“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”.
In Biafra between 1967-1970, the period of the Biafra-Nigeria civil war, the above statement was a battle cry which even children internalised. It was a regular fare on air and other gathering in the Republic of Biafra. It was designed to rouse Biafrans, inculcate in them consciousness about their environment and to look out for one another. It was like asking citizens of the breakaway republic that whenever they see something strange, they should say something and then do something about it by alerting the appropriate authority in the now defunct republic.
In addition to this quote being designed to make Biafrans despise Nigerians and rally round the flag and the liberation struggle against the Nigerian aggressors and villains, it was also meant to ensure that Biafrans reported any suspected Nigerian infiltrators into their enclave, and also Biafrans who were suspected of colluding with Nigerians and sabotaging the war efforts. Such Biafrans were branded as ‘sabo’. ‘Sabo’ was actually designed to be a short form for saboteurs but it was in reality more than that. It was a blanket description of the invading Nigerian soldiers of northern extraction. ‘Sabo’ was regarded, perhaps correctly so, as a common name among the Hausa and the Fulani of the north of Nigeria. In Biafra of that era even the execution by firing squad is not worse than being branded a saboteur. The smear or stain remained with your family even after you have been publicly executed. Your survivors became pariahs in the community. The enormity of that clarion call during the life of Biafra was best captured when rendered in Igbo language which says that ‘onye ndiro gbara ugburu gburu na-eche ndu ya nche mgbe nile. Umu Biafra unu arahukwara ura’. Loosely translated it means that the person who is surrounded by enemies strives to preserve his life. Biafrans, do not sleep nor slumber. What can be more rousing for a besieged and beleaguered people. Okokon Ndem, the unrivalled Biafran propagandist who himself was not a native Igbo language speaker, used this slogan to telling effects. And he spoke in flawless Igbo. Ndem was reportedly from Ikoneto in Odukpani local government area of Cross River State. He had the distinction of being declared the Most Wanted Man by the Nigerian regime, second only to Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, leader of Biafra. He was widely credited with saying that Biafra had ‘a military that no force in Africa can defeat’, and that it had ‘developed a nuclear warhead [ogbunigwe] that will wipe out [the] Nigerian Army’. If Ndem was alive and minded to side with oppressors, he would have been an asset to the All Progressives Congress. Not even Lai Mohammed nor Bayo Onanuga nor Ajuri Ngalela would have matched him. Ndem’s crusade was for good and to save a nation from genocide otherwise he would have been placed in the category of Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels and Iraq’s Chemical Ali.
The irony is that the sentence about eternal vigilance which has been deployed in various places and circumstances for centuries is of disputed origin.
An online entry describes it or its variant: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, as a ‘spurious quotation’ with disputed authorship. It went on to say that the earliest known appearance of the quotation in print was in 1817 as “eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty”, while it was first credited to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States [from 1801-1809], in 1834, seventeen years later. The online entry said: “We currently have no evidence to confirm that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote” those words or its variants.
“This quotation was well-known in the nineteenth century, and was in fact used by a number of famous figures, including Frederick Douglas, James Buchanan, William Henry Harrison, and Ida B. Wells. It can be traced back ultimately, to John Philpot Curran’s statement, ‘The condition upon which God had given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break[s], servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt”.
