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Why I Crossed To Biafra To Meet Ojukwu – Wole Soyinka

Published

2 years ago

July 16, 2023

The life and times of Prof. Wole Soyinka, especially in a piece that attempts to chronicle his acts of bravery, will be incomplete without the familiar story of how he broke into the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation studio in Ibadan during the Western Region’s political crisis in 1965.

Soyinka tersely dismisses the question on that with this:

“I had matured into a period of a people on the rise, on the move – people of dignity who refused that their voices should be stolen, arrogantly and contemptuously. There have been quite a few moments of my existence among people like that… I was one of them, my voice was being stolen. I could not sit down and accept that somebody should steal my voice. I felt at one with the majority of the people.”

Wole Soyinka’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War for which he was sent to prison is even a bigger event in his life without which his life history will be incomplete.

Hear him: “We were more or less a family of artistes at Independence. There was a creative family and that family was being scattered. I was in Stockholm in 1967 for the Scandinavian-African Writers conference. And one of the saddest moments for me was that so many faces were missing from Nigeria – expected but not there: Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel Okara – the Biafrans were missing even in safe Stockholm. The drums of war were no longer muted.

“It was the last chance for us to meet and talk about what was now inevitable but could still, just maybe, be averted at the last moment. I returned to Nigeria very sad and I was feeling as if I lost a limb – several limbs in fact. It was like – was this going to be it? We would become enemies confronting each other across the line of fire? There were people who were ready to take up arms – like Christopher Okigbo.

“At the time I had already run into Christopher Okigbo – it took place in Brussels – I even recall the name of the hotel – Hotel Koenisburg – purely by accident, and I knew he had come to purchase arms for Biafra. I challenged him and he admitted it. All these fortuitous encounters impressed on me a sense of urgency. Later I had a meeting earlier in London – I mention that in my IBADAN – where we talked about the possibility of going to Biafra on a last-minute mission of intervention. Again, as I disclosed in my memoirs, Aminu Abdullahi who is now dead, actually volunteered to go – this was at the meeting in London.

“We hooked up around a place called the Transcription Centre. We didn’t even know which way some of us would go. Would JP consider himself an Easterner or westerner? It was the breakup of a robust circle of creativity. We decided that Aminu should not go because he looked so clearly a northerner. We said, “Look, you won’t even get past the first roadblock.”

“Because at that time, there was such bitterness, murderous paranoia, and it was understandable… on account of the pogrom which had taken place earlier…. I went to the conference, my colleagues were not present and when I returned to Nigeria, the first skirmishes had taken place – on the northern border, and I realised that soon, it would be impossible to travel to Biafra. I was restless.

“I knew I couldn’t function until I had crossed the lines in search of them. I said, ‘When I get there, I will find Christopher (Okigbo) somewhere’ and then get to Ojukwu. That was the reason why I went, a chance at that last moment that something could be done. Some people continue to narrate that I went across to persuade Ojukwu to renounce the secession. No, I didn’t go to persuade Ojukwu to renounce anything – it was far more complicated.

“Some of us still felt that it was still possible to avoid an all-out shooting war. Let me state this clearly that I totally disagree with the philosophy of unity at any cost, a simplistic rendition of that pietistic mantra: United we stand, divided we fall. What infantile nonsense! It has no basis in logic or rationality whatever. Sometimes, not only is it that “small is beautiful” but also “small is perfectible”.

People have the right anytime to say, “We want to leave this union, whatever it is”, any kind of union, politically or whatever type of union. Peoples have the right at any time to say, “Let’s have a referendum in this area.”. That is, for me, part and parcel of democracy. Look at what’s happening in even England today – Scotland wants independence. Long, long ago, Cameroon and Nigeria, the people detached themselves from Nigeria here and went to Cameroon. Ethiopia-Eritrea remains instructive, so does the even more recent example of the Sudan. Whenever things get to a certain unmanageable stage, people look at separationist options.

“There is nothing – I want to stress this – absolutely nothing morally wrong or pernicious in a people saying – we want our own autonomous unit. It’s a childish notion, something which has been implanted in our brain, to chant or be conditioned by the gospel of: “What white man has put together, let no black man put asunder.”

