Speaking during the Arise TV’s Prime Time program, Professor Uche Azikiwe didn’t flinch when the interview veered into one of the most emotionally charged chapters of Nigeria’s civil war. She spoke calmly about her late husband’s controversial decision to pull away from Biafra – a move she believes saved lives. And as she put it, “without that I don’t think there would have been any Igbo left. They would have wiped all of us out.”
Azikiwe described her husband as a man who could read a moment clearly, even when the world around him was clouded by conflict. While many were swept up in the fury of the late 1960s, she said he saw something different: a war dragging ordinary people toward starvation, despair and, ultimately, a dead end. From her account, he weighed the realities on the ground and concluded that pulling back, not charging forward, offered the only real chance of survival for millions.
His decision, Azikiwe said, wasn’t about abandoning the East; it was about preserving a country he had spent his life trying to stitch together.
The former First Lady argued that modern Nigeria might need to rediscover one of the principles he leaned on most often: compromise. It may not sound glamorous, she admitted, but it is the sort of tool nations turn to when the stakes are highest. She recalled how speakers at a recent memorial lecture repeated the same theme – that compromise is often the only realistic way to safeguard a collective future in a country as intricate and divided as Nigeria.
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