‘There is enough cake to share,’ Ex-president tells Biafra agitators

Former president,

Obasanjo stated this while speaking at an event tagged ‘Biafra: 50 Years After’ in Abuja on Thursday, 25 May 2017.

The former president noted that the civil war showed Nigeria’s bad side.

Obasanjo recalled the role of ethnicity in the war, which according to him has remained a problem in the present day Nigeria.

He maintained that most of the Biafra agitators lacked understanding of the matter.

“We never had a national leader. Our leaders at the beginning were mindful of their regions. That is our problem till today,” Obasanjo said.

‎”I have maintained that the young officers who struck in 1966 were naive but there were some element of nationalism in some of them. Be that as it may, it set us back.”

“The language used in the war did not help matters, the people on the Biafra side called us vandals and we called them rebels.

“We thought we would end the war in three months, but it took us 30 months, and the federal side nearly lost it.

‎”Civil war is more difficult than fighting in a foreign land because we are fighting to unite.

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‎”‎Even a soldier of mine who tried to rape a woman. I had to chase him with a gun. He did not succeed in raping the woman, and I did not have to gun him down.”

“Some of the people agitating for Biafra today were not even born then. They don’t know what it entails.

”I think, we should even appeal to those saying they want to go, we should not tell them to go, we should make them understand that there is enough cake to share. We should massage Nigeria just like in a love relationship.

"We must concentrate on building Nigeria, we must learn our history. There's no substitute for us,” the ex-president added.

In his remarks, Acting President Yemi Osinbajo said "fools learn from experience while the wise learn from history."

Osinbajo urged Nigerians to use the country’s diversity to make her great “instead of trying to flee into the lazy comfort of homogeneity”.