You Must Set Forth at Dawn (21 page)

Several of Obasanjo's officers had no sympathy whatsoever for the federal cause. It was not that they were against a unified nation; no, they simply felt that the internal arrangements of the existing national entity were lopsided, weighed in favor of Northern privilege. Even within the army, they knew what it was to be second-class citizens—given the chance, they would be Biafrans! Again the question remained suspended: Should I really meet this man or not? It all boiled down to the fact that, in the view of his own officers, Obasanjo could not be trusted. He could set a trap, have me arrested for “consorting with the enemy” or whatever. And so they insisted on leaving such a risky decision to me, even while stressing that a voice like mine might just do the trick. There was not much time. Finally I abandoned all further hesitation and I called him once more. Obasanjo remained more than eager to meet.

The venue remained Jericho, at a petrol station in a quiet part of Ibadan. Again we set out the conditions:
both to come alone, unarmed and unaccompanied.
Even then, I continued to battle with unresolved doubts—going underground and operating from there seemed a far more rational option. In the end, it was probably those frenzied four or five days of intense cloak-and-dagger meetings (of whose existence Femi would be kept completely oblivious) with Western leaders—politicians, labor leaders, even senior police officers—that tilted the scales. Time was running out for Victor Banjo and his version of the Third Force, and the leader of that incursion continued to await a sign from the West. I had no further contribution to make, no more unfulfilled chores. I was drained. It was time for a decisive act. I agreed to deliver yet again—but this time face-to-face—the message I had brought back from Biafra, one that had been given to me in Enugu—
not
Benin!

Femi picked me up as agreed. I had already organized a driver, one of our group, to wait for me by Christopher Okigbo's now abandoned and locked-up domain, Cambridge House, a mere walking distance from Femi's house. I tried a last-minute variation: would it not be simpler, I suggested, for him to drop me by the waiting car and go home, and I would join him for dinner and the eagerly awaited debriefing? OBJ would not hear of it. Well, would he at least drive past the road junction by Cambridge House, where my man was waiting, and pause long enough for me to change his instructions? Was it all right if I told the fellow to tag along, follow us to the rendezvous but continue straight on, just checking that we were safe? My friend, addict of intrigues, ignored my sarcastic tone and generously gave his consent.

Neither Obasanjo nor I, it turned out, kept strictly to the agreed conditions of our meeting. In my own case, however, the failure was unintended. Femi at the wheel, we stopped by the desolate Cambridge House to brief the waiting driver of the slight change of plans. He was to follow us the short distance to the petrol station, drive past, and park his car at a distance from where he could ensure that the other side kept to the bargain, then return to Cambridge House to await my return.

At the petrol station, Femi pulled up in the shadow cast by the street lighting off the low enclosure wall. A few moments later, Olusegun Obasanjo's Volkswagen Beetle drew up, stopped at the other side of the pumps. With a Yoruba cap, an
ikori,
firmly pulled over my forehead, I walked across from where we had parked and jumped into the seat beside him. From the shadow of the wall, Femi turned around to go home immediately—keeping at least to the terms of our agreement. Obasanjo took off just as fast in the direction of nowhere, followed, however, by a car that—he would later admit—was his security detail. That uninvited guest was spotted by my own Third Force driver, who promptly threw out all instructions and followed the intruder. The agreement had been broken, and he considered his original instructions no longer valid.

And my good friend O. B. Johnson? As he recounted it to me later that night, he had indeed been headed home when he observed through his rear mirror that Obasanjo's vehicle had acquired two tails. Trust my friend: he turned around and followed the convoy of three vehicles, sensing foul play! Spotting the anomaly was not difficult. The sight of any vehicle on the streets at night was sufficient to generate attention at such a time—a partial, largely self-imposed curfew was being observed on Ibadan streets, and in any case, Onireke was a very quiet part of Ibadan at that hour. Thus began the only comic relief that would come my way since my return from Biafra.

