Asaba Massacre Documentation Prompts Obasanjo Civil War Warning
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has issued a stark warning that many of the same conditions which triggered Nigeria’s three-year civil war in 1967 remain unresolved today, urging the country to do everything possible to prevent history from repeating itself.
Obasanjo made the remarks on Wednesday while receiving a book, research materials, videos and eyewitness interviews documenting the Asaba Massacre and related events, compiled by Chief Chuck Nduka-Eze, Chairman of the Asaba Memorial Trust and the Asaba Image Branding and Project Committee, at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta.
He described the prospect of another civil war as unthinkable, insisting the country had already fought “one civil war too many.” For Obasanjo, confronting the past honestly is not an optional exercise in remembrance but a practical necessity for avoiding future catastrophe. “What went wrong in the past is essential to preventing a repeat. We must do everything humanly possible to prevent its recurrence,” he said, calling on Nigerians to collectively adopt a “never again” resolve against civil war.
His warning carried a pointed observation about how little has changed beneath the surface of national politics since the war ended. “Some of the things that led to the Civil War are still with us. How long will this remain so? I was with a colleague when Gen Yakubu Gowon said that we would not survive a second civil war as a country. I believe we have fought one civil war too many already. To say that we will have a second civil war, God forbid,” Obasanjo said.
He framed the task ahead as one requiring both honest reckoning and deliberate national commitment. “We must understand what happened, condemn what should not have happened, and do everything humanly possible to prevent its recurrence. And then, for us to be able to say, ‘never again,’ what are we going to do to make that possible?” he asked, before turning his attention directly to the documentation effort before him. “Thank you very much for making people know about it, for people to learn from it, and for people to take a vow that it should never happen again. I will do everything possible to ensure that there is never again a civil war in this country,” he said.
The former president Obasanjo praised Nduka-Eze for undertaking the work of preserving this difficult chapter of history, arguing that documenting the past serves a clear national purpose: helping the country understand what happened, learn from it, and guard against a repeat of such tragedies. He tied the effort directly to the mission of the institution hosting the presentation, noting that part of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library’s value lies in preserving the past, capturing the present and inspiring the future — and that understanding the civil war, including the Asaba Massacre specifically, remains critical to the country’s ongoing process of national healing. “We pride ourselves that we preserve the past, we capture the present, and we inspire the future,” he said.
Obasanjo, who served as a soldier during the civil war, was candid about the limits of his own firsthand knowledge of the Asaba incident, explaining that military operations in that particular area fell under the command of the late former Head of State, General Murtala Mohammed. “I must confess, and you know that I was involved in the civil war. When people talk about the Asaba Massacre, I always confess that I cannot give details of it,” he said.
Obasanjo did, however, offer insight into his own responsibilities later in the conflict, recalling that toward the end of the war he was given key responsibilities aimed at ensuring no further massacres occurred, and stressing that abuses committed by soldiers were never condoned under his watch. He described one specific episode in which he personally intervened to stop a soldier from assaulting a civilian in Asaba — an act he said would have exposed him to vicarious liability as a commanding officer had he failed to intervene — framing the episode as an illustration of the kind of leadership accountability he believed was essential during wartime.
Obasanjo also referenced how General Gowon, at the highest level of leadership during the war, had publicly acknowledged and apologised for its excesses, maintaining that atrocities such as the Asaba Massacre were neither ordered nor condoned by the wartime leadership itself. Obasanjo committed to studying the transcripts and audiovisual materials presented to him, reiterating that documenting and teaching the history of both the civil war and the Asaba Massacre remained vital for national unity, and pledging to do everything within his power to ensure Nigeria never experiences another civil war.
Providing further insight into the documentation project, Nduka-Eze described it as a substantial and carefully cross-referenced body of evidence, drawing on eyewitness testimonies, recorded interviews, archival materials, audio-visual documentation and established historical scholarship. He explained that across independent sources, a clear and consistent account emerges of what happened after federal troops entered Asaba, then a civilian population centre in the Mid-West Region.
“The evidence establishes a recurring pattern. Civilians were assembled in public places under conditions of fear and uncertainty. During these assemblies, residents were required to proclaim allegiance to the Nigerian state, including being instructed to declare ‘One Nigeria’ and otherwise demonstrate loyalty. In a setting where identity and suspicion had become dangerously intertwined, these acts were understood by those present as affirmations of belonging and safety. Men were then separated from women and children. Thereafter, unarmed male civilians were killed in a manner consistently described across multiple independent accounts,” Nduka-Eze said.
He described the tragic contradiction at the heart of the massacre’s documented pattern: that compliance with the demands made of residents did not secure their protection. “The sequence, repeated across testimonies, reflects a tragic contradiction in which individuals who openly affirmed their identity and loyalty as Nigerians were nonetheless killed in the most undignified manner by the same Nigerian state to which they had pledged allegiance. This sequence is corroborated by testimonies, documentary materials and scholarly works, and remains materially unchallenged. While precise casualty figures cannot be definitively fixed, the convergence of credible evidence points to a substantial loss of civilian life, more than a thousand men, and a profound rupture in the fabric of the Asaba community,” he said.
Nduka-Eze also pointed to the deeper structural causes behind both the massacre and the broader civil war, citing deep-seated ethnic suspicion, unresolved grievances stemming from Nigeria’s first military coup, and a persistent failure to enforce accountability as key factors that culminated in the tragedy. He noted that ethnic mistrust in Nigeria did not begin with the war itself but had already become entrenched even before independence, and cautioned that many of the underlying issues that led to the civil war remain unresolved today, with ethnic groups across the country continuing to relate to one another with suspicion.
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