Eyo Ekpo was born into the family of the late Major-General Eyo Okon Ekpo of Diamond Hill Village, Calabar Municipality Local Government Area (of the Atogha Family of Big Qua, and Itak Mkpa Family of Obutong, both of Calabar) and Sabina Yetunde Ekpo (of the Idowu Family of Owu, Abeokuta, Ogun State and Ajao Family of Ondo, Ondo State). He is a descendant of an illustrious line of dedicated public servants, traders, clerics and teachers. He was exposed to every part of Nigeria as a result of the itinerant nature of his father’s work. In this interview with ZEBULON AGOMUO and NOSA IGBINADOLOR, the accomplished technocrat waxed nostalgic, recalling the sweet memories of Nigeria he learnt from his father. He compared the Nigeria of yesteryear with the country of today, with a conclusion that something has dreadfully gone wrong with a nation touted as the Giant of Africa. Excerpts:
Can you please lay out the roles your father played that placed him in a vantage position to closely watch the evolution of Nigeria in those days?
My dad was Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters for General Yakubu Gowon between 1967 and 1973 (six years) and this was during the civil war and some years after while they were preparing to transition into civilian rule. He was also a member of the federal executive council when he left as chief of staff supreme headquarters; he then became commandant of defence academy for one year and for the last six to seven months of the Gowon’s administration, he was federal commissioner for agriculture and natural resources.
While he was in the army, he was trained and commissioned on the same day as Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu and they were friends. On the day of the first coup in 1966, Ojukwu was the commander of the fifth battalion in Kano and my father was his second-in-command, he worked very closely with the protagonist of the civil war and knew them both very well.
He died in March 2004 and in those years when I became an adult we talked quite a bit about the proverbial trouble in Nigeria and he gave me insights into the things that happened. He wrote a memoir while he was alive and asked me to publish it because if he did, a lot of people will not like what he wrote, and frankly he was not interested in getting into arguments with anyone.
He left the army in 1975 and was the first military officer to study Law while in service at the University of Lagos; afterward he went to Law School and became a qualified lawyer in 1978, and became the chairman of the Cross River State Local Government Service Commission (CRSLGSC) between 1978 and 1982 thereabouts.
Interestingly, he became a magistrate in Cross River and specifically asked for posting to the far parts where he could be the law himself. He could have been a judge but he said he was tired of signing people’s death warrants because as chief of staff he was signing execution warrants for people and he did not believe in the death penalty which he thought was wrong.
After 1986 or 1987, he became the chief registrar of the Cross River Judiciary and I think he retired in 1997 when he got to Lagos.
How did the government work generally during his time?
The government of that time was actually a diarchy which was the combination of a government headed by the military but run by civilians. Back then, there were no military ministers, until 1973 when Murtala Muhammed, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Musa Yar’Adua joined the Federal Executive Council.
Gowon was quite young when he was the head of state; so there were two people who were very instrumental to the way the government was run and they were Admiral Wey who was then Chief of the Navy and later became chief of staff after my dad left and Monsignor Ayodele Martins who was a Catholic chaplain of the Nigerian army.
They advised that he got Awolowo to join his government and then he became the Federal Commissioner for Finance but also he was given the title of vice chairman of the federal executive council and he was effectively the de-facto prime minister of the country and he taught them how to run a government. Although there were good civil servants, they had to take orders from someone who eventually was Awolowo.
Back then, I was very young but I remembered a man that used to come to our house usually in the evenings in a very long car. He will come with a huge pile of files and my dad would sit with him and sometimes I would be there listening to them even though I did not know what they were discussing. It was later that I found out that it was Awolowo and what he used to do was before each executive council meeting, he would come to my dad and go through all the memos presented and discuss all of them. My dad will make notes and discuss with Gowon about what Awolowo’s views were on the memo and then they would have a reasonably okay meeting.
I later read a story about Awolowo talking about the old men who attended the executive meeting of the western region government and sleep; he said they were able to sleep because the real meeting had been held the day before when everything was discussed.
