By DAN AMOR
When the Union Jack (the British flag) was, at the glittering mews of the Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos on October 1, 1960, lowered for a free Nigeria’s green-white-green flag, gloriously fluttered in the sky by the breezy flurry of pride and ecstasy, it was a great moment pregnant with hope and expectation. The whole world had seen a newly independent Nigeria, a potential world power, only buried in the sands of time. Endowed with immense wealth, a dynamic population and an enviable talent for political compromise, Nigeria stood out in the 1960s as the potential leader in Africa, a continent in dire need of guidance.
For,
it was widely thought that the country was immune from the wasting diseases of
tribalism, disunity and instability which remorselessly attacked so many other
new African states. But when bursts of machine gun fire shattered the predawn
calm of Lagos its erstwhile capital city in January 1966, it was now clear that
Nigeria was no exception to Africa’s common post-independence experience.
During the following four years (1966-1970), the giant and ‘hope’ of Africa measured its full length in the dust. Two bloody military coups, a series of appalling massacres and a protracted and savage civil war which claimed over two million lives threatened to plunge the entire country into oblivion.
