Gov. Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State was interviewed recently by The Will, an online news medium. Below is an excerpt from the interview:
"And if we really wanted to ensure total reconciliation, how come every account holder in the eastern region was given only £20? It did not matter whether your father had £10,000,000 or £50,000,000 before the war; you were given just £20. It was a take it or leave it situation. If your family survived and there was an account holder alive, he/she went to the bank, and collected just £20.
Could £20 pounds solve the Kwashiorkor that we were seeing? Could it reconstruct the houses that were burnt? Could it produce food? A lot of other things happened that I did not mention on that occasion. Don’t forget that it was shortly after the war in 1971 that the policy of indigenisation started, where most of the foreign industries and companies were sold to Nigerians, and the war-ravaged eastern regions, which include the entire South-South and the rest of them, could not buy, because no one who did not have money to even feed or clothe himself would have had money to buy any industry.
So, I was just wondering, as a young man, if that was true reconciliation, because one would have thought that the government would have gone to any extent to give them more money so that they could truly rehabilitate themselves.
They needed money from reconstruction, and I would have thought that reconstruction would have also started from the East."
(http://thewillnigeria.com/politics/14312.html)
A major mistake Gen. Yakubu Gowon made as Nigeria's Head of State when the Nigeria Civil War ended was that he did not initiate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission even though he declared that "there was no victor and no vanquished". Rwanda is a great example of how such a Commission can be useful in bringing wholeness to a country torn apart by war.
The various reactions motivated essentially by tribe to Late Prof. Chinua Achebe's book, "There was a country", proved how deep the wounds inflicted by the Nigeria Civil War were and how even those who did not experience the war were scarred by it. Nigeria and Nigerians have still not fully healed from the effect of that war even after four decades.
As Nigeria counts down to the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference, which even the President and the Senate President now realise is inevitable (by whatever name it is called) if we are to move forward as a nation, I believe that as a major first step towards true national reconciliation, it is imperative that the Federal Government creates a special fund and pay back, with interest equivalent to at least the Central Bank of Nigeria's Monetary Policy Rates or the Minimum Rediscount Rates during the intervening period, all those Igbos and other Nigerians (or their successors) whose bank account balances were fraudulently appropriated when the Civil War ended. Justice and Equity demand that this be done at the least.
God bless Nigeria.
Nigeria di fure!
"And if we really wanted to ensure total reconciliation, how come every account holder in the eastern region was given only £20? It did not matter whether your father had £10,000,000 or £50,000,000 before the war; you were given just £20. It was a take it or leave it situation. If your family survived and there was an account holder alive, he/she went to the bank, and collected just £20.
Could £20 pounds solve the Kwashiorkor that we were seeing? Could it reconstruct the houses that were burnt? Could it produce food? A lot of other things happened that I did not mention on that occasion. Don’t forget that it was shortly after the war in 1971 that the policy of indigenisation started, where most of the foreign industries and companies were sold to Nigerians, and the war-ravaged eastern regions, which include the entire South-South and the rest of them, could not buy, because no one who did not have money to even feed or clothe himself would have had money to buy any industry.
So, I was just wondering, as a young man, if that was true reconciliation, because one would have thought that the government would have gone to any extent to give them more money so that they could truly rehabilitate themselves.
They needed money from reconstruction, and I would have thought that reconstruction would have also started from the East."
(http://thewillnigeria.com/politics/14312.html)
A major mistake Gen. Yakubu Gowon made as Nigeria's Head of State when the Nigeria Civil War ended was that he did not initiate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission even though he declared that "there was no victor and no vanquished". Rwanda is a great example of how such a Commission can be useful in bringing wholeness to a country torn apart by war.
The various reactions motivated essentially by tribe to Late Prof. Chinua Achebe's book, "There was a country", proved how deep the wounds inflicted by the Nigeria Civil War were and how even those who did not experience the war were scarred by it. Nigeria and Nigerians have still not fully healed from the effect of that war even after four decades.
As Nigeria counts down to the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference, which even the President and the Senate President now realise is inevitable (by whatever name it is called) if we are to move forward as a nation, I believe that as a major first step towards true national reconciliation, it is imperative that the Federal Government creates a special fund and pay back, with interest equivalent to at least the Central Bank of Nigeria's Monetary Policy Rates or the Minimum Rediscount Rates during the intervening period, all those Igbos and other Nigerians (or their successors) whose bank account balances were fraudulently appropriated when the Civil War ended. Justice and Equity demand that this be done at the least.
God bless Nigeria.
Nigeria di fure!
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