You Must Set Forth at Dawn (20 page)

Banjo let him run on for some time, then interrupted with a gesture that was nearly imperceptible—he appeared to be used to commanding effortlessly and economically, like one who needed to conserve his energy. My appearance in Enugu, he pronounced, could not have been more fortuitous. The face of the war was about to change, dramatically, and I was the only one who could transmit certain crucial messages to the other side, that is, to the leaders of the West, both military and civilian, but especially to a certain Lieutenant Colonel Olusegun Obasanjo. It was there, right in Victor Banjo's command room, that I heard that name for the first time and was informed that Obasanjo had only recently been appointed commanding officer in charge of the Western Area Command, with his headquarters in Ibadan. Obasanjo had once served in a subordinate capacity to him. His response to the message I would take, Banjo stressed, would be crucial to the changes that were being contemplated on the Biafran side.

I BECAME A MARKED man on account of my visit to Biafra. Delivering the messages that I brought back with me, however, turned me once again into a wanted man, but this time that designation had turned sinister and all the more deadly for being unannounced.

On the third night after my departure from Enugu, Victor Banjo broke the federal stranglehold on Biafra and led the breakout military unit that had been in secret training. The obstacles that blocked both the Biafran and Midwest ends of the Asaba bridge were flung aside, and Banjo's army crossed the bridge in a rapid move and took over the Midwest state on the other side of the Niger River. It could be rightly considered a politically fatal move for the Biafrans, even militarily self-defeating—unless of course such a move was proceeding strictly according to plan, which was to plunge straight through to Lagos in an all-night advance and swarm over the seat of government without a loss of momentum. That invading force did not, and the result was that the rebel forces were soon spread too thin to be effective. The move also played straight into the hands of the federal government both militarily and politically. What had formerly been a limited war, in which one of the states still retained sufficient autonomy to insist on its neutrality—“No shooting on Midwest soil,” declared the governor, David Ejoor—that war now expanded to involve the entire nation. It changed the terms of conflict, enabling the federal government to mobilize the nation against the allegedly expansionist agenda of the Biafrans. It altered the scale and tempo of the war from a desultory “police action” to one of “total war,” leaving no room for further neutrality.

If I had earlier had any hesitation about delivering the messages from the architect and leader of that Midwest incursion, they vanished completely and even took on an urgency once Victor Banjo's troops made their move, although not fully according to script. The crux of his message was this:
Let them understand in the West that I am leading not a Biafran army but an army of liberation,
made up not only of Biafrans but of other ethnic groups. Make the governor of the
West and other Western leaders understand this. Urge them not to be taken in by
any propaganda by the federal government about a Biafran plan to subjugate the
rest of the nation, especially the West.

Moving as rapidly as I dared, since it was clear that I had come under heavy surveillance, I carried out my mission to the civilian leaders, with one exception: Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Even before I left Enugu, I refused to accede to Banjo's insistence that I speak to “Awo.” After my meeting with that politician, I simply felt, intuitively, that the approaching conflict was not one in which he should be involved.

A Moment of Truth —
and
the Lies of History

WAS LEFT ONLY ONE INDIVIDUAL ON VICTOR BANJO'S CALL LIST, THE MOST critical: Olusegun Obasanjo, Officer Commanding, Western Zone. It was the moment of truth, the hardest, most risk-laden decision of all. Obasanjo's junior officers, with whom I had maintained steady contact since my return, warned me to beware. In the same breath, they clearly wished—well—maybe if . . . I weighed the risks. They were difficult days for objective, rational choices. While I hesitated, Victor Banjo broke through to the Midwest, but now he paused to secure the Midwest militarily and politically, making inflammatory broadcasts. The West became confused and awaited direction from its leaders. I chose.

I called Obasanjo over a secret telephone in his bedroom, of whose existence he had not known. In his memoirs,
²⁸
Obasanjo tells the story of how he had to search for the source of the mysterious ringing that he eventually traced to a wardrobe in his bedroom, one of the few details in that narrative that can stand the test of veracity in the midst of so many half-truths, outright lies, and coy adumbrations. A few more calls and we agreed to meet “unaccompanied and unarmed”—another truthful detail from his memoirs—at a petrol station on the road between the noncommercial Jericho and Mokola sections of Ibadan. Now I had truly burned my bridges, I told myself. There was no turning back.

Even before the fateful meeting, Femi's brother, Brigadier “Bolus,” had cautioned Femi about his association with me. I still recall the exact words that Femi said his brother had used:
“So'ra l'odo e o, enu nfe si la'ra. Mi o tii mo kini
n'lon gan, sugbon, so'ra l'odo e”
—“Watch yourself with him, tongues are fanning the wind in his direction. I don't know exactly what is going on, but watch yourself.” His brother was right. What he did not know was how far committed Femi was—not to the Biafran side as such but to the liberation of the Western Region from the domination of the North.

