By Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
“Nigeria would one day feel sorry that they had thrown the baby out with the bath water.”
– Prof. Pat Utomi in New York Times newspaper edition of January 8, 1984.
The day of reckoning foreseen by Utomi paradoxically came soon enough in two tranches.
First, on August 27, 1985, when General Buhari was in turn ousted in a bizarre twist of political events.
Second, as part of the background events necessitating Professors John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (1935-2020), Chinua Acbebe (1930-2013), and Kongi who recently turned 90 to visit Dodan Barracks on March 5 1986 as captured for posterity in the attached 38-year-old picture.
Recall a few months later the ace journalist Dele Giwa (1947-1986) was blasted out of existence. Then the fallout of a junta power struggle culminated in the controversial resignation of Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe.
Those tumultuous events signified the collapse of the self-serving alliance between the Nigerian military, sections of the media, and academia that conspired to truncate our democracy and benefit from the fallout patronage.
With the valiant Onyeka Onwenu attempting to save us from ourselves as she serenaded the nation with a clarion call;
“One Love keeps us together.”
Back in 2022, when the Lady of Songs celebrated her 70th birthday despite her public bashing of former President Buhari “the situation in this country has worsened so much since he took over from Jonathan in 2015,” he nonetheless wrote to felicitate with her.
Reaching out to the Villa after Buhari assumed office Madam Onyeka’s continued as director-general at the National Centre for Women Development (NCWD) to the extent that the former President apparently overlooked a damning report by the Office of the Auditor-General dated August 19, 2015, stating in part at NCWD “a total of N325, 085, 547 was frittered away with brazen disregard for relevant laws.”
However, in fairness to her, while the report had covered a period from September 2012 (a year before she took over office) to December 2014 of the 28 months covered, 15 were under Ms. Onwenu’s watch.
“My team and I turned the place around for the better and money started coming into the organization. I outperformed all previous director generals at the agency,” she vehemently defended her tenure.
Meanwhile, her traducers insist otherwise characterizing her tenure at NCW as that of “highhandedness, mismanagement, and financial recklessness,” substantially referring to her shielding from prosecution a personal assistant attached to her office for alleged embezzlement based on a petition by a certain Mr. Joseph Nwakama, a begrudged contractor renovating the Dora Akunyili Guest House at the center.
On February 16, 2016 matters at NCWD spiraled out of control as irate staff members booed her out of office. Writing in his back-page column in the Daily Trust newspaper edition of February 23, 2016, Muhammad Al Ghazali strongly condemned the incident, particularly on the ethnic dimension it had taken.
However, Prof. Kate Obiamaka Nwufo (mni) in an elaborate rejoinder to Al Ghazali maintained;
“This is a place, women could walk into before to cry on the shoulders of the DG and get their problems solved. Playing the ethnic card is laughable.
How many Igbo women who wanted to see her did she see? The barricade she erected isolated her and made her lose touch with reality and the fact that she and her cohorts had easy access to the First Lady made her feel like a goddess. She became a lord unto herself turning NCWD into a personal fortress.”
Are the conflicting narratives pushed in Onyeka Onwenu’s 1984 documentary film entirely hers?
While it is true that the December 31 1983 coup was not “unwelcome and unexpected,” she nonetheless defined her project as a “prophecy.”
It kind of sounds futuristically familiar, doesn’t it?
This is because on page 66 of his 2012 memoirs Professor Achebe recounts;
“On Saturday, January 15, 1966, members of the Society of Nigerian Authors happened to gather for a (Lagos) meeting. We were engaged in polite conversation, delaying the start of the meeting as some of our members trickled in. When J.P. (Clark-Bekederemo) arrived at the meeting his voice rang out.
“Chinua, you know you are a prophet. Everything in this book (A Man of the People) has happened except a coup.”
That very evening, unbeknownst to us, a military coup was being launched that would change Nigeria forever.”
