Thread by @RealOlaudah

#TheAburiAccord
Prologue:
Existence of Nigeria as a singular entity has been fraught with a myriad of delicate fault lines since her amalgamation in 1914.
Each side managed their differences for more than half a century - albeit under watchful eyes of Britain’s political games.

But 1960, independence and the distribution of power along regional lines created a fertile ground for age-long resentment to fester.
The 1966 coup and the July counter-coup unearthed this bag of aggressive, power-hungry worms, so much that for the first time since 1914, the...

unity of Nigeria became subject to public debate and the power plays of the uniformed men who now held power.
The North on one side was certain that the Easterners had their eyes set on dominating everything - as Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of the Northern Region, so eloquently...

put it in an interview with the BBC before his death.
"The Igbos are more or less the kind of people whose desire is mainly to dominate everybody", the Sardauna told the British Broadcast Corporation in 1964, shortly before that year’s general elections, "If they go to...

a village or town, they want to monopolise everything in that area."
The East, on the other, had tired of the North’s grasp on federal power, a system of institutional tribalism and the neglect of the region.

By the time the Supreme Military Council, made up of the Northern-run Federal government and the regional governors, met in Aburi, Ghana, to discuss a way forward, both sides were trying to avoid the only outcome that seemed to be on the table: war.

Decades of resentment had erupted into heavy communal violence, and a series of ethnic pogroms had left many Igbos in the North dead.
Hundreds of thousands fled in an exodus to their eastern homeland.

It should be noted that after the coup, the North also considered secession. Consultations with the British and American ambassadors changed their minds.
Instead, they chose the highest ranking Northern officer, Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon, to be head of state.

Even with Gowon in power, the Federal Government proved unable to quell the pogroms. With Ojukwu in his Queen’s English-speaking glory at the helm, the calls for secession in the East began to form and project at the same time.

The palpability of the tensions that necessitated the meeting at Aburi had even determined its location. The Eastern delegation, led by Ojukwu, was certain that their safety could not be guaranteed within Nigeria.

In the inverse, both sides had agreed on the small hillside town of Aburi in Ghana, famed for its colourful botanical gardens.
There were no flowery emotions at the meeting. The Chairman of the Ghana Liberation Council, Lt. Gen. J.A Ankrah presided over the gathering.
The Accord:

Aburi Accord was reached in 1967 at a meeting attended by delegates of both the Federal Government of Nigeria (the Supreme Military Council) and the Eastern delegates, led by the Eastern Region's leader Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu.

The meeting was billed to be the last chance of preventing all out war. It was held between 4 and 5 January 1967.
Aburi as venue:
Aburi, Eastern Region of Ghana was chosen as a venue because the eastern delegates led by the Governor of Eastern Region Colonel Ojukwu's safety...

could not be guaranteed anywhere within the western or northern part of the country.
Agenda of Aburi Meeting:
Re-organisation of the Armed forces
Constitutional Arrangement
Issue of displaced persons within the Nigeria.

Delegates:
The following were the delegates at the Aburi Conference...
Chairman of the Ghana National Liberation Council -Lt.-General J.A. Ankrah-Chairman
Lt.-Col. Yakubu Gowon- Head of State Nigeria
Lt.-Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu - Governor Eastern Region
Major Mobolaji Johnson -...

Governor newly created Lagos State
Lt.-Col. Hassan Katsina - Governor Northern Region
Lt.-Col. David Ejoor - Governor Mid-Western Region
Commodore Joseph Edet Akinwale Wey - Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters
Colonel Robert Adebayo - Governor Western Region
Alhaji Kam Selem...

Inspector General of Police
Mr. T. Omo-Bare
Others as follows...
N.U Akpan Secretary to the Military Governor-East
Alhaji Ali Akilu Secretary to the Military Governor-North
D. Lawani Under Secretary, Military Governor's Office-Mid-West.

P. Odumosu Secretary to the Military Governor-West
S. Akenzua (who later became the Oba of Benin - Erediauwa Permanent Under-Secretary-Federal Cabinet Office.

The Accord:
Aburi accord is as follows...
"Members agreed that the legislative and executive authority of the Federal Military Government should remain in the Supreme Military Council, to which any decision affecting the whole country shall be referred to, for determination...

provided that, where it is possible for a meeting to be held the matter requiring determination must be referred to military governors for their comment and concurrence.
Specifically, the council agreed that appointments to senior ranks in the police, diplomatic, and consular...

services as well as appointment to superscale posts in the federal civil service and the equivalent posts in the statutory corporation must be approved by the Supreme Military Council.
The regional members felt that all the decrees passed since January 15, 1966, and which...

detracted from previous powers and positions of regional governments, should be repealed if mutual confidence is to be restored.

Breakdown:
In response to the accord, the federal government promulgated Decree No. 8, which was mainly an embodiment of the accord. The accord finally broke down because of differences of interpretation on both sides. This led to the outbreak of Nigerian Civil War.

