Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday described the late Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu who led the Biafra secessionist struggle as naïve.
Obasanjo said Ojukwu and his colleagues who sought to break away from Nigeria in 1967 did not understand the full impact of war on the populace adding that the Igbos were unguarded and did not understand what they were embarking upon at the early stage.
The former president, made this assertion at the maiden edition of the “Memory and Nation Building, Biafra: 50 Years After” held at the Shehu Musa Yar Adua Centre, Abuja.
Record has it that the Biafra civil war that consumed about three million people and innocent women were raped to death by Nigerian soldiers.
Obasanjo condemned remarks by those who, according to him, were bent on sowing seeds of discord and hatred among Nigerians.
He traced Nigeria’s challenges on leadership and unity on the absence of a national leader around whom the diverse people could make their rallying point, adding that the founding fathers of Nigeria were ethnic and regional champions.
“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 regions. That is our problem. When you listened to our leaders, they talked about freedom and their region, but never unity,” he said.
Obasanjo, however, observed that even while the civil war lasted for 30 months, troops on both sides of the battle never saw themselves as enemies, but as brothers who had a disagreement and needed reconciliation.
He berated present day advocates of separation, stressing that most members of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB, and their colleagues in the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, were not even born when the civil war was fought.
