By Tony Eluemunor
“I prefer to be accused of nastiness than to join in
the national pastime of consigning events of a few years ago into prehistory”.
Chinua Achebe wrote that in the preface of his book of essays, Morning Yet On Creation Day, to explain why he had to include essays on the Biafran war in that book instead of pretending that the war never took place. Here and now, I second that “motion”.
Tatalo Alamu, in his offering titled Ninety Bouquets For Jack Gowon published in the Nation newspaper of November 3, 2024, poured encomiums on Gen. Yakubu Gowon, “as an exemplary Nigerian patriot, a soldier-statesman and shining moral exemplar for many of his compatriots”.
Tatalo Alamu, whether in his first essayist incarnation as Prof Adebayo Williams, or in this present one, is not just an engaging writer but a deep thinker. The reader is my witness that I have left all alone his other incarnation when he was Larrie Williams but he had to drop Larrie because of then more popular Larry Williams the dramatist.Even when you disagree with
Tatalo Alamu’s reasoning, you would still strike gold in his glittering
renditions, his energetic turn of phrase that appears to make his words hop off
the essay to embrace the reader…like a lover. That reminds me of the
incomparable respect Chinewizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike paid
the poet, Christopher Okigbo in Towards
the Decolonization of African Literature: “The early Okigbo wrote
nonsense…but captivating nonsense”. Then they raised a din that has refused to
subside when in comparison, they added that Wole Soyinka (the poet as against
the playwright) wrote “abject nonsense”.
May we please begin from the two
concluding sentences of Tatalo Alamu’s 1, 200-word essay: “The rotund vultures
are still hovering in the air. When are we going to get proper closure in this
land?”
Yet, a proper closure would never
come “in this land” until those who defaced Nigeria’s history, harmed the lives
and destinies of individuals and sections of the country, making it terribly
difficult to unify Nigeria, have owned up to their roles, admit their mistakes,
deliberate ills or iniquities to show some remorse. But did Gen. Gowon own up
to any mistake in his 90th birthday interview? No!
Chuks Iloegbunam has spent over
30 years researching into the two 1966 coups, the Nigerian-Biafran war and
their aftermaths, so he is an authority on such matters. He pointed out the
untruths in Gowon’s
statements in his October 26,
2024 Vanguard article which Tatalo Alamu referenced. Chuks went straight to the
point: “Dear General Yakubu Gowon, you spoke to the Daily Trust on Saturday, October 19, 2024. You celebrated
revisionism and claimed things that were not backed by evidence.
This open letter is to point out
and correct your horrendous amputations of contemporary Nigerian history”.
Tatalo Alamu romped into the arena against Chuks Iloegbunam as though he was
mounted on the chariot of Achilles, drawn by the Greek hero’s fleet footed
immortal horses, “Xanthos and Balios”, as his essay’s passionately runaway
cadence bore witness.
Unfortunately, instead of
countering any point Chuks raised against Gowon, he began to manufacture
excuses for Gowon. Chuks said that Gowon was no super-patriot because he had
announced “on Monday, August 1, 1966, that there was no basis for Nigerian
unity”, thus rendering his claim in 2024 “My duty and profession at that time
demanded to make sure that we kept the country together” baseless. Tatalo Alamu
owned up that he listened to that broadcast, and “the initial push of the
victorious coupists was the breakup of the country until they were cautioned by
western concerns”.
That leads to the question;
could Gowon have been among the July 1966 “victorious coupists?” Chuks had
reminded readers of the strange telephone conversation between Captain T. Y.
Danjuma who informed Gowon that he was set to arrest Ajuiyi Ironsi, the Supreme
Commander, as recounted in Danjuma’s biography and Gowon, Ironsi’s Chief of
Staff asked him “can you do it”?
Nothing more!
And Gowon, who could not hurt a
fly did not even say, “please let there be no bloodshed”. Oh, elsewhere,
the Tatalo Alamu had excoriated Aguiyi Ironsi for surrounding himself with
ethnic bigots, though Danjuma who arrested him also headed his personal
security team, but he never used such words for Gowon but he asserted Gowon ran
a Northern show because the victorious coupists were Northerners. Haba, Tatalo
Alamu, haba.
Chuks showed that Gowon reneged on the Aburi Accord and detailed out war crimes against Biafra, including deliberate church, school and market bombings and over 50 years later, the Gowon with the storied heart of a church minister still claimed that he obeyed the Geneva Convention. Surprisingly, Chuks didn’t dwell on the Asaba massacre, the worst act of genocide committed in that war, and I hold it against him.
Tatalo did, but he
only added insult to injury; he had dined with two Asaba people who remembered
“with eerie graphicness about the indignities visited on young women (read mass
rape), the man’s attention was focused on the actual pogrom which he survived
as a boy by lying still amidst the huge pile of the dead and dying. Later, he
had helped sympathizers carry the body of Chief Okongwu to his adjoining
homestead for proper dressing before interment. That incidentally was the
father of a former First Lady of Nigeria”.
Gowon, Tatalo Alamu’s hero,
remained Nigeria’s Head of State for seven years after that Asaba massacre but
questioned/punished no one for it.
Okogwu, whose murder and burial
the Asaba man remembered vividly decades later, had actually just finished
reading the welcome address to the Federal troops…and he was savagely executed.
The lady recounted the mass rape and sex slavery Asaba women suffered under
angel Gowon’s watch but that elicited no condemnation from Tatalo Alamu. All he
could ask was “When are we going to get proper closure in this land?”
If that showed his impatience
with the injured former Biafrans and/or Asaba people for failing to FORGET
their injuries, then Tatalo Alamu is terribly insensitive, and such
insensitivity does not encourage closure.
Chinua Achebe was right after
all when he wrote that “Wisdom does not
come from what happened but the lessons people learn from events because much
could happen to a stone without making the stone any wiser”.
Even Gen Gowon and Tatalo Alamu
have refused to learn the right lessons from the Biafran War, Africa’s most
horrendous, most ferocious and nastiest civil war.
*Eluemunor
is a commentator on public issues
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