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●Detailed account reveals how late Col. Ifeajuna’s widow was denied remarriage after Biafran war
●Account lifts lid on security reports, vetoed marriages, blocked promotions inside the Foreign Service
From Fred Itua, Abuja
A newly surfaced autobiography by a retired Nigerian ambassador has laid bare, in granular detail, how officers from the former East Central State were systematically sidelined within the country’s foreign service in the years following the Nigeria–Biafra war.
The book, titled Zero Hour Graduate: A Nigerian Diplomat’s Journey Through War and Service to Triumph, is written by Ambassador Lawrence Agubuzu, a career diplomat who later served as a political appointee in Anambra State, an international civil servant with the Organisation of African Unity, and eventually as a traditional ruler in Enugu State.
Agubuzu was a graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, when the civil war broke out in 1967. He did not enlist as a soldier. His parents pleaded with him not to join the Biafran Army, and he relented.
Instead, he supported the war effort through the Olo and Amagu Umulokpa Civil Defence Organisation, sheltering refugees displaced by the fighting. He was later commissioned as an intelligence officer with the Biafran Organisation of Freedom Fighters, work that placed him in mortal danger on at least three occasions, including one night when he swam across a swollen river to save a drowning woman.
When the war ended in January 1970, he declined a contract teaching post offered to graduates from East Central State in the Northern states, regarding it as evidence that national unity remained illusory. He instead applied to the Ministry of External Affairs and, in April 1971, reported for duty at the Republic Building in Lagos.
According to the memoir, discrimination against East Central State officers began as soon as Agubuzu’s training class completed its course at the Foreign Service Academy that year. A classmate from Benue Plateau State was posted within a week, directly to Nigeria’s mission at the United Nations in New York.
Officers from East Central State, referred to in some quarters as coming from rebel areas, were held back at headquarters on the strength of unspecified security reports.
When the restriction eventually eased, officers from the region were permitted postings only within West Africa.
Ambassador Gabriel Akuwafor was sent to Dakar, Ambassador Mark Eze to Lomé, and Agubuzu’s own training officer, Ambassador Pascal Nnochiri, to Conakry.
Nnochiri had joined the service before the war and had earned two promotions under General Yakubu Gowon, yet his record of loyalty afforded him no exemption from the unwritten rule.
The memoir also recounts the case of Mr Mike Amobi, who submitted the name of his intended bride for the security clearance required of all officers wishing to marry. She was the widow of the late Colonel Emmanuel Ifeajuna and was declared unsuitable.
A secret letter from the Permanent Secretary forced Amobi to choose between the marriage and his career. He chose to remain in the service and ended the engagement.
According to Agubuzu, the sacrifice made no difference. Amobi was grounded permanently, in the author’s words becoming a diplomat present in body but excluded from meaningful service.
Agubuzu wrote that his own posting was delayed after a supervisor described him as too valuable to release from headquarters, a designation the author calls a tag of indispensability.
He was eventually freed to take up a post in Liberia only after another Igbo officer, Victor Chibundu, was recalled from Monrovia following an adverse report accusing him of wearing a Biafran styled suit to Nigeria’s independence anniversary celebrations.
Loyalty to the federal government offered no protection either, the memoir states. Ambassador John Ukegbu, who publicly swore allegiance to the Gowon administration while serving in Liberia during the war, was nonetheless subjected to false reports from a rival deputy and forced to return to a Lagos where Igbo men were being hunted down at the time.
Agubuzu also named a number of diplomats, including Ambassador Dapo Fafowora and Ambassador Remi Esau among others, whom he said were summarily retired in a pattern that cut short some of the country’s most capable foreign service careers.
The author was careful to note that he received support and mentorship from colleagues of other ethnicities throughout his career, and cautions against generalising about any single tribe or region.
The book nonetheless stands as one of the most detailed insider accounts yet published of how the aftermath of the civil war shaped careers within Nigeria’s diplomatic corps.