Back then, there was a system to do everything which was evident when Nigeria had the civil war and funded it without incurring any major debt which I think happened because of Awolowo.
Also during his time, there were two national development plans in 1966 to 1970 and 1970 to 1975, as at the time we spoke, my dad said here we are as a country and we still had not done anything remotely close to the policies, projects, and programmes in the Second National Development Plan of 1970 to 1975 developed by Adebayo Adedeji, federal commissioner for economic development and Obafemi Awolowo, who was the minister of finance and de-facto prime minister.
He said everything that people launched like petroleum refineries, petrochemical plants, ports, roads, etc. is in that second national development plan. If a survey is taken to determine how much has been done in implementing a plan from 50 years ago, the result will be very sobering.
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The government was run as a collective, papers were discussed, and ideas were sought from the civilians who were largely politicians or had played roles in the government like Shehu Shagari, Awolowo, Shettima Ali Monguno, etc. who were all part of that government and it seemed to have worked at least up to a certain point in time. They had promised that there will be a transition back to civilian rule in 1972 and in anticipation of that Awolowo left the government in October 1971.
Awolowo said in his resignation letter that it would be wrong for him to remain in government and at the same time be part of a political process of return, so he left, and my dad thought, that was when things started to go wrong. Gowon became a little bit more isolated and more dependent on the civil servants rather than the cabinet and the military too got very dissatisfied.
During the war, they were distracted but afterward, they had this agitation whereby soldiers wanted to play a more visible and larger role in government. The reaction to that after Awolowo left was that soldiers now became federal commissioners and ministers and one thing led to another and that did not really work well because we had soldiers become politicians and everything went belly up.
In 1975 he left the government and played no further role in national life in the country.
What can you remember him saying about his regrets or what could have been done differently?
In terms of regret, he never liked the idea of a military government. I remember in 1971 at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) where he gave a speech that the military in government was an aberration and should be as short-lived as possible but I think the biggest regret he had was that the civil war was fought at all. I have copies of letters he wrote to Gowon and to Ojukwu before the conference in Ghana where he said this was the opportunity to prevent further bloodshed and asked them to behave responsibly; he was not even in the country at that time.
By 1970 when the war ended, out of a group of the first set of Nigerian military officers which were about 30 to 35 officers, only five of them were either alive or still in the army about 13 years later. Those five were Yakubu Gowon, General Adebayo, General Ejoor, Hassan Usman Katsina, and my dad.
I wanted to join the army and was admitted into NDA in January 1983, my father did not let me see that admission letter for three years and I used to wonder how I didn’t get the letter. My father would have loved to remain in the military but he could not, even though he did not like government.
The biggest single regret he had was that they did not transit into civilian rule in 1972; he felt that Awolowo should have been the head of government after then because he had a clear picture of Nigeria that we all desired and knew how to get us to that place.
I must have mentioned a political bureau survey of Nigeria that came to his house in Calabar and he refused to talk to them because he felt it was a waste of time talking to them, telling them to read Awolowo’s books to know how Nigeria should be run.
To date, Awolowo is still the only politician who set out a clear vision of the Nigeria of our dreams and how we can get there and we have done a good job of running away over the last 50 years from the precepts that he espoused clearly in his speaking and his writing and we are still in the wilderness.
Maybe one day, we will find a leader who will look at Awolowo’s books and see in them a development of thinking about how we can attain the Nigeria of our dream, he was fortunate to be given the opportunity to quote out a development plan for this country which we have not been able to go past it 50 years later.
Every time you see another plan, it comes from trying to attain the objectives of that other plan. It is unfortunate that the politicians and the civil servants particularly those who were able to develop those plans of the early 70s and mid-70s got flushed out of government by the Murtala Muhammed administration that came in for unknown reasons and that institutional memory which we should have retained got lost.
