By Abia Onyike
Dr. Patrick Wilmot, former lecturer in sociology at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Kaduna State, who was deported by the military regime of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida in 1988, is fond of advertising his role of aiding Nigeria to subdue Biafra during the fratricidal Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970). That war was a war of genocide during which over 3.1 million Igbo were massacred by the genocidal Berlin state of Nigeria.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe refers to the mass murder of the Igbo by the conspiratorial alliance of European powers and the indigenous military commanders and commandant of the Nigerian state as the “foundational genocide” used to inaugurate Africa’s age of pestilence. What was at stake was the control of the oil-rich Southern Igboland and the Niger Delta territories.
The Igbo genocide was the first post-conquest (post-colonial) mass slaughter in Africa. It was used to experiment and recreate the African state as a “murderous political and economic contraption or residual conurbation of empire that serves the interests of the imperial European state creators, which carefully and laboriously put it together.” After the Igbo genocide, killing fields were expanded across the African continent to include Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Liberia, Guinea, Sudan, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and so on, where over 15 million Africans have been murdered since independence in the 1960s through very crude methods such as “killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, bombing of markets and schools, pillaging and enforced displacements.”
Wilmot was one of those who worked assiduously to prevent some European powers, especially France, from recognizing Biafra. He was invited to Nigeria by the northern left, mainly led by Aminu Kano and M.D. Yusuf. That was when Aminu Kano was a minister in the war cabinet of Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Yusuf was the police chief. Wilmot’s populist posturing as a radical scholar was buoyed by the dominant intellectual culture of that epoch. In his 18-year sojourn in ABU, he was always in the company of top-flight and hard-core Marxist intellectuals such as Yusuf Bala Usman, Yusuf Bangura, Bjorn Beckman, Mike Kwanashie, Okello Oculi, Mahmud Modibbo Tukur, Jibrin Ibrahim, Raufu Mustapha, Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, Yahaya Abdullahi, etc., who held sway and were part of the national network of revolutionary intelligentsia who dreamt of using the student movements to create a socialist revolution in Nigeria.
Wilmot’s tenuous role during the Nigerian-Biafran war has been elaborated based on his confessions as contained in his recent interview by Daily Trust newspaper, published on November 26, 2023, with the title “Why I cannot live in Nigeria Again.” He told the story of how he worked with Nigeria’s intelligence community to prevent France from recognizing Biafra and stopped them from supplying it with military logistics for the self-determination struggle. Wilmot said he was with Julia Wright (daughter of Richard Wright) and others, including the French legend, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) who recruited leaders of radical student movements to rally forces towards the preservation of the Lugardian state of Nigeria by subverting and undermining Biafran independence. He was later rewarded with employment at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. The former Inspector-General of Police, M.D. Yusuf, introduced Wilmot to the vice chancellor of ABU, Prof. Ishaya Audu, who recruited him to teach sociology there.
“Because M.D. Yusuf thought I would do a better job at the ABU rather than Southern Universities. So, he sent me to Ishaya Audu (the vice chancellor) and he gave me a job.”
Then in his book, “Interventions VI: Nigeria: The Nightmare Scenerio,” published in 2007, Wilmot claimed that “those farsighted patriots thought I could help transform ABU, the stagnant Euro-American-dominated intellectual outpost in the North, into a dynamic African one.” Thus, Wilmot made it clear that he was feeding fat on the alter of the Igbo question in Nigeria. The lecturership job he held in ABU was the most prominent academic position in his controversial career, despite parading a degree from Yale, one of the Ivy League universities in the United States of America.
Wilmot made some scathing remarks about the Igbo self-determination struggle in Nigeria on December 7, 2007, during the 70th birthday lecture of Gen. Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos. While he praised Danjuma as “a patriot, gentleman soldier and statesman,” he vilified Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu and the Igbo for attempting to divide Nigeria and for pursuing a separatist agenda, which was dead on arrival.
I wonder whether Wilmot can still reason in that direction today because, two years after his 2007 outing with his benefactor, Danjuma, the National Question in Nigeria forcefully reverberated, took centre stage and silenced all the political demagogues, empty phrase mongers and intellectual mercenaries who pretended that Nigeria had survived the foundational crises created by the forceful amalgamation of 1914 and the genocidal wars of 1967-1970. When did it become the duty of a revolutionary to go about frustrating ethnic nationalities from the attainment of their inalienable right to self-determination?
What does he think about the eviction of the British Raj, in 1947, which ended several decades of British influence and indirect rule of the British Crown over the East Indian territories? That was the disintegration of India, which paved the way for the creation of independent Pakistan and, later, in 1972, Bangladesh was seperated from Pakistan. What does he say about the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 with the resultant effect of the emergence of 15 new states? What are his views on the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1992, giving birth to six new states, or even the case of Czechoslovakia, which split into Czech Republic and Slovakia?
Wilmot should publish his views regarding the nature, character and composition of the Nigerian state and what makes it sacrosanct that it must be defended in the light of its past and present atrocities in its monolithic and violence-driven federation characterized by the emasculation of ethnic nationalities.
