Eighty-year-old Joshua Akinwumi retired as an Executive Director at the defunct Nigerian Telecommunications Limited. He tells JESUSEGUN ALAGBE about his childhood, career and other life experiences about Biafra war.
You later became an Executive Director at NITEL, where you retired. What lessons can you share over the course of your career and life?
Trust God, be straightforward and love your neighbour as yourself. If people have these virtues, they will put their country first in all they do and their lives will be meaningful. It’s unfortunate many people don’t put their country first. If so, how can pensioners not be paid their dues after working for so many years? How can people who just found their way to political leadership amass oil blocs for themselves and be making billions of naira? It’s because of selfishness. When I was in England, I stumbled upon a research that a lot of great countries had their development after a war.
The US became so great after the civil war; there was no civil war in Britain and that is why they are not fantastically great. The man who developed rocket technology and space science (Wernher von Braun) did it after the American civil war. He was a German Jew. During that time, it wasn’t easy for the Nazi regime to spy Britain because it is an island, surrounded by the sea. If you wanted to cross over to the country, you would be seen, unlike Switzerland and France. So, Hitler called Braun and asked how they could spy over Britain? Braun told Hitler not to worry. He developed rockets and they were sending them to Britain without leaving Germany. If not because of America, Britain would have been wiped out. They cried to America and because of the experience the US had during the civil war, they were able to stop the bombardment of the rockets. The Americans then called Braun and asked how he was able to develop the rockets. They took him to their country and that was how they decided to work with him. His efforts made America to send man to Moon in 1969. Nigeria would have developed a similar technology if not that they advised us wrongly. After the civil war, what Nigeria should have done was to call the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo and reason together. We could have asked how the Igbo man built the guns and bombs used during the war. But the White didn’t want us to reason that way, they knew they wouldn’t be able to sell their wares to us, so they dispersed us. The Igbo developed the radio and others and they are still using the residual knowledge to develop some things today. When I was working in the South-East and I saw what the Igbo could do, I knew why what happened to us happened. We would have gone very far and would probably be at the same level with South Korea today.
They disbanded the people then – their scientists, the engineers, all of them. These are the problems. We didn’t think too. However, there was still the problem that amalgamation created for us. Today, the Northerners would have been in a worse condition because they had no access to the sea, nothing whatsoever then, unlike the South and the West. The White had seen this in 1914.
They also did it that the population of the Northerners was twice that of the South and West so they could control the polity, which is why we can’t win elections. Whenever we are talking about elections, Yoruba won’t get along with the Igbo, the Igbo won’t also get along with Yoruba, but in the North, they always support themselves, especially when they are all in for a particular cause. Having worked with the Northerners, I can say they are more politically sophisticated than the rest of us.
