What becomes truly nauseating in discussions like this is the persistent attempt to reduce one of the greatest human tragedies in African history into a cheap propaganda line: “Ojukwu caused the war.”
There was and there still is the Culprit! People should stop being intellectually lazy and get up and do some facts finding- because in search of the truth, nothing should be left to sacredness.
That narrative is not only dishonest, it is morally offensive to the memory of the men, women and children who were butchered long before Biafra was declared.
Before anyone lectures Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu about “good counsel,” let them first explain why hundreds of thousands of Easterners were slaughtered across Northern Nigeria in 1966 while the Nigerian state stood by helplessly, or complicitly.
Let them explain why the same federation people are romanticizing today could not protect its own citizens from organized massacres.
Let them explain why terrified survivors fled back to the East in their hundreds of thousands carrying mutilated bodies, horror stories and trauma.
Was Ojukwu supposed to hand those people back to the same machinery that failed to protect them?
This lazy revisionism that paints Ojukwu as some power-hungry rebel while sanitizing the roles of General Yakubu Gowon and Chief Obafemi Awolowo is precisely the kind of intellectual dishonesty that has kept Nigeria trapped in lies for decades.
The crisis did not begin with Ojukwu.
It began with the destruction of the regional order, the political persecution of Chief Obafemi Awolowo himself by the Northern establishment of the Sardauna/Balewa era, the Western Region crisis engineered through Akintola, the January coup, the counter-coup, and finally the genocidal pogroms against Easterners.
Those are the facts history cannot bury forever.
And let us stop pretending that Aburi was about “secession.”
Aburi was fundamentally about restructuring Nigeria back into a true federation where each region could have security and autonomy within a united country. Ojukwu went to Aburi seeking constitutional guarantees for his people after they had been massacred.
The real historical question is this:
*Why did Gowon and the federal side walk away from Aburi after initially agreeing to it?
- Why did the Nigerian establishment suddenly abandon regionalism and embrace a centralized unitary structure after years of operating federalism?
And more importantly, why did Chief Awolowo – who himself had once fought fiercely for true federalism and regional autonomy, suddenly become one of the strongest intellectual defenders of “keeping Nigeria one”?🤷🏾♂️
History deserves honest answers to these questions instead of recycled propaganda.
People love quoting:
“To keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done,” but conveniently ignore that millions paid for that slogan with blood, starvation and devastation.
The same people blaming Ojukwu today rarely speak about the post-war economic punishment targeted at the Igbo people:
- the infamous £20 policy,
- abandoned property policies,
- economic exclusion,
and deliberate structural marginalization after the war.
Was that also Ojukwu’s fault?
Even more ironic is that present-day Nigeria has vindicated many of the warnings dismissed in the 1960s.
Today the country is drowning in insecurity, mass killings, kidnappings, state failure and deep ethnic distrust. The same unresolved structural contradictions that led to the collapse of the First Republic are still haunting Nigeria because truth was buried beneath propaganda and victorious-state revisionism. Ironically Sunday Igboho and the MC Oluomos are now being encouraged to start doing what the Aburi clearly declared then but was destroyed by the actor in chief Gen. Gowon who is now being heavily rewarded for destroying good and defending and preserving an unworkable system that has brought us to our knees today.
This is why some of us become deeply worried when people enter conversations like these still parroting narratives from old federal propaganda machinery as if independent historical research has not exposed many of those distortions already.
Books like “The Culprits” by Chief Dele Ogun and the HORRORS OF WAR by Okey Anueyiagu reveal the uncomfortable truth for many in denial, precisely because they challenge decades of carefully manufactured myths and sustained falsehood.
And yes, history will also remember that decades after the war, another son of the East, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, emerged once again arguing that the current Nigerian structure is fundamentally defective and unsustainable. What happened? He was dragged back to Nigeria and sentenced under Tinubu Administration by a Judge from a region that ought to see beyond the facades and understand that the water truly runs deep in the structural defects of Unitary federalism.
So, how will history record this? Your guess is as good as mine…
Agree or disagree with him, his emergence did not happen in a vacuum. It came from unresolved historical wounds – which some other parts of the country are alas beginning to admit albeit reluctantly.
So, no!
people should stop insulting the intelligence of others by pretending that that treacherous War – ethnic cleaning was simply the product of one stubborn man refusing “good counsel” – it is not and the facts before us have validated that
That is not history.
That is propaganda dressed up as analysis. Perhaps that is why we find ourselves in this devastation and state of hopelessness – because it seems that there’s really no lessons learned
The tragedy of Nigeria is not merely that terrible things happened.
It is that even after the bloodshed, many people still refuse to confront the truth about why they happened in the first place.
Mazi Chris Maduka
C.O.M✍🏾
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE 
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