Dawn Chinagorom-Abiakalam: Hi, my name is Dawn Chinagorom-Abiakalam and I’m conducting an oral history interview for the Nigeria Stories Archive. Today is January 24th, 2026, and I would like to start by thanking you for joining me today. So, we’re going to begin by talking a little about your personal background, and if you could please go ahead. Thank yo. 

Ike Ilebgbune: Thank you, Dawn. My name is Ike Ilegbune. Ike is short for Ikechukwu, and I am going to be 55 in a couple of months, in March. I was born in 1971, and even though I was born outside of Nigeria’s shores, I am very much a Nigerian. I regard Nigeria as my home. I’ve spent probably 50-50 my time in Nigeria and outside it, but I regard Nigeria as my home, and anything relating to Nigerian history is very important to me. So, I’m really glad to have been asked to speak to you on my perspectives on Nigerian history, and I wish you all the best of luck as you put your archive together, and ready to start when you are.

DCA: Thank you. Thank you very much. So, to start, can you tell me a little about your experiences being a child in the diaspora, like your experiences growing up outside of Nigeria? You said you grew up 50-50, so if you don’t mind, could you talk a little about that.

II: Okay, so I guess I didn’t grow up 50-50. I’ve lived 50-50. I think my developmental years were spent mostly in Nigeria, so that probably accounts for me regarding Nigeria as home, and let me explain. So, I moved back to Nigeria just before I turned five, so I guess my early years were spent in England, and I do have some memories, although they are starting to fade, obviously, as I’ve gotten older, of my life in the UK before I moved back to Nigeria. I moved back to a city called Ife in western Nigeria, where my father was a university lecturer and my mom was a student of law there, so I grew up on a campus in Ife. So when you say growing up in diaspora, the truth is that I spent too little time as a diaspora baby or toddler, and I actually did most of my growing up from age five until I left Nigeria in 1993, aged 22. So there were a few forays abroad in my teen years, in my university years, you know, going away to work in the summer, but I was principally raised here. But I spent a lot of time, obviously, most of my 20s, 30s, all the way up to my 40s, were spent in the UK, so when you add that period to the first five years, that it becomes a half and half thing. But I grew up in Nigeria for the most part.

DCA: Okay, yes, that sounds lovely. So you mentioned Ife, which is a very well known, well regarded university town in Nigeria, and you also mentioned that your dad was a lecturer and you grew up on a university campus, so the Nigerian educational system has changed quite a bit from what it was at that time to now. Could you talk a little about your experiences growing up on that campus and what you remember the university community being like at that time?

II: Great question, thank you. So I started primary school at what was known then as the staff school of the University of Ife, eventually became the Obafemi Awolowo University staff school. Incidentally, I’ve recently joined a group on WhatsApp that is made up of alumni of that school, people I lost contact with many, many years ago when I left Ife to move east, but I’ll come to that later. When I started primary school in Ife in western Nigeria, one of the things, I mean I didn’t know this at the time, was unlike most other parts of Nigeria where you were assigned to a class based on your age, in western Nigeria you were assigned based on your ability. So it didn’t take me long to start jumping classes because at the time, anyway, I showed enhanced ability, and so it was not unusual for people to be going into secondary school aged eight and a half, nine. So by the time I left Ife to move to Enugu in 1979, aged eight, I would say I was academically ready for secondary school, even if I wasn’t ready physically or psychologically, but if I had stayed in Ife, many of my mates did go into secondary school in the following year, so you tended not to do a 6th year of primary school, everyone went in from primary five, and only the primary six was kind of remedial. The quality of education, I think, compared to what I see, or I saw later in life, was superb. 

Ife isn’t just a university town. You probably know this already, but it’s the ancestral home of the Yoruba race, and so it has produced people like Wole Soyinka, you know, in as much as he’s identified as having attended university in Ibadan, which is next door, he actually came into his own as a young lecturer at the University of Ife. That was where he wrote many of his books and plays, and as a matter of fact, Ife just has as much of a claim to Soyinka’s history and legacy as perhaps the University of Ibadan does. So Ife’s steeped in traditions. I learned to speak Yoruba from a very young age, thanks to the fact that it was a mixed curriculum, but you also played with kids who spoke principally Yoruba, you know, everyone spoke English but the social language was Yoruba, and my mom already spoke Yoruba, so that helped. We had house helps and drivers who spoke Yoruba, so I was acting as a lead in plays that were entirely Yoruba by the age of six, seven, and you know, I remember some of the songs still, they were mainly musicals that had a moral message or historical message.

And yeah, I know there was a focus on, you know, ability, and I remember skipping what I believe was primary three and went straight to primary four after only a few months as a pupil in primary three, so, and it wasn’t unusual. It was quite interesting. I mean, the other thing I should mention about Ife is, as a university campus, I’ve been back since I left a couple of times, it’s still perhaps the most beautifully constructed of the universities that are about the same age. So Ife is probably contemporaries with UNN, ABU in Zaria, probably Uniben is a bit younger, but I think it was constructed by an Israeli, mainly by an Israeli firm who planned and executed the construction. There’s some fantastic historical buildings like Oduduwa Hall there, and the architectural style of the university is unique. So from a point of view of architectural history, the university is beautiful. It has an undulating land, you know, so the roads can be hilly at times, and I remember living at the base of a hill myself on campus. So it’s a beautiful place, historically relevant, geographically diverse, and beautiful topography. So that, I guess, is sort of Ife in a nutshell for me.