The Intrigues:
Aburi Accord in 1966 was the watershed in the series of intrigues that led to the Nigerian Civil War known as the Biafran War. The entire two days proceeding at the round table to fashion solutions to the impasse generated by the coup that killed the Head of State,

General Aguiyi Ironsi, was recorded by the Ghanaian hosts, who gave Ojukwu and Gowon a copy of the tapes. The meeting was held at the weekend resort place of Ghana’s former head, Nkrumah, at the invitation of Lt. Gen. J.A. Ankara, Ghanian leader who in his remarks evinced naivety

dismissing the crisis as one the military could resolve within its ranks.
The meeting at Aburi opened with an accusation by Ojukwu, the man in the East, of an arms build-up by the Federal military government, dominated by Northern elements.

At this time, Nigerian Head of State, Ironsi and his lieutenants had been killed in retaliation for the coup in January in which major Northern leaders were murdered by a group of young soldiers who were mostly of Igbo origin from the East.

According to Ojukwu, evidence exists to the purchase of large rounds of ammunition and loads of arms which have not been shared to other regions but Kaduna. On this note, Ojukwu requested an agreement on the use of force in the settlement of crises. In defense of the Federal...

Govt, the new HOS, Gowon, reiterated there'd been a short-fall of arms & ammunition generally since his time as Chief of Staff & order was to have been placed for them before the counter coup of 29th July which threw the country into a crisis of leadership & ethnic distrust.

In his rebuttal, Gowon had issued a threat subtly; “Even if you have arms and weapons in the East, i can assure you, you will only have more rifles in your hands and before you know what is happening the situation would have gone out of hand.”

The need to put a figure to the volume of weapons been held by individual unit in the army was thereby suggested by Lt. Col. Ejoor. Ojukwu’s draft resolution which forecloses the use of force on both sides also required that a copy of the declaration be deposited with...

the secretariat of the Organization of African Unity, a proposition Col. Adebayo opposed. Furthermore, Ojukwu proposed there would be no more importation of arms until issues were resolved.
Another schedule of the Accord, was the organization of the Nigerian army, in which it was

proposed that as far as possible the army personnel should be posted to barracks in their regions of origin, as an interim measure. Within this context arose a pertinent question, first raised by Major Johnson; if there existed a central government at that moment. Ojukwu was...

happy to reply to the contrary. He questioned the authority of Gowon in assuming the position of the Supreme Commander, as Aguiyi Ironsi, to his knowledge, was only missing.
Apparently Ojukwu came to Aburi to re-write the Nigerian constitution- and he largely succeeded.

The meeting, though inconclusive, drew from both sides agreement that the regions should move slightly farther apart than before. “The East believes in Confederation,’ said Ojukwu in a press conference at Enugu a day after Aburi, ‘we have gone a long way towards that as a result

of the meeting.” He needed to prove to his men he was not sold out, and so was Gowon, who under pressure from his own squad gave a quite different interpretation of what he thought the Aburi Accord meant. The stage for war was set.

Epilogue:
Perhaps wary that Gowon would change his mind, or anxious to express his small “victory”, Ojukwu returned to Enugu to declare his interpretation of what had been agreed upon.
In a widely-publicised broadcast, he said that the Supreme Military Council had agreed to a...

confederal system of government.
If this had come into effect, it would have given autonomy to the regions and to an extent, opened the door to self-determination.
Decades later, Gowon would tell the NTA, “If I had the opportunity to make my broadcast first because that was the..

agreement if I had committed myself to what he said, then there wouldn’t have been any problem”.
“But he went & said certain things that looked wrong. We saw in practically everything he did that he was playing to the gallery & not being sincere”, the former Head of State said.

Today, one can look back and question the motives of both parties, Gowon and Ojukwu.
Considering the events that followed, the Aburi meetings turned out to be little more than a stop-gap in an avoidable descent into war.
Even though the accords were simple agreements with no...

legal founding that were never implemented, that meeting in a small Ghanaian town changed Nigeria forever.
“Ojukwu believed that the odds were stacked against the people of the east. As a result, he was looking to get a fair deal which is why one of the clauses was that decisions

of the government would not fly unless they ran them by the Supreme Military Council, which included Ojukwu himself", says Tony Atambi, an Abuja-based legal practitioner and political commentator.
"One of the reasons for the accord was at that time, there was already a mutual...

distrust, which remains to this day, as to which part of the country was taking advantage or was going to have the better end of the deal.”, he continued.
“That mutual distrust did not end after the accord. It seeped into our relationship & things began to decline from there on"

"It is why even though rogues have taken over the struggle for Biafra, there is this feeling that we're being left out, it would appear as though the North & the South-West have been getting better deals & leaving the East out. That feeling continues till today”, Atambi added.

Till this day, it is difficult to convince the Igbo that any federal govt, as presently constituted, has their best interest in mind.
Meetings in Aburi exposed the fragility of Nigeria’s association. They revealed a pervading mistrust that defines our relationship till this day.

If there were any lessons to be learned from Aburi, Nigeria has ignored them.

wikipedia.com & other sources.
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