January 1965, Lagos was a city of soaring dreams—a vibrant hub where a young couple could build a life on the bedrock of independence-era optimism. By 1967, that dream had evaporated. Forced to run for their lives with absolutely nothing, they fled back to the Eastern region. They survived the hunger, the air raids, and the psychological terror of the Civil War, only to be handed a degrading 20 pounds at its conclusion. It was a blunt decree by the state that their hard work, their pre-war savings, and their status as equal citizens had been utterly erased.Those survivors were my parents. Their harrowing trek into the shadows of our history, and their resilient survival, forms the emotional core of my newly launched novel, The City He Never Returned To (launched June 20, 2026).While the book draws directly from their lived experience, it is far from just a historical retelling. The title itself captures a profound, ongoing national tragedy. “The City He Never Returned To” is, on the surface, the physical city of Lagos that my father’s generation had to abandon. But on a deeper, more symbolic level, it represents the Nigeria we never returned to—the nation of promise, safety, and functional institutional integrity that was permanently fractured in 1967.
A Shared National Trauma
As I look across the landscape of contemporary Nigeria, I realize the characters in my book are not relics of the past; their struggles are being re-enacted every single day by modern Nigerians across every geopolitical zone.
The trauma of the book perfectly mirrors our current reality:
The Fear: The terror my parents felt fleeing their home is mirrored in the eyes of a farmer in Benue fleeing rampaging bandits.· The Hunger: The devastating starvation of the late 1960s blockade is reflected in the hollow eyes of a mother in Kano who can no longer afford a bag of rice.· The Dispossession: The erasure of my father’s hard work via the “20-pound policy” is felt by the brilliant graduate in Ibadan driving a cab because connections and corruption have entirely replaced merit.For over five decades, a dangerous myth has quieted our collective conscience: the comfortable belief that the Civil War, its catastrophic fallout, and the subsequent marginalization of the Southeast are strictly “an Igbo problem.” Because other ethnic groups did not witness the starvation firsthand, it has been easy to dismiss the lingering pain as a localized, isolated grievance.This is our monumental national blind spot. The truth we must face is stark: The war never truly ended; its tactics simply morphed, and its casualties are now nationwide.
The Blueprint of Decay
When the conflict ceased in 1970 under the beautiful but ultimately hollow rhetoric of “No Victor, No Vanquished,” a toxic blueprint was codified into our political DNA. To suppress one region, the state chose to dismantle the very foundations of meritocracy, transparency, and accountability. When you intentionally throw merit out the window to keep a specific group away from power, you accidentally teach an entire political class that incompetence is acceptable as long as tribal sentiments are manipulated.By institutionalizing exclusion, we created a lawless political vacuum. The system built to police, dispossess, and marginalize the East has simply expanded its parameters over the last fifty years. Today, it marginalizes every ordinary Nigerian. The criminals who seized political power in the wake of the war have weaponized the same division to impoverish us all. The hunger in the land knows no ethnicity. The bullet of an insurgent does not check your tongue or creed.—Yet we must be careful not to oversimplify. The war did not invent the machinery of exclusion; it weaponized the colonial skeleton of divide-and-rule, handing it to indigenous elites who perfected it. And we must also name an uncomfortable truth: Eastern political leaders were not innocent heirs to this tragedy—they too played the ethnic card, consolidated regional power, and sometimes excluded minorities within their own backyard. The real cartel that emerged from the ashes of 1970 was not Igbo, Hausa, or Yoruba—it was a multi-ethnic political class that learned the war’s darkest lesson: survival means ruthless accumulation, not collective flourishing. Today, the ordinary herder in Benue, the ordinary trader in Onitsha, and the ordinary civil servant in Ibadan are equally expendable to this cabal.Furthermore, my parents’ flight to the East was the first scattering. But there is a second scattering happening right now—the voluntary exodus of our young people to Canada, the UK, and the US. That airport queue is not merely a career choice; it is a continuation of the same rupture. When we ask, “Why are we all scattered far from home?”—we must answer: because the post-war peace never delivered justice, only a fragile ceasefire. The ghost in the breadline is also the ghost in the departure lounge.And we must be brave enough to admit that the “City He Never Returned To” is gone forever. The Nigeria of 1965 is irretrievably lost. We cannot heal by yearning to resurrect a prelapsarian past. True repair means mourning that loss fully, so we can stop haunting the ruins and start building on ground that has been salted by history, using the fertilizer of our collective grief.
The Path Forward: Speculative Repair
In The City He Never Returned To, I tried to look beyond this bleak horizon by introducing what I call Speculative Repair and Political Imagination.Speculative Repair means using our collective stories to confront the historical moments where our institutional healing failed. It asks us to look back not to trade bitter blame, but to acknowledge the root of the rot—and to grieve what we have permanently lost, so we are no longer imprisoned by it.Political Imagination is the next step—a shared, courageous agreement across all ethnic lines to completely banish the ghosts of 1967 by intentionally designing a new, radically inclusive, and strictly merit-driven society. It is the audacious work of building an entirely new nation, not the futile task of restoring an old one.We cannot build a modern powerhouse on a foundation of unacknowledged trauma and structural corruption. If we continue to view the complaints of the war as an isolated ethnic issue, we will remain trapped in this cycle of poverty, insecurity, and chaos.True healing and hope will only begin when we look across our artificial ethnic divides and see our shared condition. The story of my book is a historical fact, but the story of a failing Nigeria is our current, collective reality. It is time to realize that the fight for justice, equity, and competent leadership is not an Igbo struggle—it is the only way the entire nation survives.
Discover the Story Behind the Insight
Discover the profound human cost of our history and the blueprint for our collective healing. “The City He Never Returned To” is out now, available on both Amazon and Lulu:👉 https://akajiofo.com/product/1157/ — Order Your Copy Today
Support the Work:
If this conversation moves you—if you believe a Nigeria that repairs its fractures is possible—consider becoming a patron.
Paul Ibekwe – Fintro BankIBAN: BE47 1430 9848 2080
BIC (SWIFT): GEBABEBB
Every contribution sustains the writing, the research, and the community. Thank you for being part of the circle.
Leave a Reply