A SUCCESSFUL PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST A BENEFACTOR - The Real Lady of Means.*By Hon Akogun Wale Anomo Chairman Ikosi/Ejirin LCDA

*A SUCCESSFUL PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST A BENEFACTOR - The Real Lady of Means.*By Hon Akogun Wale Anomo Chairman Ikosi/Ejirin LCDA

By Ayekooto

In 1968 during the Civil War, devastated Igbos men and children were brought by the Red Cross to Lagos, naked and superannuated. They were dumped on the site where the National Stadium is standing today. It was a bare playground by then.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Commissioner of Finance and Deputy Chairman, of the War Council, told Gen Yakubu Gowon that it was not safe to keep Igbos as refugees. He said a conversational refuge camp would not be ideal at the time the Western Region was battling with epidemic attacks of Smallpox and Cholera.

 The WHO efforts to help Nigeria contain the spread were much doubled by the care of the wounded in battle. And that the epidemic, if it breaks out in the camp, the lives they meant to save could be eventually lost.

Awolowo said he knew his people were very passionate, he suggested that Gowon could allow him to call upon them to carry those Igbo children to their homes. Awo also asked for approval of money for him to apply alternative measures:

- residents of Lagos, Abeokuta, Ijebu, and environ, were asked, through the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service, to come forward and take away the orphans from Igbo land to their homes for care. Yoruba people responded by taking to their homes the Igbo children, all suffering from Kwashiokwa - a poor health condition predicated by lack of salt in the system.

- they clothed, nursed, nurtured, and sent to school with their children.

- Chief Obafemi Awolowo, placed an order for Lady's Sewing Machine for the grownup Igbo boys to help people mend their clothes to enable them to feed themselves. 

That is what we know as 'Ovbionma' then (we later knew the source of the word to be the Sewing Industry at Ilupeju called Ovbionma, which was sewing the Military Ceremonial Dresses for the Nigerian Armed Forces). Igbos were also helped with shelters too, in people's Boy's Quarters.

- Also, those Igbo children that said they were in Elementary Schools before they were stopped by the war were enlisted into the Western Region Free Primary Schools, according to their levels.

- the children from the East that said they were in Commercial Secondary Schools were given Typewriter Machines to do freelance typing to feed themselves. Some were helped to advance in Pitman Shorthand courses by their guardians.

- Awolowo entreated the industrial sectors to employ the Igbos who were employable in typing and shorthand, as a means to assist the government in its programs rehabilitation.

- as an emancipation strategy, guardians of Igbo children, at their own expense, sent them to Adult Education Centres at Montgomery Street Yaba, to study for GCE and RSA which they did very well, to study in the UK.

- Yoruba farmers through the WNBS were entreated to make land available to Igbos coming to the Western Region villages. They could farm and take care of themselves in the communities.

- Our fathers gave each man hectares of land to farm. I remember that time, the man with my father said he came from Afikpo Division. He planted Rice by the riverside and Gari Cassava at the upper side, on the land my father cut for him.

- to accommodate the Igbos Civil War refugees, our teachers were relocated from their official quarters to individual homes and Church Mission Quarters for Catechists in our village.

Nobody took anything from the Igbos who sojourned in our territory. Yet the Federal Military Government still tasked the Cocoa Farmers of the Western Region to pay more taxes and send food to Northern Region which was under a severe drought due to a locust attack. That was the rise of the 'Agbekoya' riots, at the height of provocation.

Rather than reciprocating all this lavished benevolence, the only historic account the Igbos passed over to their posterities is hate against Obafemi Awolowo and a vow of vengeance upon his Yoruba as a people. 

In these moments of attrition, you that are reading this in print, think about it, whether Yoruba deserves this humiliation. 

You that are Christians, judge whether what Yoruba people, both Christians, and Muslims, did to their neighbors in their towns and villages did not please God enough to have allowed such payback.

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