Danjuma spoke on Wednesday shortly after a
closed-door meeting with President Jonathan, who visited him at his Abuja
residence. He said the President averted civil war in the country by timely
conceding defeat and congratulating Major-General Muhammadu Buhari (retd) of
the All Progressives Congress (APC), a move he said Ojukwu failed to make and
thereby causing the country avoidable blood shed.
He is no longer strong mentally –Ezeife
Piqued at the comments, Ezeife said: ‘’I know Danjuma is not
very well. So I am not surprised.’’
Igbo will respond – Ikokwu
‘’I don’t think we should take issues with
Danjuma until after the elections. Jonathan went to him and not him to
Jonathan. We shall respond to him.’’
Danjuma’s comments confirm the genocide against Igbo –
Achuzia
In his reaction, Col Joe Achuzia said: ‘’I am happy that my
friend Danjuma owned up that there was bloodshed and pogrom against the people
of Biafra. I don’t understand what he meant by Ojukwu conceding defeat. If the
Federal Government had implemented the Aburi Accord, the bloodshed would have
been avoided.
‘’Ojukwu believed in Aburi as the road map for peace at the
time of the crisis but the Federal Government reneged on the agreement reached
in Ghana. One does not concede defeat half way into a battle. Doing that would
have amounted to cowardice. I don’t know where Danjuma got the idea of Ojukwu
not accepting defeat from. He has little knowledge of the intricacies of the
war. He didn’t even know the terrain of the Enugu that he talked about. If the
necessities of capitulating were there, why did the war last for three years? I
fought the war for three years and I know that the necessities were not there.
Sometimes people talk for talking sake.
‘’The President’s visit to him was a private one and he
should not have used that opportunity to insult all that Ojukwu stood for. To
say publicly that the President was defeated was even a mockery of the
President. It does not portray the President in good light. Of course what he
said was an insult on Ojukwu. His reference to the fall of Enugu is laughable
because the war was just starting then. Which military officer will surrender
in that kind of situation even before firing a bullet? When some people make
wrong comments on the civil war, I wonder what often inform their judgement.
Ojukwu was a General and was right on all the decisions he took in the interest
of the Igbo.’’
His comments are diversionary – Onyike
In a chat with newsmen in Abakaliki, Onyike, one-time
commissioner for Information and Orientation in Ebonyi State, said it was most
unpatriotic of Danjuma to make such comments at this point in the country’s
political history.
Onyike said: “In the first place, it was Danjuma that backed
the spilling of the blood of the Igbo, with the killing of Aguiyi Ironsi in
Ibadan in 1967 and we want to say that Danjuma belongs to the group of Army
Officers who led the gruesome genocide and massacre of over three million Igbo
during the Nigerian civil war.
“We want to say that the problem with General T. Y. Danjuma
is mainly psychological because at a time when some of them felt that they had
become great statesmen and patriots for presiding over the attempted
extermination of the Igbo, unfortunately for them, the Igbo people survived and
have come to assert themselves and their identity in the Nigerian federation.
“Secondly, a twist emerged in the Nigerian scene where
people like Danjuma and the minority group where he comes from in the Northern
have been subjected to the same gruesome murders by militant elements of the
same northern oligarchy which they serve, and to that extent Danjuma cannot go
to his village.
“So, let him go and resolve that problem first because when
Ojukwu was making them understand the nature of the Nigerian federation and the
dangers inherent in the politics that was emerging, Danjuma preferred to be a
surrogate. So let him stop using the Igbo to hide his inadequacies.”
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