In early 1972 Gowon delivered a speech about the transition not being feasible and that there was almost a military coup to take out the Gowon administration. My dad’s view was that Gowon and the other senior officers who were the leaders of the government at that time should have resigned and cleared themselves out since they had failed in the mission of transiting to civilian rule and on the back of that view he decided he no longer wanted to be the chief of staff. He also fell ill at that time; so it was convenient for him to leave the government.
What were his major fears about the country? Again, did he tell you anything about the unity or otherwise of Nigeria, and the so-called non-negotiable and indissolubility nature of the country; did he talk about any of such?
He died in 2004. He never dreamt that Nigeria will be this bad; so he never really talked about it. The instinctive reaction of most people who fought in the Civil War is to keep Nigeria together. And I don’t think he ever really needed to ask himself, whether it was a good or a bad thing. What I do remember was that in 1999, when we were transiting and Obasanjo became the head of state. He said to me, after Obasanjo was declared as the winner, ‘You people are in trouble with this man.’ That was what he said. And I said what are you talking about? He said, look, I know, Obasanjo very well. He doesn’t like me, for various reasons. And he gave me those reasons; he told me the thing that happened for Obasanjo not to like him.
You know, later on, I experienced things that told me that maybe he was right. I mean, he told me things that happened between himself and Obasanjo which are in the manuscript of his book.
From what you can see as a well-travelled Nigerian, and your wealth of experience about the country, do you think there is a possibility of Nigeria returning to the unity that used to exist pre-civil war days when Nigerians considered every part of the country as home?
I don’t know. When a relationship between people, individuals get so fundamentally shattered, it is difficult to say. I believe sincerely that it is actions, not words that determine the fate or the failure of any relationship.
So, all it takes in my view, as difficult as it may be, is to find a leader who can take actions that are borne out of good faith and that reassure everybody.
When your good faith, your belief in the sanctity of relationships are exemplified by what it is you do, and how you do them, then you instill confidence in people.
But when the perception is that you are biased and unduly so, in favour of one particular part or another part, then people begin to feel that they don’t have a stake in what is going on. And if you then allow those views to be pushed by violence, like we’re seeing now in the south-east, that we’re seeing in the north-west, and in the north east, then it becomes a lot more difficult to do.
But I still believe that we have yet another chance with this coming election to find the right kind of people. Not only those who are rocket scientists, but those who can act in good faith and reassure Nigerians that we all have a future together. Without that, you can elect the most technically capable person you can think of and we will go nowhere.
Your father sat at the highest levels of government and took decisions, including economic decisions. I wonder what his views were in his later years with respect to Nigeria’s economy. Did he ever say anything about Gowon administration’s failure? Did he think the Gowon administration failed to drive Nigeria’s economic takeoff? And what were his views with regard to the state of the economy between 1960 up until the 2000?
Quite the contrary; he didn’t think that that there was any failure. Again, let me point out two things. Number one, the best decision that the Gowon Administration ever took was to make Awolowo the Minister of Finance, vice-chairman of the Executive Council, and de-facto Prime Minister. Best thing he ever did. These guys were a bunch of Lieutenant Colonels, and Majors who didn’t know anything about governance, and couldn’t have run any kind of national government.
They just simply said come and take over this thing and run it and we will follow. I have talked about the national development plan that Awolowo then came up with. The second thing, and they faithfully tried to implement, I told you that my dad was for about seven months the former commissioner for Agriculture, he says to me that the one good thing that he knows he did right in that job in six months, was to implement this thing called the Agric Development Programmes (ADP) which are still in place till today, across the various states of the Federation. He started that programme in what is today’s South-East, to be precise, this central state and he did it deliberately. And what that did was to take Agricultural extension services across the country, into various states of the federation and that has grown. So, for something that started 47 years ago to still be in place today, I think speaks to some form of consistency, foresight, and trying to do the right thing.
The second thing that he was very proud of was ECOWAS. Interestingly, he said to me that ECOWAS was established on the back of a great hope and promise, and that was that Nigeria would be the primary provider of last resort for West Africa. We had everything back then natural resources, agricultural produce, we had people, we had oil and gas resources, energy resources even manufacturing.
