Recovery After Biafra

Let us pull ourselves together each to each, here, as brothers with brother, pooled.

Take past events as the repentant woman's past, always forgotten and always retold.

--Pol Ndu, Ibo poet (1971)

Slowly and somewhat painfully, the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Africa's richest, most powerful and most populous nation (about 60 million), is pulling itself together after the devastating civil war that ended two years ago. A reconciliation of sorts has taken place between the federal government, headed by General Yakubu Gowon, and the secessionist republic of Biafra, now Nigeria's East Central state. The scars of war, physical as well as psychological, have mostly faded. The sole reminders of the airstrip at Uli--Biafra's only gateway to the outside world during the long federal siege--are the rusting hulks of five relief planes that missed the runway in the darkness; the strip itself is a highway once more.

All Nigeria is full of boom talk, and the country has enormous economic potential. It is rich in cash crops --cocoa, peanuts, palm oil, coal and iron ore. Most important is oil, which was discovered there in 1956. With a current output of 1,700,000 bbl. a day, Nigeria has passed Iraq and Canada to become the world's ninth largest oil producer. The government's share of the profits is expected to surpass $1 billion this year and $1.25 billion next year.

Prosperity, however, has been accompanied by the paradoxical growing pains that so often affect industrializing nations. The country is suffering from high unemployment (an estimated 1,000,000 are jobless in the East Central state alone). Most basic services --roads, telephones, water and power --are in chaos and disrepair; the luxurious Ikoyi Hotel outside of Lagos, for instance, is often waterless for days at a time. Goods rot on their way to market because of highway snarls, and according to a recent survey, the chances of completing a telephone call in Lagos are only 1 in 10.

Return of Dash. What's wrong? Bureaucratic bottlenecks account for some of the trouble; officials of Nigeria's twelve states claim they have yet to see development money supposedly appropriated by the federal government. Another factor is massive corruption--known as "dash"--which once again is a fact of Nigerian life. "When we ask what's happened to our money," says one state development official, "Lagos tells us it's on the way--that it's been put into the 'development pipeline.' But it never comes out. Either the pipeline is blocked or the pipeline is porous."

General Gowon, 37, a popular and honest leader who still lives in a rundown military barrack, has vowed to return the government to civilian hands in 1976. In the meantime, his army --which accounts for an exorbitant 34% of the $1.1 billion federal budget --is enjoying the perquisites of power. Staff officers ride through the capital in chauffeur-driven Mercedes sedans, just as civilian politicians used to do. In the expensive suburbs of Lagos, there are scores of new homes and apartment buildings whose owners are officers and gentlemen. Many Nigerians believe that corruption is worse in Lagos today than it was in 1966, when the army seized power.

In contrast to the rest of Nigeria, the war-damaged East Central state is healing at an extraordinary pace. Thanks largely to postwar medical attention and food supplies, a majority of Biafra's starving children have miraculously survived; the state has 1,100,000 children in school--more than it had before the war. New buildings are sprouting amid the wreckage, and the great market at Aba is booming again.

The Aba textile mill was bombed five times during the war, and its machinery was looted, vandalized and scattered; yet its technicians managed to put it back into operation in five months. Nigerian army engineers estimated that it would take a year to rebuild the badly damaged waterworks at Nsukka; Ibo engineers did it in three weeks. The state abounds with similar tales. As the American manager of the Aba mill, a North Carolinian named W.A. Way, puts it: "Ain't no power on earth gonna hold these people back."

Last on the List. The recovery was made possible by Gowon's insistence that the Ibos, the most energetic and aggressive of Nigeria's 15 major tribes, should not be persecuted in defeat. Some 65 rebel officers have been allowed to rejoin the federal army. The state government is entirely in the hands of Ibos; the state administrator, Ukpabi Asika, was a federal loyalist during the war, but several of his commissioners and fully 99% of his civil servants fought on the Biafran side. Like many other influential Ibos who were closely involved with the Biafran regime, Novelists Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi live in freedom in the East Central state today; both have returned to their writing.

It is also true, however, that the Ibos have been subjected to some discrimination. Shortly after the war ended, Major General Adeyinka Adebayo, the army's second-ranking officer, vowed that the Ibos, having lost the war, would not be permitted to win the peace. Many Nigerians, both in and out of the federal government, seem determined to defend those words. Most Ibos who held civil service jobs outside the East Central state before the war have been unable to win them back, even when no other qualified Nigerians are available to fill them. The East Central state is occupied by two federal army divisions, and it receives far less than its share of federal development funds. "The word is out," says one foreign-aid official, "that the East Central state is last on the list for everything, even books."

With its size and burgeoning economy, the Nigerian giant may yet succeed in strengthening and stabilizing all of Black Africa. Its progress will be seriously impeded, however, by its failure to achieve what Poet Pol Ndu described as the pooling of brothers with brother.

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