Aftermath And Legacy

414 Words
The war cost Nigeria a great deal in terms of lives, money, and its image in the world. During the war, there were 100,000 military casualties and between 500,000 and two million civilians' deaths from starvation.[5] It has been estimated that up to three million people may have died due to the conflict, most from hunger and disease. Reconstruction, helped by oil money, was swift; however, the old ethnic and religious tensions remained a constant feature of Nigerian politics. Military government continued in power in Nigeria for many years, and people in the oil-producing areas claimed they were being denied a fair share of oil revenues.[6] Laws were passed mandating that political parties could not be ethnically or tribally based; however, it was hard to make this work in practice. The Igbos felt that they had been deliberately displaced from government positions, because their pre-war posts were now occupied by other Nigerians (mostly Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani). When Igbo civil servants left to join similar posts in Biafra, their positions had been replaced; and when the war was over the government did not feel that it should sack their replacements, preferring to regard the previous incumbents as having resigned. This, however, has led to a feeling of an injustice. Further feelings of injustice were caused by Nigeria, during the war, changing its currency so that Biafran supplies of pre-war Nigerian currency were no longer honored and then, at the end of the war, offering only N£20 to easterners on exchange of their Biafran currency. This was seen as a deliberate policy to hold back the Igbo middle class, leaving them with little wealth to expand their business interests. On May 29, 2000, The Guardian of Lagos reported that President Olusegun Obasanjo commuted to retirement the dismissal of all military persons who fought for the breakaway state of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war. In a national broadcast, he said that the decision was based on the principle that "justice must at all times be tempered with mercy." Speaking to the BBC 30 years after the war, Chief Emeka Ojukwu said that "When the civil war ended, the government promised the Ibo people that there would be no victors and no vanquished." "The authorities," he continued, "were desperate to avoid a repetition of the ethnic tensions which preceded the war." Himself pardoned in the mid-1980s, he remained concerned that since the war, "Ibos have been largely excluded from power," which "could cause instability in the future".
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