Former President Olusegun Obasanjo said yesterday that the 30-month Civil War was never meant to exterminate the Igbo, but an altruistic attempt to bring “our brothers and sisters” back to the fold of one Nigeria.
Although federal troops thought the war could be won within three months, they almost lost it, Obasanjo said.
The former president, who spoke of the need for the Federal Government to negotiate with Biafran Republic agitators, recalled that he was one of those who wrote the war’s operational manual.
Acting President Yemi Osinbajo said Nigerians must continue to learn from the history of the civil war and stop beating the drums of a second civil war. The wise learn from history, experience remains the best teacher for a fool.Obasanjo, as the Commander, Third Marine Commando Division, accepted the surrender of Biafran forces on January 12, 1970, after three years of war.
He spoke at an event tagged “Memory and Nation Building: Biafra 50 years later”, organised by the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation,
He said: “We really never had a national leader. We had three leaders at the beginning of our journey as a nation who were mindful of their different regions and that remains our problem till today.
“Even in the process of our movement towards independence and when you compare with other countries, they were talking about freedom and unity. When you look at the speeches of our leaders, they talked of freedom, they talked of progress but they rarely talked of unity.
“So, the unity they never talked about, and scarcely worked for, has eluded us and that should be our starting point. So when of course the military, for whatever reason, and I have maintained that the young officers who struck in 1966 were naïve, but there was an element of nationalism in some of them.
“But, be that as it may, it set us back and we moved from the political instability to military coup and then the pogrom, the separation and the civil war. I was one of those who wrote the operation order for the civil war.
No comments:
Post a Comment