The reason was simple. Out of Lagos, Angus McDermid, 300 miles from the Niger River, was reporting all this as BBC-endorsed fact. Every journalist will know that he may have to report what a dictatorship is saying, but must make plain early on that it is the government talking, not him. This is the “attribution”—the words “according to the Nigerian government.”
To be really fair, add the words “no independent confirmation could be achieved.” And early on, in the first paragraph. Failing that, the listener will gain the impression that the allegations are all true and endorsed by the mighty BBC. The broadcasts out of Lagos that first month had attribution, if at all, in the fourth or even fifth paragraph. It sounded like the BBC itself talking. Sitting and listening to it as the expats around me roared with derisive laughter made me frustrated as hell. It was not the bias, it was the sloppiness that Reuters would not have tolerated for a minute. Then at last I got a message from London.
It released me from my instruction not to file out of Enugu. The ten-day war was three weeks old and nothing had happened. I was asked for a “matcher” to the dailies out of Lagos.
In journalistic parlance, a matcher is both confirmation and endorsement. I was supposed to file that everything being said was absolutely true.
The only “riots” were actually queues of Biafran youth trying to join up. The entire Nigerian army was stuck behind a roadblock on the border. I could not report “in voice,” but at least a telex connection had been established for written messages. So I sent one.
All right, I agree it was probably intemperate. Deep in the obedient editorial bowels of the Broadcasting House newsroom, it did not go down well. What I had actually done was point a Colt .45 at the forehead of my reporting career with the BBC and pull the trigger.
It was not out of mischief but naïveté. I was trained by Reuters. I had never covered a controversial story in my two years with the BBC. I did not realize that when broadcasting for the state, a foreign correspondent must never report what London does not want to hear.
And that is what I had done. I had told them that my briefing had been garbage and the reports out of Lagos were tripe. Then something very peculiar happened. Tiny Biafra invaded Nigeria.
Ojukwu or one of his staff had noticed that Lagos had transferred the entire Nigerian army across the Niger River way up on the northern border. There was a huge bridge at Onitsha crossing to an arrow-straight road to Lagos. The bridge was intact, the road undefended. The sheer amateurishness was breathtaking. So the Biafrans put together a column of Land Rovers and trucks, scraped together their meager supply of rifles and Bren guns, and rolled over it, heading west at a steady cruise. I went with them.
There was no opposition. A platoon of Nigerians at the western end of the bridge took one look and ran. The column rolled on across the Mid-Western Region to its capital at Benin City. This, too, was abandoned, and that included the British deputy high commissioner (there was one for each federal state), who hightailed it into the bush. That was how the news got out; someone in the radio room alerted Lagos, which spun straight into panic.
It was the success that was the undoing. The Biafrans could not believe their own speed of progress. Instead of refueling and pressing on for the Carter Bridge, and access to Lagos, they paused for two days.
The next day of motoring brought us over the next border into Western Region, land of the Yoruba, with whom the Biafrans had no quarrel. In several village doorways, there were hands waving. The jeep I was in reached the small town of Ore. There had clearly been a clash. Several dozen Nigerian soldiers lay dead round the village square. Wild pigs had been feeding on the soft parts of their faces. Without cheeks or lips, the dead heads stared up in insane greeting. Then I noticed the shoulder-flash insignia. They were Colonel Gowon’s personal Praetorian Guard.
As my colleague from Comtel filmed the scene, I remarked to my escorting officer that if they were using the elite of the elite as a stopgap panic measure, the road must be open and undefended. He nodded, but a second panic was setting in. The sheer nerve was receding like an ebbing tide.
Later, much later, it was reported that the British High Commission in Lagos was preparing to shred documents, and Gowon’s personal aircraft was at Lagos International Airport with propellers turning and a flight plan for the north. It was really that close.
It all went wrong, of course, and as usual the flaw was betrayal. Ojukwu had appointed a certain Colonel Banjo to lead the mission but, arriving in Benin, Banjo had contacted Lagos by High Commission radio and tried to cut a deal—for himself. He was later tried and shot for it, but too late.
The column began to retreat, back to and over the Onitsha Bridge. Then engineers blew it up. It remained uncrossable until the end of the war two years later.
Back in Enugu, I noticed the tone of messages out of London had changed again. The early ones begged for every detail of the invasion across the Niger. Once it was known that it had failed, I was peremptorily ordered back to London. So I packed and said good-bye to (by now) General Ojukwu, and an army jeep was assigned to take me to the Cameroon crossing point on the eastern border.
Thence with a local mammy wagon to Mamfe and another bus south to Douala. Finally in the Cocotiers Hotel, I would get a phone connection to London. The instructions were the same. No reports, thank you, just get the next flight home.
I did so, walked into Broadcasting House, to be met with an urgent instruction to talk to no one but to report at once to Arthur Hutchinson. It was a brief interview and to the point. According to him, my reporting must have been biased, and I was summarily fired.
But the BBC does not actually fire people; it sends them to a form of internal Siberia, hoping they will resign, serve out their three-month notice, and leave quietly. I was out of the Foreign News team and reduced back to home reporter. I should report to that department’s head, Tom Maltby. I would never travel abroad for the BBC again and the charge was biased reporting.
That is a serious charge, but no one could explain why a seasoned foreign correspondent, sent to cover an obscure African war, would lose his mind to the political ambitions of an African tribe he had never heard of. However, the decision was final and there was no appeal.
There was no point in appealing to Sir Hugh Carleton Greene; he was struggling with his own resignation dilemma in the face of the departure of far bigger bananas than I after the imposition of Lord Hill on the whole corporation.
So I wandered along the third-floor corridors until I came to the office of Tom Maltby.
FAREWELL, AUNTIE
Tom Maltby was a very decent man and kindly. He had been in the Navy during the war and seen combat but never made a fuss about it. He knew exactly what had happened to my BBC career and why. I tried to explain anyway.
I had reported out of Nigeria only what I had seen or, if reported speech, with immediate attribution. Where was the bias? He explained that was missing the entire point.
What I had done, he explained as to an erring nephew, was contradict the High Commission in Lagos; Sir Joseph John Saville Garner, the senior mandarin at the Commonwealth Office (and thus the British government); the BBC World Service; and Mr. Hutchinson.
But they were all besotted by the original flawed analysis, I protested. Nevertheless, it is the only analysis that is acceptable, he pointed out. Then he added the argument that prevented me from resigning straightaway.
“It is about duration,” he said, “if this ten-day or two-week war goes on for, say, six months, they will surely have to reconsider.”
It made sense and he could be right. If the Biafran insurrection did indeed collapse rapidly, the analysis of the mandarins would have been proved right, if somewhat delayed; and my own voiced predictions that this was no storm in a teacup would have been shown to be mistaken.