Senator Victor Umeh represents Anambra Central Senatorial District at the National Assembly. In this interview with CHUKWU DAVID, he speaks on some recent developments in the polity
Former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, in his autobiography, gave insight into the 1966 coup, clarifying that it was not an Igbo coup as widely claimed. What is your take on his position?
I believe that what is very important for Nigeria at this stage is a national reconciliation and healing. Babangida’s book is a very great book.
Apart from bringing out the facts even against himself in the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, which he accepted responsibility, but also said that he was wrong in what he did.
He was also able to make fundamental statements as a young military officer then, about what happened in the civil war, what led to the civil war, particularly the first coup of January 15, 1966.
He was able to bring out what myself had known previously because I worked with General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, when he was National Leader of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and I was national chairman of the party.
I worked very closely with him for five years, and most of these things I already had them in my knowledge. That coup was not an Igbo coup. The way Babangida posited in his own book and the account he gave of the coup is something that is open even for unbiased minds to have come to terms with it a long time ago.
But because of maybe, the casualties of that coup, people have not averted their minds to the concrete undeniable facts that the same coup was crushed by Igbo people. Ojukwu was in Kano then and he didn’t agree with the coup. And when he spoke with Major Nzeogwu, he was a Lieutenant Colonel then, so he was a senior officer to Nzeogwu.
He disagreed with them, the same Ojukwu that later led Biafra. And in the book, ‘Why We Struck’ by Colonel Ben Gbulie, he said it clearly. He put down the names of other people, who were involved in the coup and who were not Igbos, but from Western Nigeria.
General Babangida in his book, listed their names and the commands they led in the coup execution. The intention of the coupists as told by the people themselves, including Col. Ben Gbulie, was to bring Chief Obafemi Awolowo out of the Calabar prison because the revolutionaries were not happy with the government of the day.
They felt that Awolowo was a more progressive person than the people in authority. They were planning a better society for Nigeria to make Awolowo an ideal president and head of state, but their coup failed. I’ve seen a lot of people writing in reaction to what Babangida said.
Someone who has been head of state of Nigeria for eight years, and he was Chief of Army Staff at some point. So, he went through the army and he had knowledge both classified information about everything that happened during the war.
He gave that statement as a patriotic Nigerian to speak the truth even though the Igbo people have been punished because of that coup. We have lost so much because of the 1966 coup and it was because of misdirection and misrepresentation. There was never a time the Igbo people met and decided to organise a coup.
How do you mean that the Igbos lost so much because of the January 1966 coup?
More than anything, the coup set Eastern Region backwards because at the time the coup took place, Eastern Region was one of the leading economies in the world.
Dr. Michael Okpara was doing great work. In Western Nigeria, the government was doing marvellously well. Things were going well even in the North. Agricultural produce was helping the economy of Northern Nigeria.
Groundnut pyramids, cotton, all these things have all gone because of that coup that led to the second coup that brought General Yakubu Gowon divided Nigeria into 12 states and destroyed the four regions we had.
His own coup came because even with the January 15, 1966 coup, Nigeria was still four regions. There were military administrators appointed when General Johnson Ironsi became the head of state.
So, he had military people as heads of governments of the four regions until Gowon dissolved the four regions and created 12 states in 1967. So, from that Gowon’s division of Nigeria into 12 states, creation of more states and local governments by the military continued, and today, we have 36 states and 774 local governments.
We have lost so much because of the 1966 coup and it was because of misdirection and misrepresentation. There was never a time the Igbo people met and decided to organise a coup
So, people should be able to know how things happened and Babangida did a great job by bringing out some of the silent truths.
He served in the army and he spoke about his own experience, a close shave with death. So, I commend him for putting the records straight. Those who are controverting him should know that Igbo people were killed, Igbo officers killed Igbo officers.
That showed that the coup was a national revolution not targeted at any tribe otherwise Chris Anuforo that I later met, couldn’t have killed Lt. Colonel Unebe. Those involved were young officers who wanted to execute their conviction and it turned out the way it did.
I pray that God will rests the souls of those who lost their lives and give Nigeria a healing spirit, so that we can put our past behind. You know that they don’t teach history in the secondary schools but Babangida brought out his book that has become almost an encyclopedia of history that nobody can throw away.
It was written by a man who was involved and who was the head of state of Nigeria, and who has played so great roles in shaping the future of Nigeria the way it is whether good or bad.
So, my soul is uplifted reading from Babangida that the 1966 coup was not a coup by the Igbo people for selfish interests of the Igbo nation.
These were people who were in the army, who had their own ideas of how things would be. They weren’t carrying out the coup to go and make an Igbo man the head of state.
If the coup had gone through and Awolowo was brought out and put as head of state of Nigeria, maybe, the Igbos would have been spared the onslaught and the ethnic cleansing.
What is your advice, going forward?
What I am asking for now is that with this account and the truth revealed; If they know all those things they denied the Igbo people because of that coup, they should begin to make adjustments and know that the Igbos did not organise any coup to make the Igbo people in Nigeria dominate others. What the Igbos have had as part of them is their hard work; their adventurous spirit of commerce and business.
Despite all the discriminations put on our way since the war ended, the marginalisation and the privileges they are denied as citizens of Nigeria as well as the structural imbalance in Nigeria, occasioned by the military’s creation of states and local governments, the Igbos have continued to move on. So, there is need for reunion and reintegration of the Igbos into Nigeria, particularly in the area of science and technology.
Biafran engineers and scientists developed weapons of mass destruction but because these were done by the Igbo people, that ingenuity and invention were allowed to waste when the war ended.
Those scientists who built these weapons were rather put under watch. They have all died and I know that Nigeria lost because necessity is the mother of all inventions.
When the war ended and Gowon made a historic speech of no victor no vanquished, he should have gone for those Biafran scientists.
He should have sent them abroad, if he was thinking properly though most of them trained abroad in good universities. If he had sent them on advanced courses, Nigeria would have had nuclear weapons by now.
The present government is proposing to conduct a census. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Population, how is your committee working with the relevant agencies to make the proposed census a huge success?
I took over as chairman of that Committee on February 4, when the Senate President made some changes. The process is on to get brief and all that.
The chairman of the National Population Commission has come here on a courtesy visit to familiarise himself with the new leadership and step by step, we’ll be able to discuss, to know what their programmes are.
I intend to call him again to meet the committee. Even though he has met with the committee under the former chairman, Senator Abdul Ningi, we are yet to meet as a committee.
So, when he gets ready with his programmes, he’ll come back. Remember, they just did their budget defence before these changes were made. So, we’re working with that budget, which has been approved.
Nigeria has not conducted a census for decades. What is Nigeria going to gain by conducting it now, and what has the country lost for not conducting it all these years?
Census is very important for planning. A nation that does not know the number of human beings living inside that nation cannot make adequate provisions for the needs of the people.
So, census will give you the demographic data, age brackets of each part of the population, people between one day and maybe 10 years and so on and so forth.
You graduate it over and you have a data with which you can now make specific provision to look after those people.
You now know the number of old men and women living in Nigeria who require special care; people who have become vulnerable as a result of old age.
Then the children who are of school age, how to provide for their educational needs. So, it’s not sufficient for you to continue to say Nigeria is above 200 million people and they continue to budget for above 200 million people.