Why should the Igbo nation or any other nationality for that matter be subjected to the imperial anti-democratic foundations of such a state, based on the archaic principles of conquest? Have all those initially recruited to serve the Anglo-Fulani contraption not lived to regret their actions? Is there anyone of them that ever emerged a true hero? Check out the list, starting from Yakubu Gowon, T.Y. Danjuma, etc. No wonder Brig.Gen. Hilary Njoku described the Nigerian-Biafran war as a “tragedy without heroes.” Some of the veterans of the civil war and a whole generation of military officers, especially from the Middle Belt of Nigeria, must have regretted how they were used and dumped by the Fulani hegemonic system. Under the regime of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the Nigerian state looked the other way as Fulani herdsmen levied murderous violence on a large scale against the Middle Belt states of Benue, Plateau, Taraba and parts of Nasarawa.
The Southern Kaduna communities were also subjected to anihilationist experimentation. Even the South-East, South-West and South-South regions were equally targeted by herdsmen in their bloody campaign. Life in Nigeria became brutish and short. Chinweizu wrote over 30 years ago that “even without a formal disintegration, there is an ongoing perpetual war inflicted on Nigeria by the Lugardian state itself. Nigeria has been reduced to a shanty banana republic, a refugee camp where there is no order.” The Lugardian state has turned the art of governance into “brazen gangsterism.”
In July 2019, the Global Independent Report from the United Kingdom indicted the Buhari government on the killing of thousands of Christians in the Middle Belt. The report, which was submitted to the government in Britain, was authored by Rt. Rev. Philip Mounstephen, the Bishop of Truro in the UK. It cited the unwarranted massacre of unarmed Christians by Fulani herdsmen with sophisticated weapons while Nigeria’s security structure was reluctant to stop the attackers nor charge them to court for prosecution. It was clearly stated that “Nigerian Christians have suffered the worst atrocities inflicted on churchgoers anywhere in the world”. The report added that since 2009, Boko Haram and other islamic militant groups in allegiance to ISIS extremists…have inflicted mass terror on civilians, killing 20,000 Nigerians, kidnapping thousands and displacing nearly two million”.
The Nigerian state as constituted from the beginning was never based on he principles of equality, equity and social justice.It created a nebulous federation without any proper definition of autonomy and equality of the Federating units. The state was constructed to preserve the advantages of its Anglo-Fulani ‘conquerors’. The core Northern Region has maintained and sustained its political stranglehold on the Nigerian federation by enslaving other Ethnic Nationalities which are made to remain as perpetual slaves under the Fulani ruling class.
This type of terrible situation has impacted negatively on the socio-economic and political development of the country. The confiscation of the Nigerian state through such atrocious hegemonic arrangement is responsible for the backwardness of the country. This is so because the state is a leading agent in the development process.
Writing on this concept of power, hegemony and end-game doctrine, Arthur Nwankwo argues that “unless the virtual monopoly of Northerners is re-negotiated for more inclusiveness, the outcome would be the eventual break-up of the country. And he adds that “the monopolization of power by any ethnic block in a multi- ethnic, multi-religious polity such as Nigeria and most African countries would spell disaster”. The manifest failure of the Nigerian state is concretized by the continuous resurging of the Igbo Question, even more than fifty years after the civil war. According to Abubakar Momoh and Said Adejumobi, “the National Question in Nigeria identifies challenges that must be addressed if the nation is to survive and critical issues that have been left unresolved and now threatening the nation-state”.
The overriding evidence for now is that Nigeria is not able and capable of setting up an effective machinery which permits all its citizens to realize their fullest potentials. Thus, Nimi Wariboko describes the Igbo Question as the whole Question of Nigeria. “The Igbo Question is not only an ethnic question, but it is also the metonymy of the Nigerian question. To answer the Igbo Question is to answer the Nigerian question. Some of the fundamental issues include: the absence of political equality based on the right to rule and be ruled. The Fulani rulers and their Southern surrogates are the only ones with a divine right of rulership, based on islamic religious separatist ideology.
In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Igbo is the emancipation of all citizens from inequality and injustice”. Experts believe that there are only two ways to resolve the National Question in Nigeria today. The process entails the reconstitution of the Nigerian state through the creation of Regional Autonomy or Autonomous Republics. Regional Autonomy entails a situation where we go back to the 1963 Federal Constitution, with minor amendments where the current six geopolitical zones can be used as the Autonomous Regions. If this does not happen, then it will become apparent that we are headed for the worse case scenerio: Autonomous Republics.
This is a situation where the Ethnic Nationalities may assert their rights to self determination in line with the United Nations and African Charter on Human and People’s Rights which was invoked to seperate Southern Sudan from Sudan in 2009. The age of empire states are over, starting from the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the British empire, the Russian empire, up to the German empire or French empire. What is in vogue today all over the world are organic states: states made up of people with a common language, common culture and a common religion, with minor varieties.
