In the last 48hours, I took it upon myself to try and take a look at things from the standpoint of the pro-Biafra Igbos. I wanted to get a glimpse of why they are angry, and they want out and why Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is able to motivate them.
I have not been this sad ever. No, we cannot, in all honesty, be a serious set of people, no monument, no national acceptance of guilt, no truth and genuine reconciliation, no apology.
How is it possible for the world to accept that something unacceptable took place with the holocaust, and we will pretend nothing happened during the civil war? No, we must come to a sober realisation that something unacceptable took place and that we killed our brothers and sisters, we starved our children to death, we caused the milk of empathy of the world to flow, with other international icons returning their Order of the British Empire (OBE) medals, others doing one action or the other such as the creation of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without borders) in a bid to respond to the gory site of war in Nigeria. Yet, we have done nothing significant all these years.
The images are traumatising.
All nations do things to heal themselves.
South Africa did so after the apartheid. Same with Rwanda after the Tutsi and Hutu war. Germany after the holocaust.
Yugoslavia also was not left out.
Shall we not know that the children of the civil war are very much around, and they must wonder why we would not say sorry and do whatever is needed to demonstrate that we mean it. Where is the national monument? Where is the national day of mourning that all Nigerians observe? From now on, I will be personally observing the Biafra Day of Mourning with ash on my face as a mark of respect to the memory of a very dark period in our national history.
Dear Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, please come to the peace table. We get it. Truly we get it. We can salvage the mess our parents made. You must now let us reason together as brothers and sisters of common black ancestry.
May the souls of the victims Rest In Peace. May equity, peace and justice prevail. Never again must we allow anyone to push us into a repeat of such gut-churning waste of humans and resources.
