Now I can give marriage a thought –Odia Ofeimun at 60........

What was it?


No, I won‘t tell you. So I had to sit the old man down and said you know Bola Ige is my friend, it‘s simply that he did it. It wasn‘t Bola Ige who did it, but the people working with him. And Bola Ige knew that they did it. But then, the other people on the other side did not know that. They kept piling on pressure on Awolowo to get me out. I did not know I could be accused the way I was accused and in fact, that was what annoyed me because the letter that was leaked was actually leaked by somebody who was working for the other side. And it was Chief Awolowo himself who gave the person the letter. The person read it, went to the next room, and quickly made a photocopy. I saw it happen. I wasn‘t in any doubt, so that on the day I was accused, I simply told Awolowo to come and ask whoever did it. The reason I am not mentioning the name is that I don‘t want to spoil the telling of this story because I want to tell it my own way when I am ready. It pained me, not because I was sacked; but because of the reason I was sacked. I never saw Chief Awolowo‘s copy. But what was strange about it was that I saw his own reply to Zik for the first time when it was published by the National Concord. And after I was sacked, in the process of investigating why I was sacked, I met Chief MKO Abiola and immediately I saw him, voluble man that he was, he just started telling the story. As I entered the room, he started telling me about the people who brought the document to him. I was supposed to interview him just before I went to live in Britain for four years and he said I should not worry, that one day he would come down there and we would have a good interview over the Atlantic. But he started running for presidency.


Is it true that during the Nigerian Civil War that Awolowo visited Ojukwu and told him that if the East should secede, then the West would go, too, and that Awolowo betrayed him?


It is a lie, it never happened. The transcript of Awolowo‘s meeting with Ojukwu is published. All that talk about an agreement between Awolowo and Ojukwu never took place. Readers of Soyinka‘s book titled ‘You Must Set forth At Dawn will hear of Awolowo‘s story as he narrated it to Soyinka. But I was the one who helped to make public the transcript of Ojukwu‘s meeting and Awolowo. I have written it in one of the books that I am talking about. It is true that Awolowo did not want the war to happen and he told Ojukwu that, but on the condition that states should be created, and a union of the south and the minorities in the north be allowed to come together and present the other Arewa people with a case for governing Nigeria in a different way. Ojukwu did not want states created. Basically, that was why that union flopped. And in any case, Awolowo said, militarily, he believed Ojukwu was not prepared for that war, that he was jumping the gun. And Ojukwu‘s generals, as Njoku wrote in his book, warned him that they were not prepared for the war. If Nigeria had fought the war normally, the war would have ended in a very short period because Nigerian generals, as Obasanjo has explained, were fooling around with the war efforts because they didn‘t want it to end quickly. And Awolowo was for a quick end of the war.


But there is this story that Awolowo quickened the end of the war by starving the Igbo


We needed to end the war quickly. When


you talk of starving the Igbo, people forget that government is not about personal animosity, no matter the personal interest you have in it. The decision was not taken by Awolowo, the decision was taken by the Nigerian soldiers during the war. It is true that Awolowo was the vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council , but for God‘s sake, when people want to accuse Awolowo of that decision, they ought to do what the Jews did after the end of the Second World War, by making sure that they investigated every story and apportioned responsibility.


But it has been going on for a long time


The reason it has been going on is that some people love thriving in rumours. Many people tell you ugly stories. Awolowo voted for Ernest Ikoli who was an Ijaw against the Odemo of Ishara who was a Remo like him, and they said he was a tribalist. A newspaper that managed to turn a simple case of ideological differences into an ethnic war is doing a different job from what a newspaper should do. Let me tell you this, the fight between Awolowo and Zik was just a fight between an elderly person who was already dominant before a younger person enters the stage and the older person simply could not take the angle that the younger person was taking. Awolowo was a very methodical person, Zik was not. People cannot say that truth and Zik himself could not face it that this methodical man had programmes and was very pragmatic. So, there was one way to rubbish Awolowo, put a tag of tribalism on him and consistently repeat it. There was the other case where they said Awolowo was negotiating with Zik and he was negotiating with the NPC. It is a lie. By 1958, the British had already got Zik and Ahmadu Bello to agree that when independence came, they would work together and the British made sure they rigged the election in the Western region so that the NCNC in the West would team up with the NPC in the North. Zik had a divided party. The Igbo wanted Awolowo. Don‘t let anybody deceive you about it that the Igbo hierarchy in

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Posted: at 20-03-2010 10:38 AM (14 years ago) | Hero