“What kind of nonsense is that? True, I do prefer that we stay together, if only because I don’t like to keep spending time obtaining visas when I want to go see a former next-door neighbour and collaborators. Also, I am partial to existence within a plurality of cultures. It offers a richness of resources, a dynamic of infinite sensibilities. But to say that you must go to war over “unity”? No! Go the civilised way – plebiscite.

“Instead we wasted an estimated two million lives through bullets, sickness and starvation – to preserve a European myth? It’s a lack of maturity.

In the interview, Soyinka has a piece of advice for the Abachas. He also appealed to the then President Jonathan Goodluck to delete the name of Abacha from the list of recipients of national honours for the planned centenary celebration:

“My advice to young Abacha is “Don’t take on your betters, you are a neophyte. Don’t try to intervene in what you don’t understand. Go and learn from my attitude towards your sister whom I met without any rancour and learn to deal with history in the same way. Above all, don’t promote calumny”.… We must speak candidly.

“It is also a symptom of where we are, that the son of a thief, an international thief, so attested, documented, whose crimes are being unveiled every day, should feel entitled to defend the name of his father at the expense of truth. And that is where I wish to end this theme – I repeat my call on President Jonathan to have the moral courage to rescind – I know he won’t do it, but we shall keep saying it at every opportunity – he must find a way to rescind that Centenary Honours List because that it is a disgrace and a shame on this nation.

“It makes me embarrassed to call myself a Nigerian; that a sitting president should compile the names of a hundred supposedly worthy people and include that of a loathsome dictator among them. It should have been sufficient, if he wanted to honour the military, he should just have picked one representative of the breed – maybe somebody like Murtala Muhammed.

“So that the military don’t complain that they were passed over. But to put Sani Abacha on that list side by side with Chinua Achebe, Emeka Anyaoku, Mike Adenuga etc. etc., is an abomination. That Honours event was an abomination. Jonathan’s act was a symbolic negation, a desecration of everything a number of us have stood for in all our lives. Let that list be discarded and consigned to oblivion to make way for a truly sustainable one. And no amount of trickle-down or newly inventive calumny will stop that call, as long as I choose to carry a document of Nigerian citizenship.”

“For those who criticise Soyinka’s writing as being too Eurocentric, too modernist, and of Soyinka himself suffering from Hopkins Disease, Kongi has these for them:

“I write as the Muse dictates, not the critic. I distinguish between censorship and criticism. Censorship is telling a writer you must use this sole ideological prism to view and transmit reality or your art is engaged in social treachery. For me, that is pernicious, intolerably arrogant and fascistic.”

From this interview, we learn that Wole Soyinka once enlisted in the army with the aim of going to fight for the freedom of South Africans and Nelson Mandela. However, he deserted on learning he was going to be drafted to defend the Suez Canal:

“I have been obsessed with South Africa since I was politically conscious. I told you, that was why I entered the military as a student joining the officer corps for a short while. I fled when they were going to pack me to the Suez instead of where I wanted to go – which was South Africa. I packed up my kit, saying “No, I wanted to train for South Africa, not for the Suez. You go and capture a canal on someone’s land, then declare war when he resists, and then you call me up to serve. Remember the Anglo-French invasion? I was called up and I said “No, that was not it”. That was why I left the officer corps.”

On the granting of pardon to Mohammed Abacha by Goodluck Jonathan on the N446 billion issue, Soyinka says it’s obscene:

“It is obscene. Whether we are talking about Alamieyeseigha or we are going backwards to take in Obasanjo’s pardon to Salisu Buhari when a precedent was set. And it’s sad that Jonathan has continued in that line of cavalier pardon and especially in Mohammed Abacha who has been proven to be a torturer in addition to an incontinent receiver of national loot. Please, all of you bear in mind, it’s not as if these crimes are not in the public domain.”
VANGUARD

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Bauchi Opens Portal To Employ 10,000 Citizens

Published

4 minutes ago

December 16, 2025

Editor

The Bauchi state government says it has opened an employment portal to recruit 10,000 citizens of the state into different Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).

Gov. Bala Mohammed disclosed this in Bauchi on Friday prior to the commencement of stakeholders’ meeting on the employment.

