By Adom Kyaagba
Opening – Why I Write
This I woke this morning to Ambassador Lilian Onoh’s piece on General Gowon, forwarded by a friend who, like her, still carries 1970 in his blood. I carry something of that year too: the memory of loved ones forced apart in the war’s wake, the family reality of relatives lost fighting on the Nigerian side, and now the better part of a lifetime married into an Igbo family. I write not as a combatant in this argument but as someone who has chosen, deliberately, not to stay silent.
I am a Catholic, formed by a faith that treats forgiveness and truth-telling as partners rather than rivals, and a researcher in security and strategic studies accustomed to weighing competing claims to fact. None of that qualifies me to settle what happened in 1967. All of it persuades me that Nigeria still owes itself a more honest reckoning with it than either silence or certainty has yet offered.
A Debate Bigger Than One Article
Ambassador Onoh’s is not a lone voice, and treating it as one would misread the moment. Chuks Iloegbunam, Ironsi’s biographer, has already disputed the memoir line by line, calling parts of it fabrication. Nnamdi Kanu’s lawyer, Aloy Ejimakor, has echoed that charge, focused on Aburi and the £20 policy. Senator Victor Umeh has plainly asked for an apology.
Set against them: Bishop Matthew Kukah has called the memoir a valuable record of a turbulent era; President Tinubu has praised it as a vital national document; and Solomon Asemota has defended Gowon point by point, crediting the Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction policy and the refusal of reprisals after the war. That split matters more than any single article does.
It tells us Nigeria never actually settled this argument in 1970; it postponed it. Fifty-six years on, the same fault lines that opened at Aburi are still open, running through a bishop, a president, a senator, and a lawyer as much as through any one commentator. That is the debate I am entering, not the narrower one Ambassador Onoh’s piece alone would suggest.
First, the Weight of What Was Lost
Before anything else, this much should not be in dispute: the war that ended in January 1970 killed on a scale that beggars comprehension. In the East, the federal blockade turned starvation into a weapon, children with swollen bellies, a generation raised on relief tins, one of the first famines the world watched happen in real time. In the North and West, the January coup emptied government houses before sunrise, leaders shot in their own homes and mourned by their regions as deeply as any casualty of the war that followed.
A coup answered by a countercoup, an accord read two different ways by the men who negotiated it, a war fought to its bitter end rather than broken off at any earlier point, each turn owed more to the pride of the men deciding it than to any difference between their peoples too deep to reconcile. Whatever the precise toll on either side, no honest accounting calls any of it less than a catastrophe that leadership, on both sides, had chances to prevent. The word “genocide” can wait, until loss on every side has been named and grieved, not argued over first.
Aburi: A Promise Broken, or a Promise Never Precisely Made?
What, precisely, was promised at Aburi? Sixty years on, that question still cannot be answered with certainty, and that uncertainty is itself the most honest verdict available. In January 1967, in Ghana, Gowon and Ojukwu, with the other regional governors, reached an understanding: regions would command their own troops except in operations that the full Council approved, and senior military appointments would require regional concurrence.
Ojukwu came home treating this as settled, a near-confederal arrangement, binding from the moment the meeting ended. Gowon and his federal civil servants came home treating it as a starting point, too loosely worded to implement as written, requiring modification and, in their account, assent beyond a meeting of regional governors alone. When the federal government’s implementing decree arrived in March, the East read it as Aburi’s letter kept and its spirit abandoned.
I will not pretend to settle, from this distance, which man negotiated in better faith. What I can say is that an agreement significant enough to reshape a federation was never reduced to a signed, precise text that both delegations accepted before leaving the room, and to a promise that would always be remembered differently by the side that felt it had lost the most. That is not proof of betrayal on either side. It is proof that Nigeria’s most consequential peace talk was, at the level of paperwork, not really finished.
Beyond “Igbo Versus Nigeria”
The fear of “Igbo domination” that hardened in 1966 has a specific origin, not a vague one. The January coup killed the prime minister and the premiers of the Northern and Western Regions while sparing Eastern political leadership, and the officers who led it were disproportionately Igbo. Whether that pattern was design or the accident of who held which command that night is still argued over by historians, but the North read it as an Igbo coup regardless, and that reading, not the truth of it, is what detonated the July countercoup and the pogroms that followed. Biafra was declared into that wreckage.
