Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Whatever policy Britain pursued was bound to be suspected by both sides. As David Hunt himself said, ‘whatever Britain did there was little hope of it being regarded as neutral’.45 Parker’s position in Enugu was even more difficult. He was told by the Biafran authorities that ‘the subordinate status of his relationship to the High Commissioner in Lagos was unacceptable’ and, eventually, in October 1967, he and his staff were asked to leave the country. The war itself dragged on for thirty months, but it was apparent quite soon that the Biafrans were not going to get the recognition they wanted. The support the federal government enjoyed was overwhelming. Britain continued to supply it with weapons, as journalists like Frederick Forsyth accused the Labour government in London of supporting a ‘military power clique in Lagos’.46 Biafra, among right-wing circles in Britain, became a stick with which to beat Wilson’s Labour government, though it is difficult to see how a Conservative administration would have acted differently. When Nigeria became independent in 1960, Iain Macleod, the Conservative Colonial Secretary in the government of Harold Macmillan, had declared that it was conducive to the ‘mutual advantage’ of Britain and Nigeria to co-operate in the ‘field of defence’. He had pledged that each country would ‘afford the other assistance in mutual defence’ and that Britain would ‘give Nigeria help in training, equipment and supplies’.47 To have cut off these supplies during the Biafran War would have been interpreted as a hostile act. Once the war started, there were two questions confronting the British government: the first was whether ‘Britain should supply arms and anti-aircraft weapons’ to the federal government; the second was ‘whether Shell and BP should pay the oil royalties owing to Nigeria to the Federal Government or to Biafra’, where most of the oil was situated.

  The solution to the first problem produced another typical piece of equivocation, but it was difficult to see what alternatives existed. Harold Wilson, in a letter of 16 July 1967, told Gowon that the British did not want to ‘place any obstacle in the way of orders’ for ‘reasonable supplies of arms of types similar to those obtained in the past’. In other words, the supply of arms from Britain to Nigeria would continue as it had in the past, but no more sophisticated weapons would be supplied. The notion of ‘reasonable supplies of arms’ seems bizarre, and what it meant was that, according to Wilson, ‘anti-aircraft guns’ would be supplied, but ‘requests for sophisticated weapons, a category which included aircraft bombs’, would be refused. Britain’s problems were compounded by the Cold War, during which the Russians constantly attempted to use international crises to increase their own influence and power in whichever region of the world was affected. The Soviet Union had already ‘agreed to supply Nigeria with aircraft and other “sophisticated” offensive weapons’. There was, therefore, a realization in London that if ‘British supplies to the Federal Military Government were cut off and the Federal Military Government were nevertheless victorious’, the Russians would get the credit and would then be able to ‘secure a further foothold in Nigeria’.48

  The second problem, what to do with the oil revenues, touched on another perennial concern of British imperialism. The old colonial rivalry with the French over oil emerged once again, while the French government’s attitude to Biafra was generally regarded as unhelpful by the British. In January 1968, David Hunt was concerned that, if Ojukwu won the war, he would ‘cancel the Shell/BP oil concessions and turn over this immensely profitable area to the French company’. The French company in question was SAFRAP, a state oil concern which the Nigerians already believed had begun channelling French government funds covertly to Biafra. The British believed that the French were supporting Biafra, and that Charles de Gaulle, the French President, had an ‘anti-Anglo-Saxon bias’. The Nigerians were also convinced that the French firmly supported Biafra.49 Despite the general suspicion of French policy in Whitehall, there was scant proof of the activities of French mercenaries: ‘There is little doubt that the French are up to no good in many parts of Africa, and it may well be that they are engaged in underhand activities in Biafra. But until concrete evidence of this can be supplied, I should have thought it irresponsible to claim that the French are involved either at official or Presidential level,’ one British official wrote. There was no point in accusing French mercenaries of fighting on behalf of Biafra with the connivance of the French government because the French would only deny it.50 Later that year, the French government went further and expressed support for Biafra, declaring on 31 July that the ‘present conflict should be resolved on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination’. 51