(See details in There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra)
Hear Professor Soyinka part of that fateful Saturday’s meeting in page 286 of his own memoirs;
“J.P., I always suspected, did have a first-hand knowledge, albeit vague, of the very first coup d’état of 1966.”
(See details in You Must Set Forth At Dawn)
While a thin line separates disinformation from misinformation the moral here is against the background that both Achebe and Clark-Bekederemo were extensively interviewed in Ms. Onwenu’s documentary.
No doubt the esteemed presenter was entitled to her opinions no matter how prejudiced. Achebe and Clark-Bekederemo were similarly entitled to their biases elasticity which they stretched to the ridiculous extent of grandstanding.
Sadly, in the process, these eminent elders unleashed incalculable damage on the integrity, impartiality, and equivalence of Madam Onyeka’s documentary project.
This is not by any means to imply that the Second Republic was so pristine without its excess baggage of maladministration and endemic corruption.
If the same courtesy of free expression of bias and prejudice is to be extended across the board to viewers the documentary would be clearly seen for what it is – a hatchet job.
A rather mischievous attempt at locating the blame for the failure of the Second Republic on just a section of the nation – the North.
An otherwise great opportunity to critically examine and analytically take stock of our democratic lapses, unfortunately, ended up as a platform for regional mischaracterization and sectional ridicule.
The truth is the entire political ruling class failed during that brief civilian dispensation. North and South.
This writer humbly stands to be corrected on this.
Indeed, another documentary co-produced by BBC and NTA presented by Prof. Ali Al’amin Mazui (1933-2014) Two years later also succinctly unfolded some of the same that had pervaded Nigeria as presented by Onyeka Onwenu in 1984.
It was however a much more balanced presentation that conceded among others;
“The years 1979 to 1983 were perhaps the freest four years in Nigeria this century, certainly from the point of view of the open society and candid dissent. The names and reputations of the rulers were emphatically not spared. If political dissent means anything, it reached its highest peak in Shagari’s Nigeria, sometimes higher than in Western countries with their laws.”
(See details in p.182 The Africans: A Triple Heritage transcript)
One has to give it to Onyeka Onwenu for having the candor to admit that her documentary is “perhaps too critical in its assessment.”
Despite her purposeful asymmetry being so glaring it is still pertinent to question her objectivity in the 26th minute when she so grandiloquently stated;
“Oil wealth has concentrated patronage in the hands of government which of course means the party in power since this represents in the minds of many Nigerians a certain section of the country in this case the North. Some people feel they are losing out.”
The high falutin then continued with Ben Okri in the film reciting a poem by Clark-Bekeredemo implying a skewed economic reward scheme over benefitting the North to the detriment of the Niger Delta region;
“They draw waters up the country from the rivers. The Aborigines are left dry in their tenements in the name of one country,” concluding that Nigeria’s oil wealth is being disproportionally used “To turn waste regions into Garden Cities,” – a veiled reference to the federal capital of Abuja.
Two words. Negative profiling.
The late Onyeka Onwenu’s own experience during and after her brief stint at NCWD must have been an epiphany for her now part of her requiem.
For the rest of us, the full circle is that there is always a disconnect between perception and reality on where or how to locate the problems of Nigeria which are neither exclusively Northern nor Southern but inherently systemic cutting across our ethnic and religious differences.
Recall that the Buhari junta established special military tribunals to investigate and prosecute nearly 500 political detainees across then 19 states. Despite the toxic political differences that had existed in the defunct Second Republic a common denominator of sharp practices was firmly established with no nook nor cranny of Nigeria exempted.
“She came. She saw. She conquered.”
To paraphrase Caesar according to Appian.
That we might not see her kind again is absolutely without any doubt;
“Unbowed, unbent, unbroken.”
This is not only because the recently deceased Onyeka Onwenu bestrode our nation like a colossus but descended upon our collective imagination with magnificence and leaving us as mercurial as Halley’s Comet.
There was this deft touch about her. Smooth. Suave. Evergreen is a class act with great optics.
There was a lady.
Rest in peace, Ada Mazi.
