Towards The Political and Economic Emancipation of The Peoples of the Old Calabar Province – Akwa Ibom State

Self Awareness
I believe the time for the economic and political emancipation of the peoples of Akwa Ibom state and the Niger Delta of Nigeria has come. The manifestation of this actualisation will only become evident when we spread the good news, talk about it always and live our lives as free and empowered people. I have therefore undertaken this journey and I commit to writing a series of essays on the topic: Towards the Political and Economic Emancipation of the Peoples of Akwa Ibom State. In this first essay, I invite you to share my thoughts on the impact of Self Awareness in our political and economic emancipation.

January 1991. School of Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Imo State. SOC 101 Class. On this day, I for the first time addressed in my consciousness ‘The Nigerian Question’. My teenage soul was pricked and I battled to comprehend the place of the ‘Calabar’ man in the Nigerian polity. It started off as a discussion on the Nigerian civil war and escalated to a name-calling duel. Our SOC 101 lecturer made a statement that Biafra would have won the Nigerian Civil War if the ‘Calabars’ and ‘Rivers’ people had supported the war effort. I was born a few years after the civil war, in fact my parents had not met each other until after the war but the war had been a great part of their experience and early life and my father told us some of his experiences. It was one of this experience that I shared in the Sociology class to prove to my fellow students that Biafra had been a South East struggle and not merely an Igbo war. At the outbreak of hostilities, my father was an engineering student at UNN and he remembered working at night with other students to clear the camouflage from the Biafran airstrip so that planes carrying arms and mercenaries could land and take off. If students could do such menial work as removing fake palm trees from runways, then lets leave to the imagination what they could have used their fertile brains to achieve in the science labs. In that class, based on what my father had told me, I argued that the minority tribes of the South Eastern Region had supported the war effort but in defeat, the Igbos took ownership of Biafra and viewed it as a personal loss instead of a collective defeat. I ventured to add that a ‘Calabar’ man Col. Effiong was the officer who signed the article of surrender that ended the civil war.

This last contribution was the last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. My fellow students went berserk. They called me, my family, tribe and the peoples of the old ‘Calabar’ province names including but not limited to: cowards, emasculated men, lazy bones, idiots, houseboys etc. At this point, I am ashamed to say; I gave in to emotion at the sheer force of their hatred and wept. No one comforted me, the few ‘Calabar’ students, all of whom were male stayed rooted to their seats, not a word of comfort, no sound of protest, no shoulder to soak my tears, no mass walk out, nothing! Just a studied silence, maintaining the status quo in the face of the majority, hiding in the crowd, not seen, not heard, inconsequential, unimportant and not worthy of note. On that day, I made up my mind to commence a journey of self-discovery and know who I was, where I came from and what motivated my brothers to stay silent in the face of such humiliation and disgrace of their tribe and if we as a people had a place in the Nigerian nation.

I began my search in our history books. This is the summary of the history of Nigeria as taught to me in Primary and Secondary schools:
Independence: Awolowo, Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, Enahoro etc fought for our independence, it is in recent times that I got to hear of the works of a ‘Calabar’ Independence activist Eyo Uyo.
Economy: Groundnut form North, Cocoa from West, Timber from Sapele, Rubber from Benin. Even as late as the eighties no mention is made of Crude oil.
Politics boils down to a song taught to me in primary school in the early eighties:
Ojukwu wanted to separate Nigeria
Gowon said Nigeria must be one
We are fighting with General Gowon
To keep Nigeria one

The above song encapsulates the story of a three-year civil war. No mention of the casualties. There is no word on the human suffering. No one says anything about the bravery of a ‘Calabar’ Colonel- abandoned by a defeated Ojukwu who fled Biafra rather than surrender to the Nigerian forces- this officer faced with a demoralised, ill equipped army, the bloated stomachs of kwashiorkor children, a cruelly effective Nigerian food blockade, had the courage and human compassion to negotiate a dignified surrender to the Nigerian forces. No word is said about this man who perhaps single handedly, saved a generation of Igbos from possible death by starvation. It was reported that at Colonel Effiong’s funeral, an Igbo man proposed that a major airport in Igbo soil be named after the late Colonel, I am sure that this proposal is being seriously considered but more than two years later, there is no Colonel Effiong airport in Igboland or Nigeria for that matter.