To adapt one of Fela Anikulapo's antiestablishment songs—“Wetin follow be say Follow-follow
follow
Follow-follow.”
²⁹
I turned in my seat, looked back quite openly, and saw what was going on. Obasanjo drove in a way that might suggest that he was merely taking precautions, attempting to throw off any incidental tail, and I pretended to “swallow-swallow” the deception. I have sometimes wondered how an aerial shot of those minutes of the pursuit would have looked, with cutbacks to vehicle interiors and the bewildered faces—and thoughts—of the various occupants! It continued through the twists and turns of Ibadan roads for several minutes before Obasanjo somehow succeeded in losing everyone, including his own security detail. The soldier wore a loose
agbada.
I took the opportunity of the first lurch to lean into him. Of course he was armed, as he would cheerfully admit years later in the home of Ojetunji Aboyade, our perennial peace broker, when we reviewed the events of that night. “Me? I am supposed to be a soldier, do you think I would agree to meet someone just from Biafra, in the dead of night, on a deserted street, without protection? I would deserve to be court-martialed!”

In the flickering lights of the streetlamps, each of us tried openly to assess the other. Even beneath his
agbada,
I could discern the beginnings of a slight paunch, while his face bore the recognizable tribal marks of Owu stock, one of the branches of the Yoruba. The Owu are reputed to be pugnacious by nature; there was, however, nothing remotely soldierly about his bearing. His expression remained inscrutable, but his voice sounded relaxed, even self-confident, and he asked his questions as if the answers carried no import that extended beyond the two occupants of the car. There was nothing whatsoever to indicate which way he felt about the war, no sense of his awareness of the critical position in which he found himself. He sounded more like a village headmaster who was awaiting the visit of a schools inspector and wanted to know all about the likely areas of interest of the visitor. His face became animated, taking on a queasy slyness, only when he asked how I had come to know about the telephone in his wardrobe.

Again I tried to justify the physical encounter to myself. The core of Banjo's message had been delivered. The man's insistence on our meeting therefore had to be his need for a direct “character reference”—in short, to see the messenger in person, assess his genuineness, and hopefully believe in the truthfulness of his message: that in breaching the neutrality of the Midwest, Banjo was not acting for Biafra but planned instead to bring the war to an end. Again and again Banjo had urged me—as if I needed any urging!—to emphasize this to Obasanjo: “This is not a Biafran army, and this is not a Biafran agenda.” I was to detail how he had persuaded Ojukwu to let him train an independent force
ostensibly
to promote that leader's ambitions. The training had gone on secretly in the Midwest, right under the nose of David Ejoor, the military governor, who had remained genuinely oblivious to such activities. To obtain both men and weaponry, Banjo had had to agree to train and move an independent force through the Midwest, sack the center, and install a regime that would endorse Biafra's secession. However, there Victor Banjo's and Ojukwu's interests were supposed to part company. Banjo was solidly against the secession.

However, Nigerians are weaned on the caution “Cunny man die, cunny man bury am.”
³⁰
Victor Banjo understood clearly—as I also did even from my single encounter with Ojukwu—that the warlord meant to take over the nation. It was a view that has since been confirmed by some of the historians from the Biafran side. It was equally clear that Victor Banjo meant to ignore Ojukwu's ambitions once he himself had seized Lagos and was guaranteed the support of the Western command. Banjo then intended to take over the nation, including Biafra. I do not believe for a moment that he meant to terminate the secession by force of arms; indeed, that would have been nearly impossible, considering the fact that his liberation force was made up largely of Biafran soldiers. Guaranteed the support of the Western Region in overwhelming numbers, however, Banjo could have ensured that any ambitions of Ojukwu in the larger national context were successfully thwarted. Banjo's immediate constituency was the West, and he needed, at the very least, some form of assurance from the Western leaders. This was why he was desperate that his message to Obasanjo be couched in unambiguous terms: “Tell Obasanjo that the liberation forces at my command do not wish to fight on Western soil. All we seek is unimpeded passage to Lagos through the Western Region.”

This was the message I reiterated to Obasanjo that night as we drove through the deserted streets of Ibadan warrens.

