29/12/2025
Rumours of war: The rich, the poor and the way the cookie Crumbles
By Aoiri Obaigbo
I haven't been lucky with generator mechanics since I left Warri. To avoid spending the festive season in the dark, I went to buy yet another generator—as in, if this nor work, this go work.
Anyway, the Igbo man I bought from astonished me by saying that he's not Igbo, but a Biafran. There's Biafra in my blood, he said. That the word 'Igbo' was cursed.
Absurd. That was a regurgitation of one of Nnamdi Kanu’s mental health issues. But that someone with a secondary school level fluency in English would say it like a fact was what stunned me. Cursed by who? How?
To test his grasp of history, I asked if he knew where the Bight of Biafra was located. He didn’t know about the Bight of Biafra and he tried to explain what Biafra meant in Igbo language.
Then he said that Nigerians are wicked people who killed millions of Ndigbo in the North for no reason, until Ojukwu decided to teach them a lesson. Preposterous.
There was this pacific look on his face, so I just paid the bill and left.
Now, what we the poor people never want to acknowledge or realise is that no war in history has ever been fought because poor people died. It's always the personal interest or loss of the rich that leads to the slaughter of poor people, which is what war is in stark reality.
Historically, wars are initiated by ruling elites—kings, emperors, presidents, or industrial magnates—who have political, territorial, or economic interests at stake.
The poor rarely start wars, but they are almost always the ones who fight and die in them. They bear the brunt of destruction, displacement, famine, and bereavement. War disproportionately benefits the powerful and devastates the powerless. Most importantly, we are hardly ever the cause or the rationale for a full‑scale war.
For instance, my generator seller believes the civil war was fought because 10,000 Igbo people were murdered in the North, but Ojukwu’s first broadcast after the assassination of Aguyi Ironsi was the rejection of Gowon as his boss. In historical discussions of the 1966 Nigerian counter‑coup, it is well‑documented that Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu initially refused to recognize Yakubu Gowon as the new Head of State, insisting instead that the military hierarchy must be respected. By coup plotters?
According to historical records and accounts such as those recently highlighted by Ibrahim Babangida in 2025, Ojukwu argued that upon the death of Major‑General Aguiyi‑Ironsi, the leadership should have fallen to the most senior surviving officer.
He explicitly stated that Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, who was then the most senior officer and Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters, was the rightful successor.
Ojukwu rejected Gowon's emergence because Gowon was a junior officer compared to others in the military hierarchy at the time. Some accounts note that Ojukwu also mentioned other senior officers, such as Colonel Bassey, as legitimate alternatives to Gowon based on rank.
Brigadier Ogundipe declined to take power, reportedly because Northern soldiers involved in the mutiny refused to take orders from him, leading to his departure for the United Kingdom shortly after. This breakdown in military command was a primary driver of the tension between Ojukwu and Gowon that eventually led to the Nigerian Civil War.
We can safely infer that had any of the alternatives to Gowon been placed, there would have been no civil war in 1967.
Sure, ethnic violence was the excuse, but long‑standing seniority rivalry between Ojukwu and Gowon is the primary reason for both of them engineering the war and refusing to surrender when millions of the people they claimed to be defending were dying. Compassion for poor people has never led to war except in rhetoric. There's nothing considerate about arming children of the poor with cutlasses, and sufficient motivational speeches, to go and fight men with AK‑47 and armoured tanks.
If we the poor were to stop swallowing every myth the elites spew at us, there would probably be no senseless wars, and we could create insurrection when their greed becomes intolerable.
We need to incubate the culture of stripping away the comfortable myths and expose the stark mechanics of war—elite rivalry dressed up as compassion. If another Biafra‑induced war happens again, my dear generator seller, and his pretty pregnant wife, will be the ones exposed to the cruelty of war. If in the end, Biafra is created, only the elites, and a few social climbers will rule it, and their greed will determine how it is run.
In the end, war is never about the poor, but it is always fought upon our backs.
man pikin
