Why Nigeria’s post-civil-war reconciliation has faltered
Nigeria's hungry people are angry people. They are reliving the precivil-war animus, unmistakably so in our little corner of the internet and the social media.
On the evening of Monday, May 18th (EST), I addressed a meeting of the Collaborative Council of Nigerians in Diaspora (CCND) in the United States via Zoom from Lagos. I was invited to speak on the subject of the award of $244 million in damages by the ECOWAS Court of Justice to victims of the Nigerian civil war and for the rehabilitation of communities affected by the war.
I was taken aback that I was told to speak on the subject. I am a hesitant political commentator, although I often post cryptic political commentaries on the social media. A good number of the readers of Financial Nigeria magazine, which I founded and has been published every month since August 2008, prefer we focus our analyses on policies and markets. Our subscribers believe they are better served this way by a magazine they consider to be immensely beneficial to their career learning.
Accordingly, my columns for Financial Nigeria have often been on fiscal and monetary policy. But this focus still leaves me as a close observer of the political climates.
The first thing that struck me when I surveyed media reportage of the ruling was the emphasis on the fact that it came 47 years after the civil war had ended. Muted in that, is the view that the federal government was late in agreeing to pay compensation to the victims of the civil war, which was fought between July 1967 and January 1970 to force breakaway Biafra Republic back into Nigeria.
The 2017 ruling was in actual fact a judicial affirmation of the out-of-court agreement that the federal government had reached with the plaintiffs. Earlier