The Seventies: Part Four

The Seventies: Part Four.

As the dust and ashes of the carnage settled, the first groups of Igbos who had previously lived outside Igboland, took leaps of faith and returned to the various cities and towns they had called home prior to the war. This migration was spearheaded by the more ambitious men and women of the younger generations who boarded lorries and trains, often against the wishes of their fearful kinsmen, who would’ve preferred them to seek safer and more-local sources of sustenance. With nothing more than the shirts on their back, the strange mixture of skeptical optimism in their hearts, and of course, the sweet-smelling fried akara and coarse oji (kola nuts) their mothers had hastily prepared for them to abate the journey’s hunger. Tens of thousands of young men journeyed to places such as Sapele, Benin City, Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Sokoto, Jos, and Kaduna with the hopes of starting life anew.

By 1975, over a hundred thousand Igbos had returned to Lagos, the commercial hub of the nation. Discovering that the properties and investments they had owned prior to the war had been labelled “abandoned property” and redistributed to the locals and despite facing staunch discrimination, they found employment by any means necessary: taking jobs as factory workers, barrow-pushers, and street hawkers, saving their meager earnings to send to their families in Igboland.

Worthy of mention is that according to statistical studies conducted in the early 1970s, a combination of Federal Government policies had made the Igbo the poorest and most-disadvantaged ethnic group in Nigeria. In 1970, in Rivers state alone, 5600 houses formerly owned by Igbos had been reclaimed and redistributed by the government in addition to other properties worth a total of $1.5 billion (“Nigeria Since the Civil War”, Nwachuku and Uzoigwe) in today’s currency. In that same year, the Federal Government launched a currency conversion exercise, promoted as a measure of goodwill towards former Biafrans who were still in possession of an estimated 135 million Biafran pounds worth of valueless currency. This scheme was purposely ended a mere few weeks after its inception, and as a result, only 16.5 million Biafran pounds were exchanged. In the Banking Obligation Decree of 1970, the Federal Government invalidated accounts in Biafran banks, forever depriving tens of thousands of their life savings.#igbohistory