I was a voracious reader. I read everything and any piece of paper lying around, including scraps. I was just fascinated by the reading word, and of course, I was also intrigued by a lot of things going around me. I asked questions. I was always asking questions and not satisfied with the surface of things.
How would you describe the civil war of 1967 to 1970?
A waste! It was a total waste. (It was) A gross and costly error. It was an avoidable error. It was an unjust war. I was appalled by the fact that we went to war so easily. I believe very much in the right of self-determination. Otherwise, what was Independence all about? What was the entire struggle for liberation on the African continent all about if it was not about the rights of people to determine their own destiny? To find us fighting a war to preserve the demarcations inflicted on us by foreign instruments was for me a function of abject mental enslavement. It was surrendering our will. And the readiness to go to war and lose close to two million people to preserve something that was imposed on us by total aliens was for me a humiliating fact. It is worse than the crime against ourselves. It is also a denial of who we are as creatures of reason, volition and self-determination. It made nonsense of what I considered we were. The consequences are still with us today.
You met the late General Odimegwu Ojukwu, who led the Biafrian side of the war when he was alive. How would you describe him?
He was a mixture. He was very conscious of his class. He belonged to an affluent family. He had an affluent father who was a businessperson. He was sent to the best schools for education. I think he went to Oxford University. When he came back, we met as young people. He was older than I was. In the beginning, I didn’t even like him at all. Before I went away, I knew he was very class-conscious, rich, and wealthy. He drove a sports car while I rode along on my father’s bicycle. I remember very well. We used to meet in the same areas, seeing that we had mutual friends.
But, when he came back – and this happened to so many young people – he definitely felt a sense of mission to the Biafran cause. He tried to rise to that occasion as fast and as determinedly as he could. I thought that for somebody with that background and those challenges, that he didn’t do too badly. He made some terrible decisions though. He also had to accept responsibility for the entire scenario – going to war. However, all the people in leadership at that time were culpable. But, in my view, we on the Federal side, had a greater culpability.
When you compare some of the decisions Ojukwu made with that of Nnamdi Kanu, who is trying to resurrect that Biafra spirit, and others who are also trying to secede; what would you tell them?
The first thing I have to say as I said at that time – which got me into serious trouble – is that you cannot defeat Biafra. People took a merely simplistic approach to understanding that. They felt I was talking about the battlefield. When the people are determined, they are willing to sacrifice anything to preserve their identity. When they feel they are on a righteous cause, it is difficult to defeat them. If there is any military defeat, it is only temporary. The real issues remain unsolved. That is a lesson of history all over the world. So, when I made that statement, I was seeing the Biafran notion and concept, and all that it represented both antecedents and the future. When you have that kind of combination of different causes, it is very difficult to defeat them.
So, Nnamdi Kanu represents that concept. He is one of the younger generation who inherited a burden of defeat, resentment, and a determination in their view, not to make the same mistakes of their predecessors. They have a new will and a new understanding of history. The only problem I had was the language Kanu used over Radio Biafra. I listened to some of it. It was very incendiary and also disrespectful of even his own people.
What we fought for – for those of us who stood on the other side – was a Biafra of conscience, and for me, that is very critical. People like Nnamdi Kanu or IPOB (Indigenous People of Biafra) or MASSOB (Movement for the actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra) for that matter should not act against what I call the ‘core of our humanity’ which is one of conscience.
Nothing surprised me at all. What surprised me was that it took so long.
Would you say there are similarities with the Yoruba Nation agitators, for instance, especially with the way the Federal Government is treating things?
It was a mistake keeping Nnamdi Kanu in prison; I believe they kidnapped him. He had the right to pursue his cause in any way he wanted. He was never accused of using physical force or bombing or killing anyone. Yes, his language was inciting but you don’t kidnap people. President Muhammadu Buhari seems to have an obsession with kidnapping people. It seemed to be his trademark. I think that politically speaking, if they have any real charges against him since he is in their hands, they should try him. All these technical postponements, delays, and tactics of avoiding the basic issue, for me, are counter-productive.
What would you say about Nigeria’s standard of education as a Nobel laureate yourself?
We require a whole revamp of our mentality. The idea that one can rush people through a course and, in the end, give them certificates, dealing with the yardstick of quantity rather than quality, has to be expunged. It is not the pupils or students; it is the teachers themselves. They have to totally abandon the idea that education is perfunctory and go back to those early times when education was educating the entire person, not memorising, pouring things down, and regurgitating whatever is put in one’s head.
When you go to a museum, it is not about what you learn at that spot. It is the curiosity that it inspires within you in the direction of history, geography, culture, and productivity. It stimulates the mind. When we were school pupils, we used to go to places like that – like Olumo Rock in Abeokuta Ogun State, and Blaze Memorial Factory which produced canned fruits and juices. I remember I had a fascination with how these things worked. It didn’t matter if I became a scientist or not. The important thing is that my entire mental, critical, and understanding faculties were engaged. This is what one carries over into textbooks so it goes beyond question and answer. All that has varnished. How often do you see students on the streets of Lagos being accompanied somewhere? The teachers themselves are then challenged further by such exposure of these school pupils.
The environment is also important. If you have a rundown, ghetto environment, you would bring out ghetto-barricaded student mentality, where the entire world is locked up in a very narrow physical environment.
A good effort is being made by nourishing the brain by giving these students free meals, at least, one a day. All that is very well taken care of, but we have not coped with the holistic demand for education. Something went wrong along the way. It became looser and looser, haphazard. So, by the time the youths come to university, they are half-baked, and unfortunately, they think they already know everything, especially now with the incursion of the Internet.
They feel they can go there, tap out a few keywords, and go home and think they have contributed to a debate. Rubbish! They are just digging themselves deeper into the morass of ignorance. Let’s not deceive ourselves. We need an educational re-revolution. There is no other word.
There was a stage I proposed that we closed down tertiary institutions for, at least, a year or even two. During that period, we can send our youths to do their youth service and come back. In the meantime, the universities can hold a conference or discussion and look at all the problems they have been encountering and really bring down the education curtain so we can talk of the before and the after.
There is nothing original about the idea. Other countries have done it. China did it. If we, on our own, can close down the universities to take stock and evolve a new educational philosophy based on our material conditions, our historical experiences, and also the experiments of others, you’d see that within five years, a ‘new person’ would have been created.
When you saw how ‘Obidients’ treated you and how they were not receptive to critical thinking or the critique of Peter Obi or the movement. How did you take it?
PUNCH