DCA: Yeah, yeah, that sounds wonderful, thank you for sharing. And when you were talking about the academic environment, and you know, people getting moved in class based on their ability, it made me think about how some of that hasn’t really changed, because I went to elementary school myself in Lagos and I also stopped after primary five to start secondary school, because all the teachers thought that it was fine for me to continue on. So just thinking about how some features of the educational system haven’t changed that much between now and then. 

And another question I had, because the environment you mentioned in Ife seems to be very diverse but also kind of a unique setting, just because of the presence of the university there. You mentioned that you were born in 1971, which is the early 70s, and as we know, Nigeria experienced this big boom in the 70s because of rising oil prices, it seemed like just a time of like economic prosperity, things were amazing, and then the opposite kind of happened in the 80s when oil prices fell and things became really hard in the country. And so I was wondering what the environment and experience was like in a place like Ife that had such a central institution to it, like the University of Ife there at the time. What was the environment like in such an academic environment with all the, I guess, volatility in the economy at large.

II: Oh, big question, but a very important one too, so thanks. So my recollection of life in Ife was that I didn’t miss the UK much in terms of access to the sort of things like food or experiences. I was heavily into comics, and I went down to the store on the campus, which was a Leventus store. AG Leventus is a big retailer, they have moved into other parts of the Nigerian economy, but at the time they were known for having stores in major cities, and they had one on campus in Ife. I should mention though that the university in Ife was the biggest institution in the town, so everything was built around it, right. Ife doesn’t have much else in terms of institutions or employment, so the university was the biggest employer, it had, it took up the biggest land mass, you know, it was basically the main leverage of the city, right. And yeah, growing up on campus, it was in a bit of a cocoon. We went to watch movies at Oduduwa Hall, a beautiful, plush hall, you know, and enjoyed a life that was comparable, I guess, to living in a mid-sized western city, and when I say western I mean, you know, what was geographically western, as in the west, the UK and America and the like. So I didn’t miss growing up in England. I loved the weather, I wore different clothes, not too warm, and it was a beautiful place to grow up. So, at the time, and bear in mind my parents had very modest incomes at the time, in fact my mom was working, she had returned to start university, so she was a student, my dad basically had the only income in the household, and we’re talking about an extended family household on both my mom’s and dad’s side, so you know, we didn’t feel the pinch that much, we didn’t feel deprived in any way. And this was post-war Nigeria. 

Now, I wasn’t born in war, but you know, my parents were traumatized and scarred by that war, so you know, I know they tried to live relatively frugally. The war wasn’t a subject that came up much in the household, but you could kind of tell there were vestiges of it, you know, of their recollection, and of the experiences that came up from time to time. I’m sure we’ll touch on those later. But Ife was a gilded experience, I would say, you know. I enjoyed my life there, and it’s interesting because whereas I recollect living in the east from 1979 through the whole of the 80s and the 90s with much less nostalgia, at least around economic fortunes, it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the geography. I mean, it’s funny, with hindsight, when I recollect, I always think, oh, Ife was beautiful, Enugu was not, right. I mean, I regard myself today as an Enugu boy through and through, that’s what I regard as my home, even though I’m from Anambra state next door, but I have to say that from the point of view of my experiences of the economy, yeah, Enugu was tough, and it’s only with hindsight I realized it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Enugu, it just happened to be, you know, the times in which I lived in Enugu. So, you know, we lived through the boom when I was in the west, and then by the time we moved east, things had started to change. We had the return of civilians in ’79, and I guess that also heralded another mini boom, because with the, there was at least historically, there’s a sense in which we believe that it’s what happened between 1979 and 1983, in terms of the first, or rather the second civilian republic, laid the foundation for the political establishment we have in Nigeria today, and some of the practices around elections and rigging and corruption. Right, obviously this isn’t supposed to be me pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but I think we felt it then, and it manifested itself in different ways.

I went into secondary school in 1981. I remember the devaluation of the Naira quite significantly. I remember the first 50 Naira notes, and that was the biggest single bill we had at the time, because prior to that it was 20 Naira. Everybody expected inflation, but the inflation that followed was incredible, you know. I remember the very first time I had a friend who had over a thousand Naira in his federal savings bank account, and that was more than my parents earned together, you know, but yeah, he came from an affluent family, so to him a thousand Naira wasn’t much, but it was unspoken at the time, but we were going through massive inflation. I mean, something, I would tell you a story, something that sort of paints this picture. My dad had gone on a sabbatical to Chicago and we had remained in Nigeria for much of that time, but you know, we went to visit him in the summer, and on the way back, after the summer, just to show you how bad things were, my mom made sure to go buy lots of chicken drumsticks from some cheap meat store in Chicago, and four days before we left to return to Nigeria, she was boiling and grilling and sort of, you know, drying this meat and tying the bags to bring back to Nigeria. She wanted enough chicken to last her a year, because you could not find chicken to buy, it was like impossible to get chicken, unless you grew it yourself, it was just impossible, because it was also too expensive. So that was the sort of thing she did. I mean, the sad news is that the airline, Nigeria Airways, now defunct, delayed our luggage, and it so happened that the meat was in the last two pieces that came weeks after, so we lost all that meat. They were forgotten, the state it was in when we received the boxes two weeks after they went missing in transit. So that’s the sort of life I had. We, at some point, I remember, you know, all sorts of creative replacements for tissue paper. We had, we call essential commodity queues, where our parents had to go and queue up for essentials. At the time my dad was building a house in the village and we needed to queue up to buy cement at the factory price. There’s so many things that, they were quite, you know, terrible, in terms of my life in the east, compared to the experience I had in Ife. So economically it wasn’t the rosiest of times, and of course by the time we hit the late 80s, we hit the structural adjustment program, SAP, which was a horrible time for many Nigerians. Bear in mind my parents were public servants, my dad was a lecturer, my mom had afterwards finished her law degree in Ife and become a prosecutor, so they were both, they were both public servants, and their salary did not go a long way with the kind of extended family responsibilities they had. Yes, so it was, it was tough, it was really tough.