Mohammed, who said that the meeting was to engage stakeholders on how the employment would be done, added that a lot of the citizens of the state have started applying on the portal.

“I invited you here because the Head of Service has come up with a template and he has given us the gist of the employment of 10,000 so far.

“There are 214 jobs with 5,669 vacancies that are available in 18 MDAs, and all the people from the council’s have applied.

“The advert has generated a lot of interest, and so I don’t know how to navigate this. I must source for your resourcefulness.

“I must get your contribution, so that together we will do it with justice and equity.

“Not just to allocate everything for political expediency or the so-called people on the high table will go and share the vacancies,” he said.

Mohammed explained that the Head of Service had said that only 5,669 vacancies were available at the moment, promising that the rest would be employed next year.

He called on all the stakeholders to be just and equitable while charting the way the employment would be executed.

News

Wage Dispute: Court Orders PSG To Pay Mbappe €61 Million

Published

2 hours ago

December 16, 2025

Editor

Paris Saint-Germain were ordered to pay their former forward Kylian Mbappe up to 61 million euros ($71.8 million) in unpaid wages and bonuses by a French labour court on Tuesday.

France captain Mbappe, who left PSG in June 2024 to join Real Madrid, had been claiming over 260 million euros in total from his former club.

PSG in turn had demanded Mbappe pay them 440 million euros.

Mbappe, 26, also claimed the Parisian club applied the wrong French legal classification to his contract, but that was rejected by the court.

The labour court said the final figure of between 60 million and 61 million euros was made up of 55 million euros in unpaid salary and around six million euros in holiday payments.

Qatari-owned PSG did not immediately say if they intend to appeal.

Lawyers for Mbappe said in a statement they “noted with satisfaction the decision given by the labour court”.

“It re-establishes a simple truth — even in the professional football industry, labour laws apply to everyone,” the lawyers added in a statement.

The French club had said they were basing the figure they were claiming in part on a botched 300m-euro transfer to Saudi club Al Hilal which Mbappe refused in June 2023.

Mbappe left for Real Madrid on a free transfer when his contract expired the following summer.
He insisted he made no agreement in 2023 to waive any payment from the club.

Mbappe initially filed a complaint in June over the way he was treated by PSG at the start of the 2023-24 season.

Mbappe argues that he was sidelined by PSG and made to train with players the club were trying to offload after refusing to agree a new contract.

It is a widespread practice that in France prompted the players’ union to lodge a complaint last year.

Mbappe was not invited to take part in PSG’s 2023 pre-season tour of Asia and missed the first game of that season but was later recalled to the team after holding talks with the club.

After seven seasons with PSG he joined Real Madrid where he earns a reported annual salary of 30m euros.

Mbappe scored 256 goals in 308 games for PSG but the club won the Champions League for the first time last season following his departure.
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OPINION: Time For The Abachas To Rejoice

Published

23 hours ago

December 16, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

General Sani Abacha was a great teacher. He pioneered the doctrine of consensus candidacy in Nigeria. He founded a country of five political parties and when it was time for the parties to pick their candidates for the presidency, all the five reached a consensus that the man fit for the job was Abacha himself. Today, from party primaries to consensus candidacy; from setting the opposition on fire, to everything and every thing, Abacha’s students are showing exceptionally remarkable brilliance.

Anti-Abacha democrats of 28 years ago are orchestrating and celebrating the collapse of opposition parties today. They are rejoicing at the prospect of a one-party, one-candidate presidential election in 2027. Abacha did the same. So, what are we saying? Children who set out to resemble their parents almost always exceed their mark; they recreate the parents in perfect form and format. Abacha was a democrat; his pupils inherited his political estate and have, today, turned it into an academy. Its classes are bursting at the seams with students and scholars. Aristotle and his Lyceum will be green with envy, and very jealous of this busy academy.

Like it was under Abacha, the opposition suffers from a blaze ignited by the palace. But, and this is where I am going: fires, once started, rarely obey and respect their makers.

My friend, the storyteller, gave me an old folktale of a man who thought the world must revolve around him, alone. One cold night, the man set his neighbours’ huts on fire so he alone would stand as the ‘big man’ of the village. The man watched with satisfaction as the flames rose, dancing dangerously close to the skies. But the wind had a scheme of its own. It hijacked the fire, lifted it, and dropped it squarely on the arsonist’s own thatched roof. By dawn, all huts in the village had become small heaps of ash.

