the report, came to the Lekki Toll-Gate scene where protesters had gathered, and what follows is actually unbelievable; opened fire at defenseless Nigerians.

Lesson: Just because the sol­diers who took part in the 1966 pogroms were not punished and those who massacred Anioma people in 1967 were not punished and those who razed down Fela’s Kalakuta Republic were not pun­ished, the Lekki Toll-Gate mas­sacre was a disaster waiting to happen. Yet, even as we remain focused on the Toll-Gate tragedy, may we not forget that about 90 people were alleged to have been killed by security agents in Lagos state alone.

The Lagos State White Paper on the Panel Report has rejected the finding that nine persons were shot at the Toll-Gate that night. That is the easy part; the real hard part is to convince Nigerians that the Lagos State told the truth in that White Paper.

And has the Army and the Police set up their own internal investigations to ascertain what actually took pace that night?

Talk of massacres in modern times and your mind would go to Wounded Knee in the United States of America, to the Nanjing massacre in China and to Mai Lai in Vietnam.

Wounded Knee: On December 29, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Danc­ers under BigFoot, a Lakota Sioux chief, near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was hap­pening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it’s un­clear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

Nanjing Massacre: On Decem­ber 13, 1937, Japanese troops under Matsui Iwane, commanding gen­eral of the Japanese Central China Front Army, massacred 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese. Shortly after the end of World War II, Matsui and Tani Hisao, a lieutenant general who had personally participated in acts of murder and rape, were found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and were execut­ed.

My Lai Massacre: US soldiers of Charlie Company of the 1st Bat­talion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, killed as many as 500 unarmed villagers on March 16, 1968, during the Viet­nam War. Capt. Ernest Medina was the Company’s commander.

Result: Medina and another offi­cer, along with nine enlisted men, were charged with crimes in con­nection to My Lai.

Facts abound about every mas­sacre except in Nigeria. Yes, this is Nigeria…which has not official­ly accepted that a massacre took place in Asaba, during the Nigeri­an Civil War. So, if Nigeria denies the Lekki Toll-Gate Massacre, it will be acting true to character. But the official government ver­sion will never become the truth if it is not THE TRUTH. Yet, if we don’t accept that an evil took place, nobody will be punished and oth­ers will not learn that some acts are despicable and unacceptable. And such despicable things will go on being repeated…making Ni­geria DESPICABLE.

*Eluemunor is a commentator on public issues