The mish-mash of Nigeria’s post-war history has permitted many sad revisions which in turn has made Nigerian historical studies and its statements therefrom to be lopsided, ethnic, and gnarled. We have tended in Nigeria to celebrate the worst of us, and have confined Nigeria’s true national heroes to the dustbin. Today, only in a place like Nigeria, with its twisted ethos, can a man like Ahmadu Bello for instance, have greater pride of place in the National rolls than Akweke Abyssinia Nwafor Orizu, one of the great spirits of the anti-colonial Nationalist movement.
While the likes of Nwafor-Orizu were in the trenches fighting for Nigerian independence, and pushing the British out, and in turn being blackmailed and jailed, the likes of Ahmadu Bello known collaborator with British colonialism and its neo-colonial aims n Nigeria, were vociferous against the independence movement, and the emergence of Nigeria as a free and United nation.
Here of course is not the place or the occasion to tell this story or do that analysis fully of events between 1945 and 1947 that continue to have implications for Nigeria even today. But as the future unveils the archives of colonial Nigeria, and as those invested in the “single story” of Nigerian history begin to finally and fully exit from the stage, and down the line, as a true national history begins to shape with the solid formation of Nigeria, those coming in the future will see the true texture of that story; who did what, and who didn’t do what. Who did what, from the end of the 2nd World War in 1945, to free Africans in general and Nigeria in particular from the clutches of colonialism, and who collaborated with the colonialists to destroy the possibilities of political and economic freedom and independence.
Of course, those who are afraid of Nigeria’s true history have decreed that history be neither thought, nor even taught in our schools, but history ultimately has a way of freeing itself, because frankly, true history is like the moon shining, no palm can cover it from the face of the sky. It is important to let a new generation of Nigerians know their history. We must tell the story of Nigeria, from its colonial struggles, to its postcolonial situation. Among those who have been strategically eliminated, or bowdlerized from the pages of Nigerian history is Akweke Abyssinia Nwafor-Orizu, President of the Senate of Nigeria from November 1963-October 1965, and President of Nigeria from October 1965-Jan. 16, 1966.
For three months Nwafor Orizu was Acting President of Nigeria, and in that capacity suspended Parliament sine die during the military coup, and handed emergency power temporarily to the military in a move that signified the temporary end of the republic. This should be a matter of public record. Dr. Nwafor Orizu should therefore be counted among the Heads of State of Nigeria, and accorded his due place in the National Hall of Fame. The mere fact of taking the oath of the office of President, even in the acting role, places Nwafor Orizu legally as President and Head of State of the Federal Republic, and in that wise, of a higher status and capacity over Ernest Shonekan, who served as Head of the interim Government for three months, and who has been accorded all the rights due a former Head of state of Nigeria.
If Ernest Shonekan could be regarded as Head of State, what disqualifies Nwafor Orizu, who had a higher status in the republic, and whose position guaranteed under the law of an elected parliament of the republic gives him significant cache? This is the question that should have long occupied legal historians, political historians, theorists of Nigerian jurisprudence, and scholars of the public system.
But the circumstance of Nwafor Orizu’s presidency has often countermanded his position. Nwafor Orizu was acting President of Nigeria in a particularly difficult situation. When Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, then president of the republic took his extended vacation in October 1965.
Nwafor Orizu was President of Nigeria