Fire, in all cultures, is a communal danger; whoever releases it cannot control its path. The Fulani warn that he who lights a fire in the savannah must not sleep among dry grass, a wisdom another African people echo by saying that the man who sets a field ablaze should not lie beside raffia in the same field. Yet our rulers strike anti-opposition matches with reckless confidence, believing fire is a loyal servant that burns only the huts of opponents. They forget that power is a strong wind, and wind has no party card and respects none.

When it is state policy to weaken institutions, criminalise dissent and have rivals crushed with the excuse of order, the blaze spreads quietly, patiently, until it reaches the bed of its maker. Fire does not negotiate; it does not remember or know who started it (iná ò mo eni ó dáa). In politics, as in the grassland, those who weaponise flames rarely die with unburnt roofs over their heads.

The folktale above is the story of today’s ruling party. People in power think it is wisdom to weaken, scatter, or destroy opposition platforms outright. They have forgotten the ancient lesson of the village: When you burn every hut around you, you leave nothing to break the wind when it blows back. A democratic system that cannibalises opposition always ends up consuming itself. Our First Republic is a golden example to cite here. History is full of parties that dug graves for their rivals and ended up falling inside.

Literature is rich with warnings about the danger of lighting fires; they more often than not get out of control. In Duro Ladipo’s ‘Oba Koso’, Sango is the lord of fire and ultimately victim of his fire. In Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, we see how a single spark of regicide grows into a blaze of paranoia and bloodshed that ultimately consumes Macbeth himself. In D. O. Fagunwa’s Adiitu Olodumare, we see how Èsù lé̟̟hìn ìbejì is consumed by the fire of his intrigues; Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ shows a similar pattern with Macbeth: Okonkwo’s role in Ikemefuna’s death ignites a chain of misfortunes that destroys his honour and his life. In ‘The Crucible’, Arthur Miller’s characters take turns to unleash hysteria through lies, only to be trapped by the inferno they created. Ola Rotimi’s ‘The Gods Are Not to Blame’ and even Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ echo the same lesson. Again and again, literature insists that those who start dangerous fires whether of ambition, deceit, violence, or pride, should never expect to sleep safely. Always, the tongue of the flames turns and returns home.

Abacha must be very proud that the democrats who fought and hounded him to death have turned out his faithful students. From NADECO to labour unions and to the media, every snail that smeared Abacha with its slime is today rubbing its mouth on the hallowed hallways of his palace.

Under Abacha, to be in opposition was to toy with trouble. Under this democracy, all opposition parties suffer pains of fracture. Parallel excos here; factional groups there. Opposition figures are in greater trouble. It does not take much discernment before anyone knows that Tiger it is that is behind Oloruntowo’s troubles; Oloruntowo is not at all a bad dog. But how long in comfort can the troubler be?

In 1996, Professor Jeffrey Herbst of the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, United States, asked: “Is Nigeria a Viable State?” He went on to assert – and predict – that “Nigeria does not work and probably cannot work.” He said the country was failing not from any other cause but “from a particular pattern of politics …that threatens to even further impoverish the population and to cause a catastrophic collapse…” That was Nigeria under Abacha. We struggled to avert that “catastrophic collapse”; with death’s help, we got Abacha off the cockpit, and birthed for ourselves this democracy. Now, we are not even sure of the definitions of ‘state’, ‘viable’ and ‘viability’. What is sure is that the “particular pattern of politics” that caught the attention of the American in 1996, is here in 2025. As it was under Sani Abacha, everyone today sings one song, the same song.

Abacha died in 1998; Abacha is alive in 2025. It is strange that his family members are not celebrating. How can you win a race and shut yourself up? My people say happiness is too sweet to be endured. The default response to joy is celebration but we are not seeing it in the family of the victorious Abacha. Because the man in dark goggles professed this democracy, this democracy and its democrats have apotheosised Abacha; he is their prophet. They take their lessons from his sacred texts; his shrine is their preferred place of worship.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Absurd Wars, Absurd Lords

“As surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before Me; every tongue will confess to God.” – Romans 14:11. Our political lords copied those words and, in profaned arrogance, read it to Nigeria and its terrorised people. Now, everyone, from governors to the governed, bows; their tongue confesses that the president is king, unqueriable and unquestionable.