And, what is the name of ECOWAS? Economic Community of West African States, the primary driver for ECOWAS was building our economies and the primary engine room; in fact, the only engine room of that economic growth was Nigeria. And when you look at the plans, even up till now, Nigeria is central to all of them, which is why ECOWAS’ inability to fulfill the entirety of its promise is the story of Nigeria’s failure.
When you look at Russia, and how Russia is central, has been central to the growth of Europe. The other side of Russia’s supply of energy resources for Europe is the growth of Germany and France and their economies. It has been central; that access to cheap gas, those pipelines systems, etc.
When you look at Awolowo’s second national development plan, and you look at ECOWAS, you will see the conjoining between them, how the infrastructural development of Nigeria was meant to be the beginning of the infrastructure development of West Africa, the West African gas pipeline, it wasn’t meant to go just from Escravos to Tema; was meant to go as far as Freetown, It hasn’t. The trans-West African highway wasn’t meant to stop in Accra, it was meant to get up to Senegal.
The informal trade that Nigeria is the centre of today in West Africa was not meant to be informal, it was meant to be formalised.
And that’s why you had banks like Eco Bank established in 1975 or 1977 by Adeyemi Lawson Fajemirokun and another from Ivory Coast. They founded Eco Bank on the back of the province of ECOWAS.
So, when you look at how that has not gone, you see why there’s cause for regret. On the contrary, don’t forget that these are people who left in ‘75. And as of 1975, the reason for Murtala Mohammed’s coup was not that the economy was tanking, go and read his speech. It wasn’t that the economy was growing, but it was just that the bunch of soldiers were upset with Gowon for excluding them from governance, that’s what it was.
Gowon had isolated himself from the military and so the people who did the coup in 1966 in July, who put him in power, felt that well, he has not done what he wanted to do, so we’ll take out. That was the simple reason for the 1975 coup, nothing more. Otherwise, I think that if my father had to look back to that period, he would find very little to regret or to say we didn’t do well.
I don’t think when you look at the economic history of Nigeria, people will tell you, that was when things started to go bad. It wasn’t that 1975 -‘77 period.
There was a lot of building up at that time and unfortunately, the promise of those foundations, the promises that were made at that time, the expectations that we had have not really been fulfilled.
So, while not being defensive, maybe the regret will be that they couldn’t continue for long enough to establish those plans more solidly, maybe, that will be regret but in terms of what they did or didn’t do, we didn’t talk about it that much.
But we did talk about successes and the thing that that he was proud of. And it is centred on those three things: the ADP that he did when he was Minister for Agriculture, the founding of ECOWAS in 1975, and the second national development plan, which he had started to implement from 1971 until the time that he left.
If Nigeria does not develop, West Africa will not develop. If South Africa, Kenya and Egypt do not develop with Nigeria, Africa will not develop.
The theory was that you need those big players in the region to lift up the other. So, as you said, the victory of ECOWAS is the story of the failure of Nigeria.
What were the fun things that he could tell you about being in government and being in the military?
Again, unfortunately, it’s a matter of regret. He told me that before the 1966 coup, January, Every weekend, what they call the number one officers’ mess in the Army is in Zaria.
And every weekend from all across the country, army officers would pile into their cars and drive to the area on Friday afternoon, from wherever they are the country. Those not on duty, those available, would congregate in the area every Friday and they would play games, play lawn tennis, play hockey, go to the mess, eat together and then leave on Sunday night back to their various stations. And one of the two brigade commanders will always be present and would pay for all the officers’ drinks on Saturday night. Sometimes, once in a while, they would also drive to Accra, because
Accra is also where the very first officer training school for the West Africa frontier force. Back then, that was what the British called the armies of English speaking West Africa, consisting of Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria. There was a Nigeria regiment and the Ghana regiment.
My father’s first military training was the officer training school in Accra around 1955.
