The three Rs
General Gowon announced a programme of Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction. There was to be no Nuremberg, no reprisals, an amnesty for all who had fought. In the narrow sense this was kept: there were no mass executions and no trials of Biafran officers. In the wider sense the east was left to rebuild itself from a standing start with nothing, and every instrument of the state was then used to make sure it stayed there.
Twenty pounds
Biafra had issued its own currency. After the surrender the Central Bank of Nigeria ruled that Biafran pounds were worthless, and that Nigerian-pound accounts held in banks in the former Biafra, frozen since 1967, would be settled with a flat ex gratia payment of twenty Nigerian pounds per depositor, whatever the balance had been. A trader with two hundred pounds got twenty. A company with twenty thousand got twenty. My grandmother, who had a shop before the war, got twenty. The savings of an entire region were cancelled in a single administrative decision, and the region was then invited to compete in the oil boom of the 1970s with the money it did not have.
Abandoned property
In Port Harcourt, the city that Igbo traders had largely built, the new Rivers State government declared houses and businesses left behind by people who had fled the war to be abandoned property, took them into custody, and in most cases never gave them back. The word abandoned is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. People who ran from soldiers did not abandon their houses. They were told afterwards that they had.
Indigenisation
In 1972 the federal government passed the Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree, which reserved whole categories of business for Nigerians and required foreign firms to sell majority stakes to Nigerian owners. It was sold as economic nationalism. Its timing meant that the people with capital to buy were those who had not just had their bank accounts reduced to twenty pounds. The commanding heights of the Nigerian economy changed hands in the two years after the war, and the east was not at the table.
Exclusion
Since Aguiyi-Ironsi in 1966 no Igbo has led Nigeria. The army, the civil service and the security agencies were rebuilt after 1970 with the east largely outside the top ranks, and every federal government since has been able to point to a token appointment while the pattern held. Alex Ekwueme was vice-president from 1979 to 1983. That is the high-water mark. In 2023 an Igbo candidate won more votes in Lagos than the ruling party, and the country's reaction told you everything about what had not changed.
Silence
No memorial. No inquiry. No official count of the dead. In 2007 history was removed from the Nigerian school curriculum altogether and not restored until 2022, so that two generations of Nigerians grew up with no formal account of the war at all. Ojukwu was pardoned by President Shagari in 1982 and came home to crowds, ran for office, and died in 2011; his state funeral in 2012 was the closest the country has come to acknowledging what happened, and it did so by honouring the man while saying nothing about the cause.
They did not need to punish us after the war. They only had to make sure that we could not remember, and that if we did, we could not afford to say so.
What came out of it
A region that rebuilt itself through trade, because the state had shut every other door. Nnewi, Aba and Onitsha became engines of a commerce that owes nothing to Abuja. And underneath the prosperity, a memory that was never allowed to become history and so became, instead, a movement. That is the next chapter.