Showing posts with label Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. Show all posts

Friday, August 18, 2023

Why Do Nigerian Governors Swear Allegiance To The President?

 By Olu Fasan

This is a subject I have long wanted to address. It first caught my attention when I watched the inauguration of Professor Charles Soludo as governor of Anambra State in March 2022. As he recited the oath of office, I was struck by how many times he mentioned the words “Federal Republic of Nigeria”, “President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” and “Federal Government of Nigeria”, while he only directly mentioned “Anambra State” once; yes, once!  

*Tinubu meets governors 

The words quoted above, bar Anambra State, are in the governor’s oath set out in the Seventh Schedule of the 1999 Constitution. For instance, it says a governor must exercise the authority vested in him “so as not to impede or prejudice the authority lawfully vested in the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”, and “so as not to endanger the continuance of the Federal Government in Nigeria”. It goes on: a governor must “devote” himself “to the service and well-being of the people of Nigeria”. Really? Why?

Monday, January 24, 2022

Soludo And The Challenge Of Managing Expectations

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“She said he made love to her like an intellectual. In the political jargon of those days, the word ‘intellectual’ was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, p. 6 (1978)

*Soludo

Months before assuming office, Governor-Elect of Anambra State, Chukwuma Charles Soludo, has done a world of service to perceptions of south-east Nigeria and traditional ideas of politics in the region.

Monday, October 9, 2017

The Asaba Massacre Trauma, Memory, And The Nigerian Civil War

A Review By Chuks Iloegbunam 
Authors: S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli.
Publishers: Cambridge University Press (2017).
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We find this introduction in the book:
“In October 1967, early in the Nigerian Civil War, government troops entered Asaba in pursuit of the retreating Biafran army, slaughtering thousands of civilians and leaving the town in ruins. News of the atrocity was suppressed by the Nigerian government, with the complicity of Britain, and its significance in the subsequent progress of that conflict was misunderstood. Drawing on archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic and interviews with survivors of the killing, pillaging, and rape, as well as with high-ranking Nigerian military and political leaders, S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli offer an interdisciplinary reconstruction of the history of the Asaba Massacre, redefining it as a pivotal point in the history of the war. Through this, they also explore the long afterlife of trauma, the reconstruction of memory and how it intersects with justice, and the task of reconciliation in a nation where a legacy of ethnic suspicion continues to reverberate.”

Having read the book, I attest to the veracity of the above claim. The credibility of the publication is grounded in the impeccable academic credentials of the authors. Bird is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She has to her credit more than 80 articles and chapters on popular culture, media, heritage, and memory, as well as five books, two of which are award winning.
Ottaneli, her co-author, also of the University of South Florida, is Professor of History. He has authored and co-authored four books and several articles and essays on radical movements, ethnic history, and comparative migration in the twentieth century.
Yet, credibility often rides on more than the currency of academic triumph. On Africa, for instance, notable literary voices like Chinua Achebe and Ngügï wa Thiong’o have argued that the continent’s stories are better rendered by Africans and in their own tongues. But their standpoint does not invalidate the benefit of detachment often achieved by non-partisan non-Africans. This point profits from the consideration that, through half a century, Nigerians have failed to agree on what actually happened in Asaba on October 7, 1967.

The authors are mindful of the fact that they are liable to the charge of appropriating and running with a story not their own, a charge that, of course, pays scant attention to the reconstruction of today’s world as a Global Village in which what happens in Alaska is much the business of its denizens as it is the concern of the inhabitants of Sarawak. Thus, they take the pains to state that funding for their book did not come from Africa, while the story they have told is the result of extensive research, and the aggregation of the voices of massacre survivors, the relations of the victims and other assorted quarters. All told, 77 people were interviewed. The result is a 239-page book of six chapters:

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Nigeria: Twilight Of The Republic

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Since our leaders have failed to learn from the past, they have currently embarked on a voyage of stretching the resilience of the nation and its people to the limit. To them, no calamitous consequences could attend this. They feel secure in the delusion that since the civil war could not dismember the nation, nothing else could. This is why when the victims of killer herdsmen cry for justice, they are ignored. It is the same way that those who agitate for restructuring are dismissed as national irritants. The beneficiaries of the warped polity send the subtle message to the oppressed that they have nowhere to go; they just have to learn to accept their bleak lot.
*Buhari and Saraki
These injustices have not really precipitated an insurrection that provokes the searing memories of the civil war simply because it is the poor citizens of the country who are significantly their victims. Or could there have been the civil war if a member of the ruling class, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, had not considered himself as the embodiment of the persecution of the Igbo? Would the poor Igbo have resorted to secession as a means of ending the injustice being meted out to them by their fellow citizens?
But the country is taken to the precipice of crisis, and its heightened form, dismemberment when it is the members of the ruling clique who feel betrayed by their colleagues. Again, the civil war bears out this – did Odumegwu-Ojukwu call for arms because what was primarily at stake was the need to stop the mass killing of his people or that of redressing a personal insult of those beneath him transforming into his superiors? 
Throughout history, the fact is the same – personal squabbles become national tragedies. In the dark days of military regimes in Africa, there were palace coups because some soldiers felt affronted by the arrogance of their colleagues.
Now, the brewing crisis between the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari and the Senate of Bukola Saraki poses a mortal danger to the continued existence of the nation. It has gone beyond recurrent disagreement as a staple of democracy. What we are faced with now is a smouldering fire that could imperil the nation’s democracy.