But “Nigeria versus the Igbo” was never the whole shape of it. The Eastern Region was perhaps 60 percent Igbo; its oil-bearing minorities, Efik, Ibibio, Annang, Ijaw, Ogoni, did not uniformly join the secession, and Gowon’s creation of Rivers and South-Eastern States days before Biafra’s declaration split those areas from Ojukwu’s claimed territory before a shot was fired. In Cameroon, the Anglophone leadership’s own calculation in 1961 was fear of Northern Nigerian political domination, not Igbo domination specifically. But it deserves this much regional credence: Igbo traders had settled so deeply in some Cameroonian towns that local resentment of that presence was real, even if it was never the decisive factor at the negotiating table.
The June 12 Test
It is tempting to point to June 12 as proof that patience within the system eventually pays off: Abiola’s stolen mandate, annulled in 1993, was finally honored twenty-five years later, with a posthumous GCFR, Democracy Day moved to his election date, and a national apology of sorts. If Nigeria could right that wrong, the argument runs, it can right this one too. But look at how June 12 was actually won. It was not the Yoruba alone who forced that reckoning; it was NADECO and a pro-democracy coalition that ran across the North, the South, and the diaspora, built around a claim almost no one outside the military government seriously disputed, that a free election had been stolen.
That consensus is what made a national apology possible. The Igbo grievance is not weaker for lacking that consensus, but it is different in kind: who bears responsibility for 1967, and how great the cost truly was, remain genuinely contested across regional lines, not merely suppressed. June 12 does not teach that resolution simply takes time. It teaches that resolution takes a coalition wide enough that the wrong stops being one region’s claim and becomes the nation’s own.
Repentance, Rightly Understood
Whether General Gowon’s soul stands in peril is not a question I am equipped to answer, and I do not think Ambassador Onoh is either; that judgment belongs to God, not to a memoir or its critics. But I understand why she reaches for that language. In the Catholic tradition I was formed in, repentance is not a private transaction between a man and his conscience; it is meant to be witnessed, because sin against a people requires acknowledgment before a people, not just before heaven. That instinct, stripped of its verdict on the afterlife, is worth taking seriously as a policy claim rather than a theological one. Nigeria did once build something like the mechanism that instinct calls for.
The Oputa Panel, convened in 1999, was mandated to investigate human rights violations back to the very day of the first coup, a reach wide enough, on paper, to take in the war itself. In practice it never quite did: Ohanaeze’s petition on Igbo losses was heard, but the war’s central actors were never made to answer the way later military rulers were, and Gowon addressed the war publicly only once, at a lecture rather than a witness table, timed just ahead of the Panel’s own final hearings.
Then the Supreme Court stripped the Commission of any power to compel testimony from a former head of state, and the federal government declined to publish its own report as a white paper; what should have been Nigeria’s truth commission was left to circulate as a document human rights groups had to publish themselves. That is not the absence of an instinct toward reconciliation.
It is the instinct, offered once, and allowed to fail. Acknowledgment does not require self-condemnation, and it does not require Gowon to accept every charge laid against him. It requires only what Oputa was denied the power to require: a public accounting, met by a public and structural response, so that memory stops functioning as grievance and starts functioning as history.
What Nigeria Should Do Now
This is not a closed chapter. It resurfaces today as a proscribed movement that can shut down commerce across the South-East with a single order, as a security response that costs nearly as much as it deters, and as a generation too young to remember the war inheriting its unresolved argument as its own. A wound treated as history rather than as live will keep tearing. I will not end this by declaring who was right in 1967. That fight is fifty-six years old, and another argument over it will not feed a single family in Aba or heal a single grievance in Kaduna.
What I will end with is a single, concrete ask: that the federal government finishes what it started in 1999. The Oputa Panel’s mandate already extended to the war; what it lacked was the constitutional power to compel anyone bound by it to answer, and a government willing to publish its findings. Give a revived commission that power on a footing the Supreme Court cannot strike down, put the civil war’s record at the center of its work rather than its margin, and publish what it finds as an official act of state, not a document activists have to leak themselves.
Alongside it, the unfinished business of the 3Rs deserves finishing on its own terms rather than being gestured at, the £20 conversion and the Indigenization Decree’s exclusions reckoned with specifically, and parity in the South-East’s state count among them, since a grievance about representation is answered by representation, not by argument. None of this requires anyone to lose. It requires only what every genuine reconciliation has required: that the accounting be made, together, once, and then allowed to be history rather than a wound each generation reopens on its own.