DCA: Wow, you’ve touched on many things and I’m going to ask lots of follow-up questions, but one area I want to start with is with the civil war. So you mentioned that, you know, you could see in your household some of the trauma that your parents had faced during the war, kind of in the way they lived their lives. And one question I was going to ask was how your identity as an Igbo family came through, living in Yoruba land in Ife, because you mentioned that you came back to Nigeria when you were like five, which is kind of like mid, late 70s, so post-war, but not too far from the war, people were still rebuilding at this time, the war had just ended. So I was wondering if you could talk a little about your experience with that, just being an Igbo family living in Yoruba land after this extremely devastating thing had happened to southeasterners in Nigeria.

II: Thanks. My parents didn’t speak much about the war. In a way I’m glad they didn’t. I had no prejudices about living in what was hitherto enemy territory for them, right. And I learned Yoruba even before I learned Igbo, mainly because, obviously, you know, by osmosis, you know, after everyone, yeah, my mom spoke it because she had grown up in western Nigeria herself, so it was one of her first languages. So the war affected my parents in many ways. I mean, needless to say, they both lost close family. My dad lost one of his sisters, who I never met, she died before I was born. My mom lost her only brother, that traumatized my grandfather. You know, hindsight, they say, is 20-20, and I came to understand my grandfather, sadly, only after he passed. I came to understand some of his behavior and his soberness, and, so sobriety, I guess, is the right word. Or is that only used for alcohol? I don’t know, but he was a sober guy, and a bit somber too. So, you know, he’d lost his only son in that war. 

My mom had, you know, to take on some very serious adult responsibilities, as, you know, really a child, at 16. She was married at 18 to my dad. She doesn’t say so, but again, these are things I think would not have happened but for, they’d been through that war. She’d come across as a kind of person who would have wanted to be married at that age, but you know, I think, you know, things like, you know, marriage and things like that, conferred safety in some way, and you know, everybody lived for the day, or the day after, and you couldn’t plan ahead. So everybody was taking, I guess, measures at that time to protect themselves, and that probably was one way in which, you know, she herself and her family did that, because she was the first. And I know, I always saw a bit of, my mom had this, I’m thinking of a decent way to say without maligning her, but she had a lost childhood, I believe, because of that war. There was a part of her life that was truncated by the war, and it has kept her sort of in that state through adulthood. Now, on the one hand, what it does is it makes her very good with young people, you know, she craves what she lost during those years, because I mean, the war started in ’66 when she was 15 years old, and by the time that war was over, she was married. Imagine a 15 year old child who became an adult overnight, having to lead her sister back to the east, they’d never visited before, in a lorry, and walking long distances. They were just dropped in Onitsha, they had to go by train to Lagos. There was a traumatic experience that she narrated, of the girls who chose to leave Kano, where she was in secondary school, at the start of hostilities. They decided to take the train that went to the east, and when they got to Makurdi, they were all slaughtered, right. Before they crossed that bridge, the Benue bridge. But she was lucky, because her parents lived in Jebba in Kwara state. She decided to go there first. When she got to Jebba, the station master recognized her and managed to get her attention, telling her not to go into the town, because there would be nobody there for her, and that everybody had sort of taken off to the east, those who were Igbo. So they managed to hide them in the station overnight, put them in a train, basically they were hidden in a part of the train with animals. I think, you know, underneath these animals, and that was how they were conveyed out of the worst of the pogroms in northern Nigeria, until they got closer to Lagos, and my mom spoke Yoruba, so she was able to get them onto a bus, not a bus, a lorry, that got them to the east. 

My dad left very early, after finishing university, and the programs started in the north. He was in law school in Lagos in ’66, he could not finish law school, so he left and he went to Enugu, where they had established a Biafran law school at what is now University of Nigeria, Enugu campus, where he ended up teaching law later on in life. That Biafran law professional law qualification eventually got proscribed, so anybody who went to Biafran law school had to eventually re-qualify after the war. My dad went to Biafran law school and then he set up a practice in Port Harcourt, he lost his partner in a bombing, and he had to walk long distances to safety. He joined, I believe, the Biafran freedom fighters, and it wasn’t all terrible stuff. Bear in mind I wasn’t here at the time, but there is one good news story I have to tell you about the aftermath of the war, in spite of all this stuff, and it came to define me in ways that you will probably come to understand in a bit.

