By Ihechukwu Madubuike
My eyes were fixated on the screen of the television before me as Bishop Hassan Kuka reviewed the long-awaited biography of General Yakubu Gowon, an evangelist of reconciliation, and I do believe, of ethical principles and consolidation, wiser the more by years of sober reflections on life in general. Kuka did a fairly good job of it, given the volume of the book and the time constraints.
Every memoir has a point it is trying to make: It could be a confession, it could be to explain, to justify, to preserve, to entertain, or to settle a score. Whatever, a personal memoir can’t be far from historical rigor; it must eschew blind spots by being honest, avoiding as much as possible the temptation of subjectivity.
We may not litigate what the author says, but we cannot ignore distortions irresponsibly stated. Memoirs touch people and do shape opinions. They also change or reinforce views.
These were my thoughts when the reviewer announced at the very beginning the following words from the book:
“I want to emphasize that I am telling my story without access to my crucial personal records since many important documents taken from my desk after my removal in July 1975 were discarded by those who succeeded me.’ “How can I, uttered aloud?.
Every memoir has a point it is trying to make: It could be a confession, it could be to explain, to justify, to preserve, to entertain, or to settle a score. Whatever, a personal memoir can’t be far from historical rigor; it must eschew blind spots by being honest, avoiding as much as possible the temptation of subjectivity.
You cannot write a memoir without documentary evidence, since both memoir and history deal with the past. A memoir is not fiction. It explains what happened in the past and why it is important to the public. It is also an encounter with public opinion. Gowon cannot write a good and important memoir without reference to Aburi, the realities of prosecuting the war, and how these occurred. No serious historian would, in the same vein, write about the Nigeria-Biafra war without reference to these facts. Fiction is the work of the imagination.
And cannot substitute reality. At the end, a memoir should not leave us with a lot of questions, a lot of what should have been, but is not. Both need sources. They must pass the evidence test.
That is the perception, if not the reality, that followed after the review of the memoir by Bishop Kuka, usually known for being blunt. And this gap has been observed by other commentators. I will not say he was intimidated by the sheer size of the book– nearly nine hundred pages, precisely 881 pages- or by the weight of the author, or yet by the equally intimidating presence of the audience, including business moguls, military generals- past and serving and their proxies. He should have pointed out these gaps. After all, he was not reviewing General Gowon; he was reviewing his book. Other observations did not leave me cold.
It was the first time I realized that memoirs could generate, on the spot, billions of naira in a country where some sixty percent of the populace live in silos of multi–dimensional poverty, and our children in schools across the nation have become the soft and preferred targets of emboldened and unrepentant bandits.
Gowon cannot write a good and important memoir without reference to Aburi, the realities of prosecuting the war, and how these occurred. No serious historian would, in the same vein, write about the Nigeria-Biafra war without reference to these facts.
I also thought of the number of people who will be able to buy this book, or are left with the desire or appetite to find and read it because they think the voice of the author is candid enough to engage them in the quest for authenticity and nation building. The high cost of the book, some say, is part of the elite conspiracy to keep people ignorant and hide the truth of our history from them.
No matter the book, My Life of Duty and Allegiance, could just be another propaganda to justify a war that needed not to have been fought, a war that enriched many of its supporters and warlords at home and abroad, including those who supplied the soft and hard arsenals of war. Gowon’s voice is one of exculpation, as if he were not in charge of what happened during his nine-year stay in office as Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of Nigeria. DECREE 8 of March 1967 gave veto powers to him to prosecute the war as he deemed fit, to decentralize powers, and to defeat secession.
It is not altogether a coincidence nor ironic that Bishop Hassan Kuka, the chosen reviewer and an apostle of peace and reconciliation as well as of good governance, should find himself in the company of two of Nigeria’s prominent warlords, Lt. General Theophilus Danjuma and Lt. General Yakubu Gowon, in this seeming drama of the absurd.
They are all from the Middle Belt geographical space, a region that is at the vortex of an unending bloodbath and ethnic cleansing by non – state actors and terrorists, challenging the right of their people’s existence and the sovereignty of Nigeria. This reality should open eyes to the illusion of a coercive territory masked as a united Nigeria -a terrible epitaph on the graveyard of millions of diverse Nigerians and on our collective existential drama. It is not over until it is over. We must reset Nigeria to make it work for all of us, no matter where we come from.
Gowon is one of the last few major actors from 1967-1970 alive. The expectation is that he and his admirers would model a reconciling tone and a template to foreclose the worst experience in our history as a people. It is a missed opportunity that his book, rather than setting a temperature for a new national debate to move the country forward to national greatness, has opened a different set of debates that are dialectical, fractious, and asymmetric.
No matter the book, My Life of Duty and Allegiance, could just be another propaganda to justify a war that needed not to have been fought, a war that enriched many of its supporters and warlords at home and abroad, including those who supplied the soft and hard arsenals of war.
When an author states, “I will not reopen wounds”, readers and the general public must ask questions about whether he did or not. Did the memoir close “open wounds”, or pick at scars? Is the memoir a defense of scars of wounds that are still festering? They may not be wrong to see the memoir as a defense of a broken contract made after the war- end slogan and the declaration of “No Winner, No Vanquished,” especially as the tone is one of branding, not of reconciliation, reconstruction, and rehabilitation. And we are yet to see the end of triumphalism and the voice of the Leviathan.
Says Judith Barrington in her book, Writing the Memoir (2002): “Even if no one ever finds out that you ever tampered with the facts, your memoir will suffer if you are dishonest….Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing”. Yet for the benefit of clarity, Gowon’s memoir must be tested against other historical sources to conclude whether it could be a valid source of history or just a defense.
This notwithstanding, the historical fact remains that many children born during and after the conflicts are still traumatized by the effect of a war that have left their territory as a wasteland of sorts, a dream land of unfulfilled promises, a country where many of them are treated as second class citizens, where an Nnamdi Kanu, a symbol of their resistance and wounded conscience, is labeled a terrorist and incarcerated by the state, because he dared ask to be treated without disparities, marginalization and the foundational rights of citizenship.
Fifty -six years later, Nigerians do not need justification or arguments by the prosecutors of the war and the Nigerian state. What is needed is closure by resetting Nigeria as a balanced federation of equal partners without malice.
**Dr Ihechukwu Madubuike, a two-time Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, wrote from Isuochi, Abia State