When a man is truly blessed, all the world, big and small, will line up to bless him and the work of his hand. Governors of all parties are singing ‘Bola on Your Mandate We Shall Stand.’ In the whole of southern Nigeria, only one or two governors are not singing his anthem. Northern governors sing ‘Asiwaju’ better and with greater gusto than the owners of the word. In their obsessive love for the big man’s power and the largesse it dispenses, they assume that ‘Asiwaju’ is the president’s first name. They say “President Asiwaju.” The last time a leader was this blessed was 1998 – twenty-seven years ago.

Our thirst for disaster is unslaked. All that the man wanted was to be president; he became president and our progressive democrats are making a king out of him. And we watch them and what they do either in sheepish horror, complicit acquiescence or in criminal collusion. We should not blame the leader for seeing in himself Kabiyesi. That is the status we conferred on him. Even the humblest person begins to gallop once put on a horse. True. Humility or simplicity disappears the moment power unlimited is offered.

The chant of the president’s personal anthem is what Pawley and Müllensiefen call “Singing along.” It is never a stringless act. Worse than Abacha’s Two-Million-Man March, we see two hundred million people, crowds of crowds, move together in one voice, bound by an invisible script and spell. We feel a ‘terrorised’ democracy where citizens learn, through bowing, concurring and context rather than conviction, to sing the song of the kingly emperor. People who are not sure of anything again discover that synchronised voices create safety, and belonging. They proceed to stage it as a ritual for economic and political survival.

The popular Abacha badge decorated the left and right breasts of many fallen angels. Collective chanting signalled loyalty and reduced individual risk. Under this regime of democrats, the badge will soon come, but the chant is louder and wider cast. Unitarised voices have become instruments through which power is normalised, and by which dissent is dissolved.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR:OPINION: Kukah And A Nation Of Marabouts

Two years into this democracy in 2001, Nigerian-American professor of African history and global studies, Raphael Chijioke Njoku, warned that “new democracies often revert to dictatorships.” He was a prophet and his scholarship prescient. We are there.

There are sorries to say and apologies to drop. On September 8, 1971, Nigeria killed Ishola Oyenusi and his armed robbery gang members because they stole a few thousands of Nigerian pounds. Why did the past have to shoot them when it knew it would stage greater heists in the future? It is the same with Sani Abacha and his politics. Why did we fight him so viciously if this grim harbour was our destination? I do not have to say it before you know that the spirit of the dead is out celebrating its vindication.

American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, in his ‘The Third Wave’, lists four typologies of authoritarian regimes: one-party, personal, military and racial oligarchy. The last on this list (racial) we may never experience in Nigeria but we’ve seen military rule and its unseemly possibilities. The emergence of the first two (one-party and personal dictatorship) was what we fought and quenched in the struggle with Abacha. Unfortunately, the evil we ran out of town has now walked in to assert its invincibility. What did Abacha’s sons do that today’s children of Eli are not doing ten-fold? Democracy is a scam, or, at best, an ambush.

Politicians have borrowed God’s language without His temperament. They have restructured the Presidential Villa into Nigeria’s Mount Sinai where commandments descend on tablets of gold bars. The whole country has become an endless Sunday service; the president sits on the altar, ministers and party chieftains swing incense burners, emitting smokes of deceit and self-righteousness; the masses kneel in reverence and awe of power. They look up to their Lord Bishop, the president, as he dispenses sweet holy communion to the converted – and dips the bottom of the stubborn into baptismal hot waters. We were not fair to Sani Abacha.

We cannot eat banana and have swollen cheek. But we can eat banana and have swollen cheeks. What will account for the difference is the sacrifice we offer to the mouth of the world. The words of the world rebuke absolute power. By choking the space for alternative voices, my Fulani friend said the ruling party is setting the whole political village ablaze, including the patch of ground on which its own structure stands. No parties or leaders survive the inferno they unleash on others. The flame of the fire the ruling party ignites and fans today will, inevitably, find its way home tomorrow.