So my dad had graduated top of his class in ’66, right, when he went to law school, which is what you do after you finish your law degree. He was actually due to go on a scholarship after law school, overseas, as the best qualified, best graduating student, but he left for the east instead, you know, and the war happened. Immediately the cessation of, you know, war activities, was announced in January 1970, it wasn’t long before a courier came looking for my dad from Ife, unsolicited. They said they were looking for this guy. He has a scholarship waiting for him, a federal government of Nigeria scholarship, and remember, this was the same federal government of Nigeria that was the enemy until weeks before. They brought this scholarship to my dad. “Are you married?” He said no, but he was kind of engaged to my mom at the time. Said, “Well, you need to sort of get this wedding done quickly, so that you and her can depart for the UK immediately.” So the war ended on the 15th of January 1970, by early March my parents were already in London on a Nigerian government scholarship that had been waiting for five years. That was how I ended up being born in London, which then gave me the kind of global perspective I have, and access to two nationalities, and all that kind of stuff that has made an impact in my life, which is why London is sort of my second home now.

So direct negative consequences, I already talked about my mom, and you know, how she sometimes hankers for a childhood lost or truncated. My dad is tight lipped about the war, he doesn’t talk about it. My mom talks about it with a lot of sadness and tears, my dad just chose not to talk about it at all, but I have heard second hand stories about things that happened in the war with him, they’re not for this interview, so that’s another subject. But yes, he clearly had his own traumas from the war as well, but I think by and large they were, they were some of the lucky few that recovered for the most part after the war, in spite of their severe losses. Now, how did that affect our lives? I moved back to Ife, I learned Yoruba, my dad, I noticed quite clearly, refused to, he might say he’s not good with languages, but he also, I think, did very little to integrate. My mom did the integration on behalf of the whole family. My dad did not feel the need to do so, but I suspect some of that may have come from, you know, the animosity he felt for what had happened in the war, perhaps. I don’t know, and it eventually led to our departure, because he felt discriminated against as a university lecturer in University of Ife. He kind of reckoned that his path to seniority and professorship eventually would not, you know, materialize, so that was the primary reason why we relocated to the University of Nigeria in Enugu, was in order for him to, you know, achieve the professional growth he craved. And so I didn’t feel discriminated against in Ife. I don’t ever remember anybody calling me okoro or omo ibo or any of those derogatory terms. I didn’t feel like I was on the outside. I just, I don’t know if it’s because I was in a university environment with a mixture of people, or just that was the way it was. I have to say that compared to the Nigeria of today, and I live in Lagos, I felt safe. I don’t know if it was naivete or whatever, but today my sense of my Nigerianness is far weaker than it was in the immediate aftermath of the war, having returned here in ’75, like five years after that war, with all its scars everywhere. And yet today I feel less affinity with the city I call home, Lagos, than I did with Ife at the time, when I was a child, just five years after the war. So I guess you can make some deductions from that about the direction we’ve gone in since the war ended, yes.

DCA: Yes, thank you so much for sharing that. I also think that’s really important to touch on, because Biafra Remembrance Day was just a few days ago, so we’re really trying to keep in our memories people’s experiences, because we read a lot about the war and we hear about large numbers, like three million people who passed, who lost their lives, or the impact it had with like the Biafra pound, and like you mentioned the Biafra law school, and we think that it’s really important for us to remember that there are real people and real lives behind those large stories that we hear. And even when you were talking about like the economic hardships of Enugu, I remember thinking about some of what we read with Abacha’s time as head of state, with Nigerians having to use sawdust to cook, and just the intense economic hardship that existed at the time. I do have two follow-up questions with the last bit we just talked about, and one was with regard to what you just mentioned about feeling less affinity to the city of Lagos that you live in right now, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on why you think, I guess, the direction of the country has changed in such a way that you felt more welcome in post-war Nigeria than you do now.

II: Yes, you know, there are always, you know, if you were to open a beautiful Swiss watch, you’d see what they call a complexity. They talk about, you know, the complexity of a watch, you see all the cogs and things, you know, you see two very simple arms of a clock, the hour and the minute, and you think, oh yes, it’s just probably two gears in there, one, you know, moving independently of the other, but actually it’s a very complex piece. And that’s the same way I think Nigeria is. It’s like underneath the surface there’s so many levers at play, so many gear cogs, and for whatever reason, the seeds that were sown in ’66, and probably prior, they didn’t grow and then get chopped down at the end of that war. They’re a bit like weeds, they can proliferate. I don’t know, you must remember water hyacinth in Lagos covering the lagoon, good. It’s been impossible to eradicate, and every year there seems to be more of the water hyacinth covering the lagoon, and that’s, I think, the same way that whatever seeds were sown have continued to proliferate in Nigeria, and I think worsened by, you know, poor leadership, economics, you know. I always feel that animosity between peoples, whether they are tribes or religion, or even, you know, sometimes gender in a family, are, you know, accentuated by economic hardship. You probably know that economic hardship, finances, are one of the biggest causes of divorce in a family, good. It’s the same way that the bad leadership, the direct result of bad leadership, the direct result of ethnic jingoism, has been a poorly run country, okay. And as you’ve had other cogs, other wheels in the cogs of the watch, moving, such as the explosion of a youthful population, and therefore a lack of jobs, so the quality of education has not grown at par with the size of the population, or in fact at par with the growth of, you know, educational capacity globally, so we’re behind in terms of skills, we’re even behind in terms of just numbers of schools and teachers, and you know, all the indicators around, you know, a normal decent life, we’re behind. When you put all these cogs together, you get what we have now. So yes, you have, it’s a Lagos that tries to raise much of its budget from internally generated revenue, from people who are primarily non-Lagosians, and you can see that it can be skewed, the way in which enforcement happens, it’s skewed in elections, because clearly what’s happened is you’ve had a lot of, you know, we’re migratory people, Igbo people, we travel around a lot, and we’ve come back to Lagos after the war, we’ve done well, but it’s been hard for us to put a political stake in the ground here. And the more economic power we wield, and therefore the more we try to leverage that economic power for political gain, the more the indigenes fight, and so it becomes dirtier. Now, this is just my perspective and I’m sure there are other perspectives as well. 