With the incursion of Victor Banjo's troops into the Midwest, all subterfuge, all fence-sitting, came to an end, affecting soldiers and civilian leaders alike. Obafemi Awolowo surrendered his bargaining powers. The Midwest, formerly a part of the West, a self-declared neutral until now, had been invaded and occupied. That region now threw its weight formally behind the federal government, where Awolowo was now minister of finance under Gowon, and it put an end to all his options. Nnamdi Azikiwe, “Zik of Africa,” an Igbo and former president of the Nigerian Federation, had already taken his place on the side of his fellow Biafrans. Not that he'd had much choice. At the time of the January 1966 coup, which had been led by a preponderance of Igbo officers, Azikiwe had been on a seemingly endless “health cruise” in the Caribbean, and news of the coup had caught him, incongruously, on the isle of Haiti, then groaning under the misrule of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The timing of the cruise had been too pat, and the Northern proponents of the countercoup that brought Yakubu Gowon to power in July did not believe for one moment that Azikiwe had not been taken into confidence over a coup that oversaw the decimation of Northern leadership. Azikiwe wisely kept beyond reach of the new regime, becoming a roving ambassador for the breakaway region, a powerful voice internationally in the Biafran cause.

Azikiwe's counterweight on the Nigerian side was Anthony Enahoro. Tony Enahoro was a most effective minister in Yakubu Gowon's government. Indeed, his advocacy contributed much to the international acceptance of the federal cause. Enahoro exuded an easy charm and was gifted with intelligent eloquence, a persuasive Edo nobility in the midst of so many fakes. He was one of the early youthful nationalists, a political model from our school days. Enahoro had learned at the feet of Azikiwe, who would, however, denounce him during that anticolonial struggle as an intemperate agitator when the younger man stood trial for sedition against the colonial government. Enahoro never forgave Azikiwe for that act of repudiation and later switched his allegiance to Obafemi Awolowo and his party, the Action Group, joining his leader in prison as one of the casualties of the treasonable felony trials. He was among those who were freed by Yakubu Gowon in the shrewd political move to gain support among Southerners in the conflict with the breakaway Biafrans. Enahoro was a die-hard federalist—at least then. Together with Obafemi Awolowo, he outweighed the influence of Nnamdi Azikiwe in mobilizing international support.

In his position as commissioner for information, Tony Enahoro was the government spokesman who would read to the international press, after my arrest and detention, an infamous confessional statement that had me admitting that I had been negotiating the purchase of warplanes for Biafra! It was, of course, intended to silence any further hue and cry over my continuing detention without trial. I found it rather ironic—and a little depressing at the time, I must confess—that the “fugitive offender,” not many months out of jail, would be the one to read such a damnable fabrication and wave the “confessional statement” in the face of the international press. Perhaps the most easily disproved of the charges—next to the ridiculous claim that I was purchasing arms, including planes for Biafra—was my alleged admission that I had held a meeting
in Benin
with Victor Banjo, the leader of the invasion, on the very night when his troops had taken over the Midwest state. A few weeks after Tony Enahoro's press conference, an indignant Femi Johnson encountered the commissioner on the Ibadan golf course and refused to let that chance meeting go to waste.

“That can't be true!” he challenged the minister. “I was with Wole in Ibadan throughout that day; you can check with my wife and a number of other people whose names I will provide you. All day, including dinner. He could not have been at that meeting as alleged. That confession must be a forgery. It's a frame-up.”

Enahoro was taken aback. He asked Femi how sure he was of his facts. Femi swore that he was ready to back up his statement anywhere. The minister asked him to write a formal letter to that effect, which Femi did the following day, making sure that Enahoro had it in his hands before he returned to Lagos. To further engage his interest, Femi reminded Enahoro of his own past predicament as a “fugitive offender”—the title of Enahoro's account of that experience—and of the voluntary role I had played in the efforts to prevent his extradition.

Tony Enahoro replied, “Oh, that was then. This is war, you know. The rules are different.”

Curiously, I found myself in agreement with Tony Enahoro—it
was
war— and I never held his indifference against him, which was just as well, since we were destined to join forces two decades later against a far more detestable foe, the dictator Sani Abacha. Even so, I must confess that I was rather nettled at the baldness of the dismissal. I suppose one always nurses a secret expectation of some kind of reciprocity, even if it exists on a purely rhetorical level. As for the statement that Femi handed to him the following day, that was the last he ever heard from Tony.