  Besides the French, by the end of 1967 Whitehall was also worried about ‘Chinese experts and military supplies’ coming into Biafra ‘in great numbers’ and ‘prolonging the bloodshed’. The Biafrans were indulging in ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ on their radio station, Radio Biafra, and British officials were worried that the anti-Soviet nature of the Biafran regime would draw them ‘closer to the Chinese’. There was no evidence, however, to suggest that the Chinese were involved in Biafra to any great degree.52 Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on the conflict, and people were quick to take sides. At the end of October, the Papal Office in the Vatican corresponded with the Foreign Office expressing ‘great anxiety concerning the situation in Eastern Nigeria where there is a large Christian, principally Roman Catholic, community’. In Sweden there were demonstrations in favour of the Biafran cause, and in general the Swedes were perceived by British diplomats to be ‘more sympathetic’ to Biafra.53

  The Biafran conflict, by causing famine and a humanitarian crisis, captured the imagination of many in the West, and the war was notable for the involvement of international aid agencies, like the Red Cross, which co-ordinated mass aid packages for the first time in an international crisis. Millions of dollars were poured into relief for Biafra; thousands of volunteers were mobilized. The normal annual budget for the International Committee of the Red Cross was £500,000, but by September 1968 the Committee’s monthly budget for Nigeria alone was £1 million. The Red Cross’s operations were assisted by various foreign governments’ national Red Cross Societies and other agencies, as well as by an unprecedented number of individual donations. Biafra was one of the first media wars, if not the first, in which reporters such as Winston Churchill, grandson of the wartime leader, Jonathan Aitken, later a Conservative MP, and Frederick Forsyth, the author, learned their trade and gained useful exposure. There was a chic to the war. Forsyth befriended Ojukwu, whom he saw very much as an English minor public schoolboy, much like himself. Forsyth knew Ojukwu well enough to correct the mistaken belief that the Biafran leader had been educated at Sandhurst. He was at Eaton Hall, an infantry school in Cheshire, and not the more famous military academy, but this didn’t matter. Everyone thought Ojukwu was a typical product of Sandhurst. ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare, the celebrated mercenary, got Ojukwu’s academic provenance completely wrong when he described his manner and accent as those ‘of an English squire’ and claimed that his ‘Sandhurst and Cambridge background predominated . . . his mind was clear and decisive’. Details did not detract from the central point that this Nigerian freedom fighter had apparently been educated at a decent public school and knew how to drink his whisky. As a result of Ojukwu’s background, the natural snobbishness of some commentators made them sympathetic to the Biafran cause, just as snobbishness had made the northern emirs attractive to an earlier generation of British imperial administrator.54

  The foreign involvement, through the aid agencies and various pop concerts held in support of Biafra, infuriated the Nigerian government. It felt that Western reporters were ignorant of normal conditions in Africa and had ‘fanned public opinion in Europe and North America with exaggerated stories about the real suffering’. The Nigerians were appalled by what they saw as the ‘neo-imperialist and self-righteous attitude of the international charitable organisations’. They remembered with bitterness that neither the Pope nor the Red Cross had ‘been equally brave in standing u
p to Hitler’.55 Nigerian resentment of the Pope was expressed immediately after the war in the New Nigerian, a newspaper based in the north of the country, which predicted that ‘accusations of atrocities’ would be levelled against the federal troops, and that the ‘Pope [was] already leading the way’. ‘What’, the newspaper asked, ‘have we done to deserve this pontifical injustice?’ The following week, the same newspaper, in an article entitled ‘The Foreign Do-gooders’, declared that the ‘joint Church aid, the French and Nordic Red Cross, Caritas’ and other organizations could ‘keep their blood money’, since the relief work could be undertaken by Nigerians themselves.56