So I think it’s too simplistic to just say that post-war Nigeria was peaceful, from the point of view of, you know, no victor, no vanquished, which is what the head of state Gowon had said at the end of that war. I think what nobody envisaged was the poor leadership and political decisions that followed, which then had as a direct consequence poor management of our economy, of the country, and which led to the situation we’re in now, where, you know, you have an exploding population but educational and healthcare and basically livelihood systems that are running in the opposite direction, and that vulnerability can manifest itself in different ways, such as in what you see as tribalistic reactions. But those are no different from what you see happening, I guess, in the west today, where you see America, you live in, becoming more insular, you know, as economies have become more global, more foreign, as moving into America, you have, apparently, they’re on track to having more black and brown and, you know, people, non-indigenous, quote unquote, Americans, by 2050, and they don’t like that, because at the same time the economy has moved away from them, to the east, to China, economic growth, you know. So you start to see them retreating from, you know, principles that appeared to be entrenched in global norms around equality and fairness. And I think it’s no different. What’s happening here, on a sort of micro scale, is that we started to see that kind of reaction here earlier, because the economy stalled, and we just haven’t managed to get it to grow quick enough to cater to the needs of everyone, and so it manifests itself in tribalistic ways, and it’s the time we’re living through now.

DCA:Wow. Thank you for sharing that insight. And you talked specifically about how in the last few, well, decades, Nigeria has really struggled to provide basic things that people need to live a decent life. And when you look at formal histories of Nigeria, especially formal economic histories, you see a lot of discussion about Nigeria in the 90s. So you have this country that has just come out of independence, come out of a really horrible war, but the 70s are an amazing time because oil prices are going through the roof, so there’s an oil boom, there’s lots of corruption but there’s all this oil wealth coming in, so there’s big structural improvements, there’s lots of growth. In the 80s, that starts to slow down, and then in the 90s you get this new era, once Abacha seizes power, and those glory days really fade away. A lot of formal histories, formal economic histories of Nigeria, kind of look at that moment in time as where the real breakdown happened, at least economically, and look at the rest of our history as trying to recover from all the losses of that time. There’s accounts that actually say like Abacha caused Nigeria to lose all the gains that the country had made post independence from 1960. And I was wondering if you could share a little about your personal perspective, thinking about your experience in Nigeria in the mid to late 90s, and how the rest of history continued after that time, and if you think that these formal ideas are in line with what people experienced, or at least what you experienced, around that time.

II: Okay, so that’s an interesting question. Now, you remember I said to you I left Nigeria in the early 90s. So I graduated university, what you call college, in 1991. I was 20 at the time, and I went, I did law school, came to Lagos here to do law school, and when I was done with that, I wanted to leave. In fact, I didn’t want to do law school. I had left for England after my degree, and there was a trend of people who could leave, right, Nigeria, once they could, after from about the 80s, with the structural adjustment program under Babangida. People like me were seen as lucky, you could, you know, leave immediately after, and you know, I had, I worked every summer in London while I was a student, from the age of about 17. I would go to England, I’d work, I’d come back with a little bit of pounds that would go a long way in Nigeria, you know, so take pocket money from my parents for a long time, and you know, I’d still have enough to buy a ticket to go back to London the next summer, and then come back with even more money, and it continued like that until I finished. So I thought, what’s the point of law school in Nigeria when I’m not going to live here, I’m going to England, I’m British and I’m going to stay there. But, you know, my parents encouraged me to return. I did, I did law school, I left again, I said I’m done. I said, come back to national service. I was like, hell no. But, you know, I listened, and eventually I did. 

Now I’m grateful for all those experiences because they made me who I am, but I did leave in ’93. I was offered a permanent position, which I took up at PWC, which is where I did my national service. But it wasn’t long after, I mean, I already received admission to London School of Economics to do a postgraduate in international financial law. I had deferred it already by a year, and I wasn’t ready to defer it again, because I was going to lose the place, and so I chose to resign my job instead and move to the UK. So I didn’t live through the worst of times, I was not here the entire Abacha time, other than to visit, but I saw firsthand what happened. My, I had younger ones who were in university at the time. I know how much more my parents struggled to put my sisters through school than they did with me, just a few years earlier, right. So there’s not a big gap in age with me and the two sisters after me, but there’s a massive jump between the first three and the last two. So those were 90s babies, either born or raised in the 90s and early 90s, and I know things were much, much tougher for my parents, in spite of the fact that they had risen significantly in their professions by that time, but their money went far less, far, far less of a way, than it did in the 70s and 80s. So how did that affect me? I mean, I always felt a little bit of guilt. I always felt the need to send things back to my sisters from England. I had nothing, you know. I saw, you know, the growth of Abuja first hand, because my dad moved there in the mid 90s, so I would visit him there. But I wasn’t here first hand. But obviously, being in the west and reading stories with the western lens, Abacha was this, beelzebub, in a military outfit or in Agbada, depending on which version of him you saw. He was enriching himself, people lived in fear of him here, and you know, I heard nothing good about him, and you know, people worried about me and my family in Nigeria at the time, and they would always ask if we were safe. Now, obviously, I pick up the phone and call home and everybody would be fine, and nobody was living, like, in fear, locked in a cupboard, or, you know, there was, it wasn’t a Gestapo, you know, movement. I mean, there are people who were involved in politics who struggled, who suffered, no doubt. 