Curran’s variant of this quotation is apposite for Nigerians today, and specially so for Ndigbo. This is in light of the introduction and wide circulation of a document purported to be a template for the restructuring of an obviously benighted country. The contents of this document are dubious, hateful and criminally inspired. In spite of what appears to be the strident efforts of the purveyors of this dangerous document, it is easy to notice and subsequently conclude that what they set out to do is to foul the air and then discredit the genuine demand and struggle for the restructuring of the country and the entrenchment of true federalism. Restructuring and the enthronement of true federalism is said to be in the constitution and manifesto of the APC when it came to power in 2015. Its leader then and president, Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, who turned out to be an affliction on Nigeria initially denied that he made such promises to Nigerians when he campaigned for the office of the presidency. But prior to his campaign for a second term, he made an about face and set up a committee headed by a former governor of Kaduna state, Nasir el-Rufai to study the promise of restructuring and make recommendations to him. The committee met and made recommendations to the lazy and laid back president. The report containing the recommendations was received and thrown into the dustbin. The whole exercise was a political gimmick and a distraction from the 2019 elections. As if to confirm the fears in many quarters that the eight-region proposal which is currently in wide circulation was a ruse, a special assistant to Tinubu was last week quoted as saying at a public event that restructuring was already in full swing and that it was being implemented through the policies of the regime. Really? Can an enduring restructuring of the country be effected through flimsy and whimsical policies? The conventional wisdom is that restructuring a behemoth like Nigeria with its diversity and the near mortal injuries inflicted on it for decades by various military regimes will be intentional through a new people’s constitution and tinkering with associated laws. Nigerians should be concerned by the ongoing acts of obfuscation.
For instance, on June 14, about two weeks ago, a newspaper reported that Tinubu was set to receive that same day a draft bill that proposes a shift to regional government structure for the country. That day was a Friday. The bill titled “A Draft Bill for an Act to substitute the annexure to Decree 24 of 1999 with New Governance Model for the Federal Republic of Nigeria” was to be delivered to Tinubu by his kinsman, one Akin Fapohunda, identified as a chieftain of a Yoruba socio-political organisation Afenifere. It was reported that the so-called draft bill aimed to introduce laws under the name “The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria New Governance Model 2024”. The only effort made by the promoters of this sectional and ill-digested so-called draft bill was to claim that it was being done under the auspices of one group of ethnic nationalities in Nigeria. Who were members of the ethnic nationalities group? When did they meet? Where did they meet? On whose mandate did they meet? From which resolutions did they distil the contents of the so-called draft bill? With whose consent and authority was the so-called and obviously fraudulent ‘draft bill’ being forwarded to the Presidency? The questions are legion.
My anxiety with the way this ‘draft bill’ is being smuggled in as a mainstream document stems from the known fact that the APC and it regimes’ capacity for fraud and evil are enormous. When rumours started flying around that the Tinubu regime was secretly working to scrap the 1978 national anthem and replace same with the discarded Independence anthem, not many Nigerians took the speculations seriously. But it came to pass. The House of Representatives and the Senate passed the bill in a jiffy without public hearing as should be expected, and before you could say Kunle, Tinubu had signed it into law. Tinubu joined the National Assembly [NASS] members in muttering the new-old anthem when he visited them the same day he signed the bill into law. What really do Nigerians expect from assembly members who appropriated Tinubu’s personal anthem, ‘On your mandate…’ as that of NASS and went ahead to sing it during the presentation in parliament of the national budget last year by Tinubu. To situate the seriousness and focus of NASS you just need to recall that its chairman Godswill Akpabio, a lawyer and a two-term governor of Akwa Ibom State, said recently that banditry became an issue in Nigeria when the Independence national anthem was discarded in 1978.
Tinubu is not a democrat and l will not get weary of saying so. The evidence of his inclination to dictatorship has been glaring for more than 25 years. But if his supporters insist that he is a democrat and an advocate of restructuring and true federalism, he now knows what to do. He is vested with the requisite powers and he has a pliable NASS at his beck and call. He does not need to convene another money guzzling jamboree in the guise of a meeting. He should go and dust up the documents on the work done by the 2014 constitutional conference and their recommendations. If he feels bad that it was done under the administration of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party [PDP], he should add the body of work done by his own APC team led by el-Rufai. He could hold his nose tightly in working with the document since el-Rufai appears now to be an enemy of his regime and a pariah in APC. The body of studies on what to do is not in short supply.
Next week we will endeavour to fully ex-ray the details of the Fapohunda’s dubious draft bill, the excision of parts of the heartland of the Igbo nation and their donation to strange and far-flung proposed regions. And the docility, probably compromise, of the Igbo ruling and political elite in the wake of the ongoing scramble and partition of Nigeria. This country is unravelling in a manner it never happened before, at least not since the end of the shooting aspect of the Biafra-Nigeria civil war.