  The end of the war came at the very beginning of 1970. After thirty months of fighting, the Biafrans surrendered, though the elusive Ojukwu himself had been flown to Gabon by his Swedish pilot Carl-Gustav von Rosen. Major General Philip Effiong, the forty-five-year-old emergency leader, announced the surrender in a radio broadcast: ‘any question of a government in exile is repudiated by our people’. The aftermath of the war inaugurated a remarkable period of reconciliation. There were no trials or recriminations, and Gowon, the Nigerian federal leader, who had devoured books about the American Civil War in the course of his own country’s conflict, adopted the attitude of Abraham Lincoln when he declared that there would be ‘no victors, no vanquished’ in the war. Behind the scenes, however, there was less magnanimity, and this less generous attitude was reflected by the British government and by some individual MPs in the Labour Party. In January 1970, Maurice Foley, a Labour MP and self-appointed Africa expert, was in Lagos, where he talked with the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Information: ‘The conversation turned to the need to destroy the personal image of Ojukwu.’ Foley suggested that ‘a fully documented, comprehensive broadside followed by silence’ might be the best way to achieve this.57 Even in 1973, the Foreign Office was concerned to find out that Ojukwu’s wife had been in Britain the previous Christmas. It was angry that the Home Office didn’t seem to know when, or if, she had left the country. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was ‘very unhappy about the idea of her coming to this country at all and had agreed only with reluctance to her coming here for a visit of three weeks at the outside’. There was relief when it was learned that she had actually left Britain after only two weeks, on 20 December.58 Meanwhile, after the Igbo defeat, other tensions were emerging. In January 1973, the Yorubas were now, according to M. H. G. Rogers, the Deputy High Commissioner in Lagos, ‘regarded with much more suspicion in the North’. In a statement that indicated bias towards the Hausa-speaking north, Rogers wrote that the Yorubas were now ‘inclined to show the same kind of arrogance towards the Hausas which the Ibos [sic] showed in earlier years and which in part led to the Ibo [sic] massacres of 1968’.59

  Gowon himself was toppled in 1975, in one of the dozens of coups which have plagued Nigeria since independence. The institution of civilian rule made tribalism an even ‘more important factor’, according to a Foreign Office report in 1977. The report concluded that housing, loans, jobs, transport, nearly every area of Nigerian life were ‘more blatantly dependent on family or tribal connections than before’. The armed forces were particularly affected by tribal antagonisms. The Yorubas, it was noted, did not like serving in the army, while northern officers tended to come from Hausa-Fulani aristocracy. In the mid-1970s, Nigeria’s Brigade of Guards, which had been largely manned by members of minority tribes under General Gowon, was disbanded when General Murtala Mohammed, a northerner, deposed Gowon. The Guards were then replaced by units drawn largely from Hausas from the north. Unsurprisingly, it was an officer from one of these minority tribes, a Colonel Buka Suka Dimka, who in February 1976 led an abortive coup in which General Mohammed was assassinated. Between thirty and forty people, mainly relatively junior army officers, were tried and executed for this putsch, with ‘almost all those executed’ coming from ‘a relatively small area’ in the middle of the country.60

  Modern Nigeria has been dogged by tribalism and corruption. The country’s economic performance has been disastrous. More than five decades after independence, as one historian of modern Africa has written, Nigeria presents ‘a sorry spectacle’. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winner for literature, has described his own country as ‘the open sore of a continent’. Despite an oil boom which generated about $280 billion over thirty years, the economy was ‘derelict’; public services were ‘chronically inefficient’; infrastructure was decaying. On average, Nigerians were poorer in 2000 than they had been at the start of the oil boom in the early 1970s; half of the population now lived on less than 30 cents a day. Successive governments had failed to provide even basic services for the people. Lagos, a city of around 10 million, had no more than 12,000 policemen on its payroll, whereas Greater London, with a population of 8 million, had 32,000 police officers in 2008. Corruption had played its part. Vast sums had been spent on prestige projects, but the money had merely lined the pockets of officials. Tales of Nigerian corruption were staggering, such was their scope. A total of $8 billion, for example, had been spent constructing a steel industry complex at Ajaokuta, which had conspicuously failed to produce steel in any significant quantities a decade after the project had started.61

  Nigeria’s rulers in the 1990s seemed to reach new levels of corruption. In 2003 Switzerland’s highest court turned down an appeal by relatives of the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who had ruled the country with an iron grip for four and a half years before his death, reportedly in the arms of two Indian prostitutes, in 1998. It was revealed that Abacha had diverted billions of dollars into personal bank accounts in Switzerland and London. The Swiss authorities froze accounts in their banks worth about $618 million, and pledged to help the Nigerian government track down other assets. In 2004, the British authorities were reported to have found traces of $1.3 billion handled by British banks on behalf of Abacha’s family and friends, but the money had not remained in Britain.62 The political process itself was dominated by money and violence. Governorship of one of Nigeria’s thirty-six states was an eagerly contested office, and in 2006 one gubernatorial candidate in the small province of Ekiti was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in his bed. This tiny state had a population of only 2 million, in a country whose population was then estimated to be 130 million, but the fact that the governor of each state received a monthly cheque, as part of that individual state’s share of Nigeria’s federal oil revenue, allowed the governors tempting opportunities to become very rich. Largely unaccountable, governors used the oil money to strengthen their own positions by bribing state legislators and other officials. One governor of Ekiti was alleged to have spent $7 million, mostly on contracts with political allies, ‘supposedly set aside for a poultry farming project’ which had not yet produced a single egg.63

