ALABI-ISAMA, THIRD MARINE COMMANDO, BIAFRA WAR AND OBASANJO 2: REVIEW OF THE TRAGEDY OF VICTORY BY BRIG. GEN. GODWIN ALABI ISAMA. BY M A C ODU I desire to examine the title of this work in this effort. A writer worth his salt should conceive his work within an appropriate title. The title must relate to the work and tell a complete story that does credit to the work. I chose my review title on my own priorities for presenting to the world my concept of the work. I suppose in the same manner Alabi-Isama carefully and contemplatively chose his title. It is evident that he did not intend to write an autobiography. He wrote sharply around his title. Were he to have contemplated a larger subject, I am certain he would not have chosen the title for the book. Being a teacher, I score him excellent in the choice of title for the work. The Tragedy of Victory with the extension: On the Spot Account of the Nigeria Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre is a classic choice of title. He dealt superlatively with the subject. He introduced himself and his connection to his title appropriately. His main subject was fully dispatched. He did not show any disdain for Biafra and its mission although he excoriated the preparedness of his assailants for real war. He allocated credit wherever it was due. He did not for once in the copious account insult sensibilities of his reader of whatever persuasion. He came clean on facts. General Olusegun Obasanjo was a well painted charlatan in the work. The arm-chair general in his own work titled My Command wrote an evident fiction since he did not really participate in the war to give any factual account. He was an opportunist and the work came just short of labeling him. This is evident of pedigree. Set together with this work, the villain of the Third Marine Commando looms large. I am certain that the consanguinity the author of this work shared with his fighting colleague and another gem in combat of the type under examination, General Alani Akinrinade, would come out with a similar factual account worthy of history books and a reference material for warfare were he to write his memoirs on the war. Generals are not made at the rear, howls forth in the mind of a reader of this work. Alabi-Isama was not as corrosive as he should have been with Obasanjo and this showed enviable pedigree of the writer. Obasanjo used the term ‘Rebel’ with a heavy heart in his work. Biafra was respectfully used by a warrior on the frontline. This was a critical divide between qualities of both human beings. I have come to know that the whole life of Obasanjo has been less than wholesome. Perhaps the mask of his Igbo ancestry in a milieu when parentage is male determined wrought tremendous harm to his psyche in youth that he found rebound in hatred for the tribe of his father. He did not want any closeness with a tribe that bore his father. For the unaware, an Onitsha born police corporal was the father of Olusegun Obasanjo. The man had no guts to bring his mother home with him on retirement on account of age-old tradition of not polluting the purity of Onitsha purity with alien contaminants. The attitude of Obasanjo through his leadership at various levels was largely dictated by this discomfort. He hated the guts of his own tribe and did everything to denounce their virtues, even in printed matter that is bound to outlast him and his parent from an irrepressible race. The Tragedy of Victory beams a positive searchlight on the pedigree of Alabi-Isama. He saw that what the war set out to achieve was not achieved. The restoration of the nation was not attained. No war of course, he obliquely observed, portends any positive goals for any groups pitted against themselves in warfare. Human psychic distortions as exemplified by the damage on his idol in combat, Benjamin Adekunle, alias Black Scorpion, culminating in his plan to eliminate his Man Friday in the Atlantic Theatre, eloquently presents the destructive repercussion attendant to blood-shedding of any type. Contrast this with the sanity of the writer long after the din of war, in putting together an authentic, indisputable comment on the war with his sanity unimpaired and unwavering constancy in unbiased judgment of events running through the impressive volume of picturesque description, garnished with photographs conscripted painfully in trying circumstances, of his role in the Atlantic Theatre, does immense credit to his mind as a positive specimen of humanity among failures in false success apparels like Obasanjo and General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma. I strongly believe that the relevance of this specie of humanity in subsequent Nigeria represents for the author the Tragedy of Victory in this monumental effort. What he did not say which Natural Law dictates inexorably, is that nothing goes unrequited in Creation, no matter how long its closure takes in becoming a living and visible reality. The Tragedy of Victory eminently discharged its mission in the title of the work. Its impact on the human psyche is bound to endure.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 04:10:39 +0000
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