But now a necessary digression on the minor but instructive theme of revisionism in purported historical narratives, using as an intimate example the notorious fictionalizing of my telephone exchanges and eventual meeting with Olusegun Obasanjo during those crucial nights when the fate of a nation hung in the balance and one man held the key to its future—at least its immediate future. That man of fluctuating destinies Olusegun Obasanjo would later become a military head of state, a prisoner of another military dictator, an occupant of death row, and then a civilian president—albeit elected under extremely dubious circumstances—in 1999 and, under even more discredited circumstances, in 2003 (see
Supreme Court Judgement, Buhari vs Obasanjo,
2004
). Obasanjo has earned himself a reputation as an assiduous chronicler of the immediate past, but one most prone, alas, to the extreme latitudes of creative license.

The mission that I had undertaken just before, during, and immediately after the Midwest invasion was to transmit Victor Banjo's objectives to Obasanjo. I was to tell him in very bald terms that Banjo wanted unimpeded passage to Lagos, that he wished to avoid a battle in Western Nigeria—
finis!
This was the exact message I delivered. What I did or said outside that meeting was a different matter, and this included how my future activities were influenced by Obasanjo's response to the message that I had delivered to him.

The decision to meet him at all had been a most difficult one, fraught with warnings. The most forceful had come from the young officer in military intelligence who had revealed to me the existence of the secret telephone in Obasanjo's bedroom, and its number, to facilitate direct contact. Yet even he could not bring himself to wholeheartedly endorse the final meeting. His distrust of his superior officer was unambiguous. Such warnings were responsible for my writing down, then
memorizing,
the precise words in which I proposed to deliver Victor Banjo's message. If I were arrested and brought to trial, I wanted to ensure that my words would not be distorted or taken out of context.

That simple precaution would generate a not inconsequential footnote years later, in 1980, during an encounter between Obasanjo and myself. Our destinies had long taken off in different directions, and Obasanjo himself had served as a military head of state.

I had crammed my lines so efficiently that I still remembered them years afterward, when Obasanjo published his account of the war in
My Command.
There, among other lies, he claimed that I had asked him to name his price for letting Victor Banjo's troops through the West! Even combatants who have done their best to disembowel each other in wartime do embrace and carry on with life afterward, and so, although Obasanjo's betrayal of the very event of our meeting was certainly the most crucial factor that led to my incarceration, I found—to my pleasant surprise, I think—that I could meet him afterward without rancor. I experienced no obstacle to resuming our brief and untoward relationship on a new footing and was able to collaborate with him on a number of national schemes when he became head of state.

What I found impossible to stomach, however, were his constant attempts to rewrite—and tendentiously, to boot!—a history of which I had been a part, in no matter how minor a role. And so, both privately and publicly, I was drawn into the repetitive, excruciatingly boring and frustrating imposition of setting him right whenever—in order to secure a temporary advantage, often petty but distracting—he resorted to twisting the true narrative of events. Following the publication of his book, and after the ensuing bout of public exchanges, we met in the home of Ojetunji Aboyade, then vice chancellor at the University of Ife, who sometimes complained that he felt that his life mission was to act as referee and conciliator during our frequent wranglings.

It was virtually no contest! I began by reciting from memory my opening statement to him on the occasion of our “Follow-follow” meeting, word for word. Then, not nearly so precisely but as close to exactitude as made no difference, even by his own admission, I repeated his comments, questions, my responses, and his final statement. Even the unscripted exchanges were still fresh in my mind; one passes much time in total recall in the quiet of prison solitary confinement! The recalled exchanges were so logical in their content and sequence that Obasanjo could only stare, dumbfounded. I accused him of coming armed to our meeting, contrary to our agreement. He laughed and admitted it. I repeated yet again that I had offered no opinion, no comment on the message I had brought, had said nothing that could be remotely construed as an attempt to sway him one way or the other. Obasanjo remained mute for several moments, then gave his familiar schoolboy-caught-in-the-act mischievous smile and—
apologized!
Aboyade gave his verdict, exhorting me to accept his apology as gracefully as he had proffered it.