So the main struggle that my parents went through at the time was an economic one, rather than a political one, that was exacerbated by Nigeria being ostracized from, you know, many international institutions, including, I believe, the Bretton Woods ones at the time. So there were no, there was no access to IMF loans, although of course I think Abacha was known to have refused to play ball with the IMF or the World Bank at the time anyway, so in spite of the fact that he would not have been able to access those facilities, he also didn’t want to. So I think my knowledge, my direct knowledge, is limited. I know my parents struggled financially at the time. You know, you talk about, you know, sawdust for cooking, people didn’t throw newspapers away back then, you had to find a way to soften them and use them as tissue in the loo. Yes, so that was a common thing in many, many, many middle-class homes. People stopped buying milk. I remember visiting home and the only milk available for me to use was soya milk that was homemade. My mom would buy soya beans, soak them, pulverize them, and squeeze the milk out, and, you know, it was healthy, but clearly not as healthy as dairy. So, stuff like that. You know, we always planted around the house, a garden here, a bed here, for cucumbers, for bell peppers, a little bit of corn, but in the 90s, mehn, it was almost like my parents had to, there’s this thing we call allotments in the UK, where there are plots of land that the local government can allot you for your gardening. 

In Nigeria, all the university land that wasn’t occupied by housing, lecturers were literally fighting over it to plant like big farms. So we had a large farm. My grandmother lived with us at the time, so we had that advantage. She was a farmer, so the whole of the backyard, which was a plain field for us, was turned into a yam farm, and then we had another space where we did cassava and yams, and then my dad had bought land in a city called Emene, near the airport in Enugu. I remember my grandma would be taken by my dad’s driver to go and cultivate that land of yams, and harvest time would go there, harvest, bring them back, make them into garri. So, look, it made us creative as survivors. There were certain things I learned how to do and how to survive, you know, making garri at home, learning how to turn waste, I mean, to other things. So that, I even had a little poultry myself. I had a dog kennels, but you couldn’t feed dogs with food that, you know, human beings were struggling to feed. In the late 80s, I’m talking about late 80s here, so my dog kennels were converted into a little chicken house. So I had 12 chickens at the time for eggs and meat, and as they were being dispatched, a new, you know, set of, you know, day old chicks would appear, and I would groom them. So this, I guess, the downside is yes, living through it was painful, but the lessons made us, I guess, more resilient as individuals.  So I’d say people like us who lived through that time, especially if you had adults, or, you know, post teen responsibilities, probably, they’re the people who are in charge of Nigeria today. That generation of Nigerians are the leaders of Nigeria today. Some of us live with the trauma, some of us live the lessons and the creativity that came out of that time. I didn’t live here fully, in the main parts of the 90s, so it’s kind of hard for me to relate to the direct experiences.

But I know that if it was anything like the late 80s, I mean, I was here during the whole Abiola crisis, by the way, I was working in Lagos. I lived through it, and that, that was terrible. I mean, I got stoned in a bus at some point. I was on my way to a meeting on Ikorodu Road. We were stopped, there were stones raining from everywhere, you know, people who were mad at the election being annulled, and I had to come out and use my briefcase, which I carried at the time, as a bit of a shield. I ended up in my cousin’s house in Anthony Village, and I spent two days there, no change of clothes, nothing, and there were no mobile phones, so nobody knew where I was. As soon as I was able to get back to my house in Akoka, where my uncle lived, I lived with him at the time, I packed my things and I took off to the east, and I think that was when I decided certainly that Nigeria wasn’t for me, I would have to leave, you know, and go and make a living elsewhere. So I know it’s sort of a bit jumbled, mixing up late 80s and then my limited experience of the 90s, but I guess when you’re living through it there are no fine demarcations, you know, they’re just flowing from one day to the next, and so the experiences I had at the time are kind of hard to disaggregate into 80s, 90s. I think they just all were part of that whole militarized leadership of Nigeria that went from bad to worse, okay. And so that was my experience, direct, and the rest of it was, I guess, felt vicariously through having family in Nigeria that struggled. But I just stayed home as often as I could, at least once a year, so I would obviously get firsthand, you know, updates on how people were living. And you know, I think by and large, my parents appeared to have been somewhat privileged. You know, they didn’t, you know, as I said, my dad had got to the peak of his academic career, so in some ways that helped to soften the direct impacts of the economic crisis we were living through. I mean, of course they were affected by it, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been if he was still, say, a junior lecturer. He was, I think, at that time, deputy vice chancellor of the university. He had been the dean of law, plus he had his law practice on the side, right. So he was privileged in that he had come from, he was in a profession that allowed him to make money on the side legitimately, and I think that created a bit of a safety net for my family. But it’s hard to speak about the experiences of other Nigerians at the time, not having lived here myself through most of the 90s.

