Reactions are beginning to pour in over the statement credited to former Defense Minister, General Theophilus Danjuma, on the conduct of the late Biafran Leader, late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, during the Nigerian civil war.
Danjuma said if Ojukwu had conceded defeat, the way President Goodluck Jonathan did after the March 28 presidential elections, the nation would have been saved from one year of bloodshed.
Danjuma was speaking after a closed door meeting with President Jonathan who visited him at his Asokoro, Abuja residence.
The comment by Danjuma, is coming amid controversies surrounding another statement credited to the Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu, threatening to drown Igbos resident in Lagos who may refuse to vote for the governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Lagos State, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode in tomorrow’s election.
Igbo leaders, who reacted to Danjuma’s comments yesterday, accused him of ridiculing the president, insulting Ojukwu and continuing the genocide against the Igbo by other means.
According to a Vanguard report, those who reacted and berated Danjuma’s comment included former Secretary-General of Ohaneze Ndigbo and officer in the Biafran Army, Col Joe Achuzia; Second Republic Politician, Chief Guy Ikokwu; Third Republic Governor of Anambra State, Dr Chukwuemeka Ezeife and former Deputy National President of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Chief Abia Onyike.
For Ezeife, the comments by Danjuma did not come as a surprise because, according to him, Danjuma is no longer strong mentally. Ezeife said: “I know Danjuma is not very well. So I am not surprised.’’
Reacting, Chief Guy Ikokwu alleged that Danjuma killed Nigeria’s first military Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi (an Igbo), adding that Danjuma will get a full response after the elections because by talking about Ojukwu, he is talking about the South-East and South-South geo-political zones, which constituted most of the former Eastern Region and later the defunct Biafra.
He said: I don’t think we should take issues with Danjuma until after the elections. Jonathan went to him and not him to Jonathan. We shall respond to him.”
Col Joe Achuzia in his own reaction stated that Danjuma’s comments already confirmed allegations of genocide against the Igbo nation. “I am happy that my friend Danjuma owned up that there was bloodshed and pogrom against the people of Biafra. I don’t understand what he meant by Ojukwu conceding defeat. If the Federal Government had implemented the Aburi Accord, the bloodshed would have been avoided.
“Ojukwu believed in Aburi as the road map for peace at the time of the crisis but the Federal Government reneged on the agreement reached in Ghana. One does not concede defeat half way into a battle. Doing that would have amounted to cowardice. I don’t know where Danjuma got the idea of Ojukwu not accepting defeat from. He has little knowledge of the intricacies of the war. He didn’t even know the terrain of Enugu that he talked about. If the necessities of capitulating were there, why did the war last for three years? I fought the war for three years and I know that the necessities were not there. Sometimes people talk for talking sake.
“The President’s visit to him was a private one and he should not have used that opportunity to insult all that Ojukwu stood for. To say publicly that the President was defeated was even a mockery of the President. It does not portray the President in good light. Of course what he said was an insult on Ojukwu. His reference to the fall of Enugu is laughable because the war was just starting then. Which military officer will surrender in that kind of situation even before firing a bullet? When some people make wrong comments on the civil war, I wonder what often inform their judgment. Ojukwu was a General and was right on all the decisions he took in the interest of the Igbo.’’
For Chief Abia Onyike, Danjuma was unpatriotic to have made such comments at this point in the country’s political history.
Onyike, a former Commissioner of Information and Orientation in Ebonyi State, in a chat with newsmen in Abakaliki, alleged that Nigeria’s problem now is not from the Ndigbo but from Danjuma’s North-Eastern zone occasioned by the Boko Haram and Hausa/Fulani herdsmen insurgency, insisting that the General’s comments were mere diversionary tactics deployed to denigrate the integrity of Ojukwu.
He said: “In the first place, it was Danjuma that backed the spilling of the blood of the Igbo, with the killing of Aguiyi Ironsi in Ibadan in 1967 and we want to say that Danjuma belongs to the group of Army Officers who led the gruesome genocide and massacre of over three million Igbo during the Nigerian civil war.
“We want to say that the problem with General T. Y. Danjuma is mainly psychological because at a time when some of them felt that they had become great statesmen and patriots for presiding over the attempted extermination of the Igbo, unfortunately for them, the Igbo people survived and have come to assert themselves and their identity in the Nigerian federation.
“Secondly, a twist emerged in the Nigerian scene where people like Danjuma and the minority group where he comes from in the Northern part of the country has been subjected to the same gruesome murders by militant elements of the same northern oligarchy which they serve, and to that extent, Danjuma cannot go to his village.
“So, let him go and resolve that problem first because when Ojukwu was making them understand the nature of the Nigerian federation and the dangers inherent in the politics that was emerging, Danjuma preferred to be a surrogate. So let him stop using the Igbo to hide his inadequacies.”
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