The Aburi Accord - Chinua Achebe

The absence of a concerted plan to address the eruption of violence throughout Nigeria against Easterners, mainly Igbos, and the inaction around the refugee problem amplified the anger and tensions between the federal government, now led by Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, and the Eastern Region. Calls in the East for independence grew louder, and threats from the deferral government grew more ominous, in a vicious cycle.

A last-ditch summit was held from January 4 to January 5, 1967, to discuss the areas of conflict. Great optimism was expressed that this would be the instrument to bring lasting peace to Nigeria. Aburi, in Ghana, was chosen as the venue, as a concession to Ojukwu, who had asked for a neutral site outside Nigeria for this meeting, but also to impart a sense of impartiality and credibility to the summit. A document memorializing the areas of shared understanding was produced after two days of meetings. It would be known as the Aburi Accord.

The gathering was attended by senior military and police officials' and government secretaries.' Topics for discussion included: a committee to work out a constitutional future for Nigeria; the back payment of sala­ries to Igbo government employees who were forced to leave their posts as a result of the disturbances; the need for a resolution renouncing the use of force; and the refusal of the Eastern Region to recognize Lieuten­ant Colonel Yakubu Gowon as supreme commander. The predicament of displaced persons following the pogroms in the North, the fate of sol­diers involved in disturbances on January 15, 1966, and the planned distri­bution of power between the federal military government and the regional governments also required urgent attention.

The goal of the Gowon-led Nigerian government was to emerge from these deliberations with Nigeria intact as a confederation of the regions. Many intellectuals and key members of Ojukwu's cabinet in the East had been battling with solutions to these issues for months before the Aburi meetings, thinking through various possible answers to these key ques­tions: What is a confederation? How would it work in the Nigerian set­ting? How much power would be delegated to the central federal government as opposed to the regions? In my estimation there was not as much rigorous thought given by Gowon's federal cabinet and the power­ful interests in the North. The two parties therefore left Aburi with very different levels of understanding of what a confederation meant and how it would work in Nigeria.'

By March 1967, two months after the summit in Aburi, Ghana, the Aburi Accord resolutions had yet to be implemented, and there was growing weariness in the East that Gowon had no intention of doing so. The government of the Eastern Region warned Gowon that his repeated failure to act on issues pertaining to Nigerian sovereignty could lead to secession.

Gowon responded by issuing a decree, Decree 8, which called for the resurrection of the proposals for constitutional reform promulgated dur­ing the Aburi conference. But for reasons hard to explain other than as egotistical self-preservation, members of the federal civil service galva­nized themselves in energetic opposition to the agreements of the Aburi Accord. Seeing this development as a strategic political opening, the Yoruba leader, Obafemi Awolowo, the West's political kingpin, hereto­fore nursing political trouble himself, including prior imprisonment for sedition, insisted that the federal government remove all Northern military troops garrisoned in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, and throughout the Western Region-a demand similar to those Ojukwu had made ear­lier, during the crisis."

Awolowo warned Gowon's federal government that if the Eastern Region left the federation the Western Region would not be far behind. 

This statement was considered sufficiently threatening by Gowon and the federal government to merit a complete troop withdrawal.

There were increasing indications that Northern leaders never had any intention of implementing the settlement negotiated at Aburi. Ojukwu at this point was exasperated by what he saw as purposeful inac­tion from Gowon. During March through April 1967 he responded by instituting a systematic process that severed all Biafran ties to Nigeria:

First he froze all official communication with Lagos, and he then fol­lowed this swiftly by disconnecting the "Eastern regional government's administration and revenues from those of the federal government."

I was in Lagos at the time. This event was so big that I cannot even in retrospect fully explain exactly what was happening. People were con­fused. I was confused myself. People who are confused in such a situation generally act with great desperation, emotion-some would say without logic.

The movement toward a declaration of independence was very clear and sharp, because it was a result of a particular group of Nigerian citi­zens from the Eastern Region attempting to protect themselves from the great violence that had been organized and executed by arms of the gov­ernment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. There was a strong sense that Nigeria was no longer habitable for the Igbo and many other peoples from Eastern Nigeria.

That epiphany made us realize that Nigeria "did not belong we," as Liberians would put it. "This country belong we" was the popular pidgin English mantra from their liberation struggle. That was not the case for Igbo people and many others from Eastern Nigeria. Nigeria did not belong to us. It was now clear to many of us that we, the Nigerian people, were not what we had thought we were. The Nigeria that meant so much to all of us was not reciprocating the affection we had for it. The coun­try had not embraced us, the Igbo people and other Easterners, as full-­fledged members of the Nigerian family. That was the predicament that the Igbo and many peoples from Eastern Nigeria found themselves in, and one that informed Ojukwu's decisions, I believe, on the eve of civil war.

The first part of May 1967 saw the visit of the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) to Enugu, the capital of the Eastern Region. It was led by Chief Awolowo and billed as a last-minute effort at peace and as an attempt to encourage Ojukwu and Eastern leaders to attend peace talks at a venue suitable to the Easterners. Despite providing a friendly recep­tion, many Igbo leaders referred to the visit disdainfully as the "chop, chop, talk, talk, commission." A majority of Easterners by this time had grown contemptuous of Gowon's federal government for its failure to bring the culprits of the mass murders in the North to justice, and they saw this as the latest in a series of insincere overtures. Senior Igbo mili­tary officers were also openly voicing their concern that Gowon was an illegitimate leader, because he was not the most senior officer in the chain of military command, and so had no right to be head of state.

There were a number of distinguished and well-meaning Nigerians on the National Reconciliation Commission, but they were meeting with leaders of an emotionally and psychologically exhausted and disillusioned Igbo people. Many of these same Igbo leaders had been at the vanguard of independence struggles, and after years of spearheading the "one Nigeria" mantra, had very little to show for it. Clearly the situation had become untenable.

On May 24, 1967, in the midst of this chaos, my wife went into labor. I sent my close friend, the poet Christopher Okigbo, to the hospital she had been admitted to, to find out when the birth would take place, and then to call me at home, where I had briefly returned to rest and take a shower. In characteristic Okigbo fashion, he waited for the delivery, went to the nursery to see the baby, and then drove back to convey the news to me that my wife had delivered our third child, Chidi -"There is a God” - and that the way his baby locks were arranged, he looked like he had a haircut and was ready to go to school! The baby's arrival was a great joy, but I couldn't but feel a certain amount of apprehension for this infant, indeed for all of us, as the prospect of civil war cast a dark shadow over our lives.