Post-War Reintegration, Reconstruction and Reconciliation Among the Anioma People of Nigeria

Abstract

Author(s): Nwaokocha, Odigwe A. | Abstract: Much has been written on the Nigerian Civil War. However, its impact on some minority groups has been largely neglected. This oversight has affected scholarly treatment of how forces emanating from the war impacted the Anioma people. Though predominantly Igbo-speaking, the Anioma were geographically on the Nigerian side during the war. The dynamics of the war as an ethnic conflict ensured that Aniomaland was a major battlefront. At the end of the war, the Anioma were a distressed group. Houses, homes, careers, dreams, aspirations and individuals lay in ruins. This left the people and their territory in need of major rehabilitation. This article focuses on the rehabilitation and reintegration of the Anioma into the society. It attempts this against the background of the Nigerian government’s policy of rehabilitation and the trumpeted principle of “no victor, no vanquished,” which dominates discourses on the war. Employing primary and secondary sources, the work probes how the Anioma people fared under the post-war rehabilitation program at different levels. It argues that it was difficult for the Nigerian government and society to completely forget the bitterness of the war even while implementing the rehabilitation program. This left the program struggling to manage two diametrically opposed principles, resulting in its merely scratching the surface after promising much.