Opinion
By Ambassador Lilian Onoh
IF your bank manager took all your savings, worth millions of Naira or even N100, and gave you N20 in return, what would you call him? A thief. Onye oshi. Barawu. Olé.
In 1970, at the end of the Nigerian Civil War, Yakubu Gowon and Obafemi Awolowo executed this exact manoeuvre. They confiscated the billions of Pounds of the entire Biafran population, whether dead or alive, and gave the living £20 in return, no matter how large your account balance was! This included the bank balances of Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, Africa’s first billionaire and the father of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the leader of Biafra and the person about whom Gowon wants to rewrite history and blame for the War.
It was a final act of a vicious, inhuman beast who had superintended the death of over three million Biafrans but not satisfied with their blood, took all their money and then sang his own praises and forced school children in the East to sing: “We salute you, General Gowon; Great Commander, we are grateful”!
Gowon and Awolowo literally stole all the bank balances of Ndi Igbo, including all the Igbo industrialists, multi millionaires, civil servants, Doctors, Nurses, teachers, pharmacists, traders, the wives, mothers and grandmothers that made money from selling fruit, akara, vegetables from their gardens – every single Igbo person.
It was the entire combined bank balances of the most industrious, legitimately affluent tribe in Nigeria – income gained through hard work, entrepreneurship, trading, academia etc and not government largess or contracts.
Whether their bank accounts were in Maiduguri, Ikot Ekpene, Kaura Namoda or Enugu, Gowon and Awolowo took their money and gave the living adults with bank accounts £20 in return. If you didn’t have a bank account but had money, it was worthless. The dead lost everything to these vultures. They never gave an account of how they shared the money.
However, we know that both of them became stupendously wealthy after the War. So did everyone in their Supreme Military Council during that time.
Theophilus Danjuma, a soldier whose legitimate salary was around N500 a month when he was a member of the Supreme Military Council, had an excess N3billion to launch Gowon’s fictitious recollections, which he calls a memoir. Danjuma has never explained how he raised the initial funds required to bid for, and acquire the oil fields awarded to him during that time; oil fields from which he is reputed to receive untold millions of Dollars daily.
This grand theft of the billions of Pounds from Ndi Igbo is what Gowon called: “No Victor, No Vanquished” at the end of the War; and which he still tries to sell to a credulous world as his noble achievement!
No Victor, No Vanquished can also be called the most brazen heist in modern history. He stole the money of the people of an entire country, Biafra, after slaughtering three million of its people. I have not been able to find any record of such a thing happening anywhere else in history. Yakubu Gowon stole our money in what is akin to cannibalism by any other name. He could not physically gorge himself on the carcass of Ndi Igbo so he gorged himself on their entire savings after carrying out the war with the highest casualty in African history.
It is now time to demand it back and demand an accounting and reparations from Gowon and the Nigerian Government.
Ohanaeze, all Eastern Governors, Traditional rulers, Lawyers, Activists, MASSOB, IPOB, Students, Doctors, Lawyers, Journalists, Traders, Anyone with a shred of human decency from any tribe, must arise en masse and demand an accounting and reparations from the Nigerian Government while Gowon, Obasanjo and Danjuma, the three living participants of that horror, are still alive. Even if all three died tomorrow, the Nigerian Government is still liable to repay our money.
Ndi Igbo cannot remain stupid and docile forever. Nigeria may have “defeated” Biafra with the help of three superpowers, but our money in Nigerian Banks, including Standard Bank (now 1st Bank), Barclays Bank, UBA, African Continental Bank (ACB) and other Banks, was not theirs to steal and share amongst themselves. The government must return our money. With interest.
This is modern history – current history in fact. The banks did not shred the records. They can still be found. And if any bank destroyed the records (which would be an illegal act), then they too must be taken to court and be part of those that must pay reparations to Ndi Igbo.
Since they took every Igbo man’s money, currency at par with the British Pound, and only gave £20 in return, then the minimum due every Igbo man and woman alive over the age of eighteen (18) should be set at £250,000.00 (Two hundred and fifty thousand Pounds Sterling).
Any survivor of the Civil War, who still has any sort of record, should present it and demand compound interest as well as 40% potential Return on Investment (ROI) on the funds during the fifty six years since the War ended.
If we had used our money to bid for oil fields like Danjuma when Nigeria nationalised foreign companies after the war, the ROI would be immeasurable.
If a Judge can award damages against the UK for the massacre of coal miners in Enugu, how much more this established theft of our money by Yakubu Gowon, Obafemi Awolowo and the Nigerian Government in 1970?
Gowon can continue lying to himself that he did not cause the war but he can never deny that he stole our money by executive fiat. That is established fact; no dispute. So, he will die as a common thief. That is the one single legacy that can never be disputed or erased.
In the meantime, it is time for Ndi Igbo to rise up as one and demand that the Government of Nigeria right this horrendous wrong.
Later, we can face the people of Rivers State and the so-called, “Abandoned Property” vultures who will never have peace in the houses they stole from our parents and grandparents, killing those that returned to their homes after the war in order to take over their property.
***Ambassador Lilian Onoh is Nigeria’s former High Commissioner to Namibia, former Head of Mission in Jamaica; and author of, “Diplomatic Bedlam: Interactions With Humans, Mutants, Variants and Quadruple Variants.”
A.I
May 31, 2026
Tags: Ambassador Lilian Onoh Yakubu Gowon