Pete Edochie’s interview and the Awolowo question, By Osmund Agbo
The same man celebrated for deploying government so effectively in the service of human development became, during the Nigerian Civil War, one of the most consequential civilian figures in the Federal Government’s prosecution of the war against Biafra.
After the war, the Federal Government’s decision to give people in the former Biafran territory a flat £20 in exchange for their old currency became one of the most enduring sources of bitterness.
It demands that we hold two seemingly incompatible truths in our minds at once, that Awolowo was an extraordinary visionary who demonstrated what purposeful government could accomplish, and, at the same time, a central civilian figure in a war whose economic strategy inflicted terrible suffering on his fellow Nigerians.
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