FEMI HAD CAUSE to be a hundred percent certain of my alibi. Not only had I been with him most of that crucial day, I had again involved him in my course of action, imposed a chore on him—which was to find me a new hiding place. It had become necessary to “go under,” even while remaining active. His house was now “hot,” and I had no wish to implicate him any futher in this latest entanglement. Tongues from the police and military intelligence were indeed fanning the wind toward my person, and I still had some urgent tasks ahead, tasks that required total seclusion. I also needed a secure place for the two or three final meetings that were left—with members of my group, for instance, even with Bola Ige, and indeed one or two military contacts. I could no longer go to people but could get them to come to me if I succeeded in finding a secure venue. Obasanjo was the sole exception—we had agreed to meet at Jericho.

Femi went away to make inquiries, returned with information about an expatriate civil servant who had gone on leave. His house was unoccupied; not even the servants' quarters were tenanted. Femi obtained the number and address of the bungalow—in the Iyaganku government quarters, virtually under the nose of the police—and drove me casually past the house in daytime while I looked it over. Close to the police though it was, it was most obligingly secluded; the expatriate owner was a kindred spirit, he believed in a surround of lush vegetation. Best of all, it had a functioning telephone.

Later that night, he dropped me by the fence, armed with a torch and the now regulation hamper of food and drinks. Gaining entrance through a window was easy. Once assured of entry, I told him to get lost. “Don't come near me again. From now on, you don't know me, never saw me in your life. If I am absolutely desperate for some item, I'll telephone or get a message to you somehow. You can bring it at nighttime, drop it at the point where you've just let me off, and keep going. You've done enough, you've done more than you should have done. Now get out and look after yourself.” The shocked look on his face was a marvel to see, but he saw at once that I was in deadly earnest, sensed at once that this bout of conflict with a military government, and in wartime, was far more serious than my earlier political skirmishes.

I underestimated Femi yet again, forgot that he did not willingly let go of some space of collaboration. The many times when I denied him participation, he succeeded in inflicting on me a sense of betrayal, as if I had deprived him of a natural entitlement that was well within his conspiratorial competence. He insisted on driving me to the rendezvous. In vain I impressed on him the fact that I had my arrangements well in hand, that one of my own group was far better equipped to handle any untoward situation, but, most important of all, he would be exposing himself to unnecessary risks. He flared up—“Why shouldn't I? If I get arrested, well, what exactly would they charge me with? That you had dinner in my house, told me to drop you at the petrol station and return for you after an hour—since when did that add up to a crime? You're going to meet the man in charge of zonal security on some crucial national matter, leaving from my house—everybody knows you stay here, after all. So I drop you and pick you up again, what's wrong with that?” And then the clinching argument: “In any case, we know each other. I've done insurance for him and his colleagues—we get on quite well. In fact, I'll say hello to him as I drop you.”

I drew the line there, surrendered the others. Just drop me at the petrol station and take off, I insisted. As it happened, the rendezvous was close to Femi's home. He would pick me up at my hideout after dark, take me to the encounter, I would satisfy his burning curiosity over a late dinner, and then my man—not he—would return me to my base.

I got busy on the telephone, even as I continued to ask myself, Do I really want to meet this man? More meetings with his junior officers followed where we debated that issue.

I had already delivered the core of Victor Banjo's message over the telephone, but Obasanjo wanted very much to discuss it in some detail. I knew what the truth was: he needed to ask questions. Questions to help him decide which side to support? Or questions that might yield snippets of intelligence for securing his own base in aiding the federal cause? It was all very suspicious, and, to make matters worse, the character references from his own officers were not especially reassuring; the kindest word that summarized their assessment of their commanding officer was—cagey. The situation in the Midwest remained fluid; indeed, there was a lull for several weeks, as if the federal government and Biafra were weighing up each other, or else—which was more likely—waiting to see which way the West would respond to the new situation. Fighting had not yet flared up on the next obvious front: the border between the West and Midwest. The West itself was undergoing its final moments of fence-sitting, never mind the stout declarations of allegiance to the slogan of “One Nigeria”!

The British High Commission intelligence network, for once, had been caught on the hop, though we were to learn later that it had not failed completely—the high commissioner did report the likelihood of the Midwest crossing to Yakubu Gowon's government but could not pinpoint the date. Much, so much, now depended on the decision of the Western command. It was a military situation, and not even the governor of the West could make that decision, as he had no forces under his command. Banjo was holed up in Benin. The bulk of the federal troops, weapons, and logistical resources was bottled up in the Northern sector, since the Midwest had earlier refused to allow any fighting on its soil—a position that was no longer tenable. The federal government desperately depended on the West holding firm to the federal cause. In short, one man now held the key, and that was the officer in charge of the Western Area Command, Olusegun Obasanjo.