  Besides the endemic corruption that scarred Nigerian economic and political life, ethnic rivalries intensified, with religious animosity between Christians and Muslims aggravating tribal tensions. ‘Everybody is sharpening his knife,’ warned one state governor.64 At the end of 2002, violence erupted in the northern capital, Kaduna, over the Miss World pageant that was supposed to be held in Nigeria, after an article appeared in a Lagos-based newspaper suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed would have approved of the pageant. The journalist, a woman staffer on the paper, asked, ‘What would Mohammed think?’ She answered her own question by asserting that ‘in all honesty he would probably have chosen a wife from among them’. Four days of religious violence ensued, during which more than 200 people lost their lives. At least twenty-two churches and eight mosques were destroyed in Kaduna, causing the Miss World event to be relocated to London.65

  The old hostility towards the Igbos still remained. Chinua Achebe described the situation in pessimistic terms: ‘Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Ibo [sic]. They would all describe them as aggressive, arrogant and clannish.’ A Western writer, travelling i
n Nigeria in the late 1990s, could claim that the ‘[Biafran] war was still in the mind of everyone in eastern Nigeria even among the majority of the Ibos [sic] who were born after the guns fell silent’. Ojukwu, in his ‘impeccable upper class English accent’, could tell the reporter that part of the Igbo problem was that ‘we don’t realize that we have survived’.66 Ojukwu was now a successful businessman who claimed his old adversary, Gowon, as a personal friend, but the wounds still festered. He was in philosophical mood at the beginning of the twenty-first century when he observed that politicians were ‘stirring up ethnic hatred because they have little else to offer’. His subsequent statement could be applied to many other situations, in lands far removed from the African scene: ‘the more empty the leadership, the more reliance on primordial forces’.

  It was clear, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that the structural problems that ‘have bedevilled Nigeria since Lord Lugard’s amalgamation in the name of the British Crown have not been resolved’.67 That amalgamation had ushered in a period of indirect rule, in which a system that had been developed for one area of the country was indiscriminately foisted on to another part. Besides the problem of yoking together different areas with radically different traditions, there was a wider problem of decolonization and democracy itself. The whole tenor of British rule in Nigeria, as in other places, had been elitist and aristocratic. Northern emirs, Yoruba chiefs and business tycoons had been fêted and flattered by the colonial regime. Indirect rule itself deliberately elevated the so-called natural leaders of society and used them as instruments of imperial power. Nigeria was, as one high commissioner believed in 1968, ‘one of the major British creations in Africa and hitherto the most successful’.68 Nigerians felt an ‘intense interest in Britain’, in the view of one British deputy high commissioner in Lagos in the 1970s, because ‘Britain created Nigeria out of the bush and . . . almost all the institutions which Nigerians value here were either imported from Britain or deliberately fostered by British administrators’. And yet, in a statement of great insight, the same official, Richard Parsons, observed that it was the elitist nature of many of the African leaders that made democracy so difficult to achieve: ‘In retrospect the tragedy in modern Africa is perhaps that successive British Governments, when giving independence to their African territories, insisted on trying to transfer power to ostensibly democratic regimes based on the Westminster model. This has run counter to the views of many African leaders who are unashamedly elitist.’69 This may have been true, but the whole premise of indirect rule in Nigeria had been ‘unashamedly elitist’; indeed it was the very nature of British rule that had encouraged the elitism in the first place. Ojukwu, the Sardauna of Sokoto, the Yoruba chiefs and others had merely adopted the lofty, patrician style of their colonial masters; genuine democracy was as alien to them as it had been to Goldie and Lugard at the beginning of the twentieth century. Democracy, even without tribal conflict, never really stood a chance in Nigeria.