AFTER ABURI
It had been
agreed at Aburi that all previous decrees assuming over-centralisation and
detracting from Regional autonomy should be repealed and a decree enacted
before 21st January restoring the regions to their position before the military
takeover on the 15th January, 1966.
Eventually a
draft decree was issued by the Lagos authorities and submitted to the regional
governors for their approval. Both the Eastern and Western Regions rejected
this draft on the grounds that it was contrary to the spirit of the Aburi
agreements and was at variance with the agreements reached by the
Solicitors-General at Benin on the 14th January, the latter having met to
examine and recommend which decrees should be repealed on the grounds that they
detracted from the position of the Regions before the military take-over.
It was then
agreed that officials from the different governments should meet at Benin to
discuss and advise on how the Aburi agreements could best be implemented. The
officials met on the 17th and 18th of February and made a number of
recommendations.
Another draft
decree was prepared which, again, was totally unsatisfactory in the light of
the Aburi agreements. Eventually, on 19th March, Decree No. 8 was formally
published, the draft of which the East had found objectionable and had rejected
for the following reasons:
(a) It gave Lt. Col.
Gowon a personal veto power over the concurrence of all the Regional Military
Governors.
(b) Empowered the
Supreme Military Council to declare a State of Emergency in a Region against
the wishes of its Governor.
This decree, as
the recordings and transcripts clearly demonstrate, was contrary to the Aburi
agreements and yet Lt. Col. Gowon has publicly claimed that in the promulgation
of this decree the Aburi agreements were implemented.
It is also an
important fact to bear in mind that at Aburi it was agreed that the Supreme
Military Council should meet to appoint the Commander-in-Chief and Head of the
Federal Military Government. That decree was never implemented.
These actions and
the withholding of essential revenues due to the East (Civil Servants not paid
up to 31st March as agreed at Aburi) only exacerbated the Easterners’ fear and
distrust of the Northerners and the Northern-dominated Federal Government.
Lt. Col. Ojukwu’s
reaction to this refusal by the Lagos Government to accept the decisions of the
Supreme Military Council was to inform Lt. Col. Gowon and the Military
Governors of the other regions that he would be compelled to implement certain
of these decisions unilaterally. In his letter of 16th February addressed to
Lt. Col Gowon he fixed 31st March, 1967, the end of the Nigerian fiscal year,
as a deadline.
It was in answer
to this ultimatum that the Lagos Government on 19th March passed Decree No. 8 which
it introduced to the country and the world at large as the implementation of
the agreements reached at Aburi. The East had, however, rejected this decree
for the reasons already stated above.
It was therefore
only after 31st March that the Eastern Government enacted those measures
essential for the government and financial self-preservation of the East,
namely the Revenue Collection Edict, Court of Appeal Edict and Registration of
Companies Edict. The first of these pieces of legislation, in particular,
reveals the intentions of the Eastern Government at the time. In accordance
with the Edict, revenues which were normally collected in the East for payment
to the Federal exchequer were to be paid instead to the Eastern treasury in
Enugu.
In this manner it
became possible for the Eastern Government to carry out the obligation of the
Lagos Government, clearly entered into at Aburi, to meet the salaries of
Federal employees of Eastern origin who had been forced by circumstances to
seek refuge in the East. Quite apart from the sum total of these salaries it is
interesting in this context to note that according to the Financial Times (14th
April, 1967) a total sum of £11,330,000 was owing to the Eastern Government by
the Federal Government at the end of February. The East plainly faced economic
collapse at that time if it had not passed the legislation necessary to enable
revenue to be raised in order to offset this debt and, at the same time, meet
the salaries of refugee employees of the Federal Government.
The Federal
Government retaliated to the measures taken after 31st March by imposing
economic sanctions on the East. Throughout April and May several efforts were
made to bring the disputants together, but all failed.
On the 26th May,
1967, there took place in Enugu a joint meeting of the Advisory Committee of
Chiefs and Elders and the Consultative Assembly. Lt. Col. Ojukwu, after
reviewing at some length the events of the previous 17 months, asked the
Consultative Assembly for a mandate for future action. It was clear from the
manner in which the Military Governor put to the Consultative Assembly the
choices before them that he was asking for a mandate to assert the autonomy of
Eastern Nigeria without specifying either when or in what form this autonomy should
be finally claimed. “It is for you as the representatives of the 14 million
people of Eastern Nigeria to choose from:
(a) Accepting the
terms of the North and Gowon and thereby submit to domination by the North, or
(b) Continuing the present stalemate and
drift, or
(c) Ensuring the survival of our people by
asserting our autonomy.
If we have no
alternative to the third choice, we shall leave the door open for association
with any of the other regions of the country that accept the principle of
association of autonomous units.”
On the following
day, the 27th May, the Consultative Assembly unanimously mandated Lt. Col.
Ojukwu in the most precise terms “to declare at the earliest practicable date
Eastern Nigeria a free sovereign and independent state by the name and title of
the Republic of Biafra”.
It is plain that
the Consultative Assembly was not prepared to allow Lt. Col. Ojukwu a great
deal of latitude either on the form which autonomy should take or on the time
at which it should be implemented.
The reaction of
the Lagos Government to this mandate from the representatives of the East
Nigerian people to their Military Government was the sudden enactment of a new
constitution for the Nigerian Federation based upon the division of the four
Regions into 12 States. The Eastern region, in particular, was to be divided
into three states; Rivers, East-Central and South-Eastern.
Little detail is
available on the actual form which this new constitution was intended to take.
Certain elements of the 12-state legislation are, however, clear by
implication:
1. The proposal to divide Nigeria into a
larger number of units pre-supposed a stronger central government in Lagos and
thus contradicted the consensus of opinion reached on the two previous
occasions upon which representatives of all the regions had been represented at
discussions, namely the September meeting of the Ad Hoc Constitutional
Conference and the January meeting of the Supreme Military Council at Aburi.
2. The new constitution had been enacted without
consultation with East Nigeria and states had been created without a
referendum; as a Federal Constitution is plainly workable only if there is
agreement to make it work by its constituent parts, it was natural that the
East should react by calling the proposals dictatorial.
3. The
division of the Eastern Region into three states was made in such a way as to
deprive the Ibo hinterland of the Eastern Region of its outlet to the sea (Port
Harcourt) [See Willink Report 1958, Cmnd. 505, paras, 13
and 14] and of
several other Ibo-speaking areas which happened also to be oil producing areas.
It is not
therefore surprising that the reaction of the Eastern Government to this move
was to consider it a crude political attempt to divide the unity of the East by
appealing to its minorities and engendering separate nationalisms and, at the
same time, render the predominantly Ibo East Central State economically
unviable and therefore permanently dependent upon the Lagos Central Government.
The inevitable
reaction of the Eastern Government to the legislation was on the 30th May,
1967, to proclaim Eastern Nigeria the sovereign Republic of Biafra.
LISTEN TO AUDIO RECORDING: BIAFRA THE CASE FOR INDEPENDENCE - PART 6
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