In fact, our house here in Calabar is called Teshie Lodge, named after that town in Accra, where the military academy is located in a part of Accra called, Teshie-Nungua.
So, they used to drive to Accra, to connect, fraternise with their friends once in a while, listen to highlife, stay in what was called Ambassador Hotel now the Golden Tulip. The Golden Tulip of today in Accra used to be the Ambassador’s Hotel back then. They will go there, listen to E.T Mensah, Victor Olaiya and other highlife musicians and then drive back to Nigeria. Those were happy times.
The great regret for him is that after January, when officers started killing themselves (between January and July), all that ended for good. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, I believe that until the end of his life, he suffered from PTSD caused by first those two coups and then the Civil War.
From what I heard, I never knew that part of him. He was a very lively person, very sociable. The person that I knew and I grew up with was almost a hermit, did not like to socialise.
I asked him once about it, and he said socialise with whom? All my course-mates are dead or they left the army.
In a six month period, the 12 people that he went to military school with, he did his course with and were commissioned in 1956 were gone.
In fact, part of his stress was the fact that he was military secretary after the ‘66 school. The military secretary is responsible for the postings of senior officers. That’s the part of his function. He recommended two of his course-mates to be battalion commanders. They were made battalion commanders and they were both killed in July. He believes that was him because he could have left those guys where they were, and maybe they wouldn’t have been killed. It was a great time.
But for those who know the army, back then, the best part of the Nigerian army was before January 6, 1966. After that, it became something else.
And I mentioned to you earlier on that I wanted to be a soldier but he refused. He just simply did not let it ever happen. And you know, sometimes, I think whether he was even right.
At the time, I didn’t like him very much for doing that. I went to a barracks primary school which again, was something interesting. We lived in Ikoyi then, on Bourdillon road. My friends were going to Corona, but I was crossing the bridge and going to Yaba, to a school in barracks.
But I think that was a good thing that he did for me, because I went to school with Nigerians, I went to school with people from all across the country.
So the happy time for him was probably before 1966, because I was born in June 1966. I never saw those happy times.
The most serious challenge facing Nigeria, as you pointed out, is the economic challenge, and the next president should really understand these needs so well. But from the narratives going on so far ahead of this election, do you see a deviation from the usual focus on religion and ethnicity, in choosing the next president?
First of all, I disagree. Our biggest single challenge is not economic. Our biggest single challenge is just fraternisation. How do we live together as a group of people? That is not a function of any technocratic ability. It’s a function of your ability to just pull people together behind a common cause, act in good faith, act transparently, take decisions; they may be wrong or right. But take decisions that are clearly the product of a process of collective thinking.
Look for the best that we have in the country. I went to a federal government college and at the age of 11, I found out that ability is not shared according to tribe. The best people in Nigeria are not Ibos, Gwari people not Efik people but best people in Nigeria are Nigerians of good character.
People who believe in the country, we need a leader who will give us people that they will work with who believe in Nigeria who do not see Nigeria as a big elephant to be carved for the meat that it gives to us, who do not see Nigeria as a national cake. That’s all we need right now. It is not a matter of tribe, of religion. It’s a matter of character and an ethical grounding that says, Nigeria first.
If we do not have that kind of leader, I’m afraid we’re digging ourselves deeper into the hole.
When you have that kind of leader, he will find the best people who know about the economy. Because the president, again, from my dad, between himself and Gowon, they shared responsibility. Gowom took care of the Federal Government, he took care of the states. And he found out that no matter how good you think you are, you must depend on people.
No matter, any president of Nigeria on any given day, in any 12 hour period, while he’s awake, he can only deal with a small percentage, maybe 10percent of the 68 or 69 items, on the exclusive legislative list, which are the Federal Government’s responsibility.
There are over 800 parastatals, all appointed by and reporting to the President. Is he going to be looking at all? How?
It is your character, your understanding of this country, how you want to bring people together, and how you want to appoint those that will work on your agenda. If those decisions are taken on a parochial basis, you will continue to be in trouble.
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