DCA: Thank you so much for sharing that, that was really insightful. And I was, before, you mentioned, I was going to ask about, because you mentioned you left in 1993, and I was going to ask about that, because with the canceled elections of MK Abiola in June of 1993, a lot of people think about that as the moment in time when a lot of Nigerians, especially those in generation X, kind of checked out politically with the country. I see a lot of political analysts and even some historians liken it to the unfortunate incidents at the toll gates in Lekki in 2020 with the End Sars protests. People kind of think about that as that moment for Gen Z, they related to 1993 for Gen Xers. And I was wondering, you mentioned that, you know, the experience you had on the bus was the moment in time when you told yourself you couldn’t live in Nigeria. And I was wondering if that also affected your political participation, because I know for a lot of people in your age group, those elections were this moment in time where people really had a lot of hope for the future, for democracy, and so there was a lot of engagement and participation. And with, I don’t remember who it was now, but I think with Babangida like canceling those elections, that moment really became one that was immediately sad for many people, and just in the long run really unfortunate and devastating. So I was wondering if you could talk a little about that event and, I guess, your political relationship with Nigeria from then on.

II: Sure. That would have been the first time I was registered to vote in Nigeria. For whatever reason I had not been registered to vote from the age of 18. I just, I guess, didn’t feel I had a stake in Nigeria at the time. Like I said, at 18, which was in 1989, my entire mindset was that I was leaving Nigeria once I left university. So elections were not something I was, and in any case at the time the elections were a bit of, I guess, they were a charade, because we were in a military regime. So I think there was some attempt to register some parties that were made up by the government at the time, one of them a little to the left, another one a little to the right, you know, I think that was how Babangida described them at the time. So I didn’t have much of an interest. But when Abiola emerged as a candidate, at this time I was in Lagos, I was in law school, and I followed that, with my national service afterwards. There was a palpable excitement, everybody was excited at what was about to happen in Nigeria. I had a cousin who was a banker, a young banker at the time, and, you know, everybody, he was a member of this organization called Corporate Nigeria for MKO, so I remember him giving me one of the t-shirts to wear, and I had that t-shirt for many years. I don’t know what’s happened to it now. It was a white t-shirt with MKO’s picture, and it said, Corporate Nigeria for MKO. So it was already like a, I would say, predetermined, but everybody kind of figured the outcome was obvious, that Abiola was going to win, certainly in Lagos, that was the noise, you know. And of course this was far long before the internet was a thing, so you only perceived what was in your immediate surroundings, and so being that we were in southern Nigeria, there wasn’t a chance in hell, in our opinion, of Tofa winning that election, it was Abiola’s to lose. And it was, you know, a deep interest. I didn’t attend any rallies, I watched them on the news at night. I had no intention of voting, even though that would have been a time to register and vote, but I didn’t. But yeah, I was directly affected by the violence that followed the annulment, as I’ve mentioned to you. But yeah, there was a lost opportunity, there is no doubt. I mean, obviously sometimes we see these things through rose-tinted glasses. 

I happened to have been in Nigeria for 20th October 2020, the Lekki Tollgate crisis. I can tell you that even though I was here firsthand, I think 1993 was of a far bigger scale, and I will tell you why. We didn’t have the internet then. A lot of what was happening in terms of the magnification of what was happening in 2020, we didn’t have in 1993, and yet it was felt everywhere. Yes, primarily in western Nigeria of course, but even in the east, because I did go home to the east before I left for England in ’93, everyone was shocked at what had happened and pained. Everybody did expect Abiola to win, and I think there was a, it had a much bigger chilling effect on Nigeria and on the economy than 20 October 2020 had. Not that comparing the two is of much value, but I know that it’s a conversation that comes up a lot in terms of comparing the experience of gen X’s with gen Z’s. And I think, to be honest, it is slightly different. 2020 was accentuated by the availability of the internet. 1993 was, I guess, in my view, more real, and had wider implications for Nigeria than 2020 had

DCA: Wow, thank you. That’s a really amazing insight, because 1993 is a very specific time in Nigeria’s history, where even till now a lot of people feel like that particular moment changed the course of Nigeria as we know it now, and that if MKO had been allowed to be president, what we have as a country would look really different. We are about to round up the interview, but one question we usually like to ask, I’m going to ask you, is that when you look to the future, what are some things that you see for Nigeria, what are some hopes that you have, and how do you think Nigeria’s history is going to continue to play out?

II: Oh, that’s a dangerous question to ask me now. I’ve become quite jaded since my return to Nigeria in 2012, back to Nigeria as a one Nigeria person. I strongly believe that it was incumbent on every one of my generation to do everything they could to keep Nigeria united. I still, by and large, have sympathies for that proposition, but they’ve been badly dented by direct experiences that show that perhaps there isn’t much hope for a unified Nigeria. And it is not to say that I’m looking for the country to split up or to break up, but I think the system that we currently use to administer the country is not going to take us anywhere. I think there is certainly a need for decentralized power. I think that we need fiscal, a proper fiscal independence of the states, and too much of the spoon feeding from the center should not happen. I think also fiscal autonomy, fiscal economies, are better for our growth. I think we should be able to benefit from the minerals and the resources we have in each state better if there wasn’t that whole drip feed approach from the federal government, which retains too much power in my view. Plus, you know, the cost of democracy in Nigeria has been extreme. I think the percentage GDP of our income it is huge, and is unsuitable for a nation at this stage. What I say to people is this, I didn’t, I never studied history formally, even though I have a deep interest in it, and I know that the western approach, the modern western approach to government around democracy, was in itself the benefit of years of authoritarianism, monarchy, you know, systems of government that bear no resemblance to what you see now in the modern west. So democracy is a benefit that comes out of all of that. And the way I describe it is, I say it’s almost like you need to go through a maturity model that takes you to a point where you have enough institutions that are strong enough to sustain democracy, then you adopt democracy. But I kind of think it is not ideal for Nigeria, nor is the system of political government we have, not just in terms of first past the post elections, but also in terms of the relationship between local government, state and federal government. I think those two things are major impediments to our growth. When you have those two things, and the yields from them have been negative for Nigeria, and then you have a massively growing, exploding population, not just a growing population, then my hopes for Nigeria start to recede. 

Sometimes I ask myself if I love this country for nostalgic reasons, right. I think it was Barqani that said the other day that nostalgia is not, is not worth, it’s not a, I forget what his actual words were, but he was trying to say that nostalgia for a system that never existed is not good enough, you have to be realistic about what it is. And so I think my nostalgia for a Nigeria that never materialized makes me hold out more hope than there actually is, based on the reality and the results that I see every day, and the poverty I see and the corruption I see and the tribalism I see. Yeah, so in terms of where I think this is going, my hope is that at some point we will have a selfless leadership emerge. I mean, it’s not going to be perfect, but even if we get to a sort of 30:70, selflessness to selfishness, it will be better for us. I say to many Nigerians who care to listen that General Obasanjo, the former president, was the best we ever had, and I will still score him like maybe 51%. It’s not a good score, that is a D, or less, depending on which system of scoring you’re using. But the point is, he took us in the right direction, and in spite of his flaws and failures, as a person, of the system of government he ran, we made a lot of progress in his time. And how do we get back there? I mean, he was a beneficiary of a time when he still had military boys that were loyal to him because of his past as a military officer. There was also the fact that it was seen as payback for western Nigeria having lost Abiola. So having Obasanjo as president was, you know, as the first president of that dispensation, of that third republic, was absolutely necessary to our unity, and so there was a pragmatism to his government that I liked. We haven’t had that since. A lot of people compare the incumbent to Obasanjo, and I think that is a falsehood. So what am I saying, in effect? It takes very little to ruin a nation. You can ruin a nation in four years, you can ruin a nation in 30 days. You know what happened in Rwanda over a 30 day period, you know, close to one million people were killed. To fix it takes far longer. And I think we need to take the glasses, the rose tinted glasses of democracy, off, and start to look for, you know, the traditional systems of government that we recognize have more application to us as a people, and reduce the cost of this modern democracy that basically has legislators basically looking out for themselves, not accountable to us, or even holding the executive to account. You know, I just see, you know, failure writ large over Nigeria and its prospects today, sadly. Now, I also believe that there are certain triggers that could happen in the economy, because, you know, the population that I mentioned as an impediment, as a factor, because it’s growing, could also be a major benefit to us if we’re able to harness that growth through skills acquisition and things like that. You know, I sometimes just want to say to people, don’t be confined by the ideas of the past, that there is a sequence of secondary school, university, and then a job waiting for you. And I’m gradually proud to see Nigerians entering the creative space, entering the tech space, and doing fantastic things there, and I’m kind of hopeful. But I’m not sure that the growth of the prodigies we see in those spaces is enough to counteract the effect of bad leadership, and that’s where my problem lies. There are individuals who are doing great things, and Nigerians that make me proud, but as a collective we’re not going in the right direction. And so, sadly, if you asked me to bet on it, I wouldn’t.

DCA: Wow, wow, thank you so much for sharing that. I really appreciate you sharing how you feel about our future, how you feel about where we’re going, because each perspective, yours, mine, all of our perspectives come together to make what we know as Nigeria, what we shape up our national identity to be. So it’s really important to hear these things, and know how people are thinking and feeling, also for leadership to know how people feel about the current state of things, about even the future. Nigeria has a long history that, very interestingly for a country, has been crammed up into a pretty short time, when you think about the standard, like, ages of countries. It’s difficult to sometimes imagine that all of these things have been going on since 1960, which is a while ago but honestly not that far back, for the sheer volume of historical events.

II: A blink of an eye.

DCA: Yeah, just the sheer volume of events that have happened in such a short time. But, um, I want to ask finally if you have any more things you would like to share with me for the archive today.

II: I worked in the early days with a committee of friends that have been tasked with putting together something called the Center for Memories, which is a physical center dedicated to memories, um, that are Igbo memories, basically trying to create a repository of our history. I would encourage anyone who can to visit. It’s a physical site in Enugu, but I mean it has a long way to go, but what I would say is, first I want to thank you for this initiative. I think the important thing is we need to gather this history and turn it into, I mean in this modern day and age, you know, nuggets that are capable of being transmitted electronically, in a style and fashion that is suited to younger people. You know, we were from a generation that read books. People don’t read a lot of books now, and in any case we, people are not investing enough in Nigerian historical books. So you, in this initiative that you have, along with people like those who are running the Center for Memories, should be praised, given that you’re gathering this history in a modern way. And I’m pleased that you’re doing what you’re doing, and I hope that it fills the gap that I see we had with the Center for Memories, in that the Center for Memories is a physical center, but I also think there is room for more virtual, you know, repositories of our history. And, you know, what you’re doing serves that purpose. We need to find a way to sort of hold hands across whatever divides exist, in order to optimize both the physical presence of a center and the virtual histories that you’re gathering and telling. And, you know, yeah, those two things need to sort of find a way to become synergistic. So I think, I just want to round up by saying thank you for what you and your sister and your friend are doing in, you know, articulating these histories, and it’ll be great to see what comes out of it. I’m always here to support, assist you in any way, shape or form, so good luck with it and all the very best.

DCA: Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for joining me on this interview today. I’m going to stop recording now.