Ola Balogun

Ola Balogun (born 1 August 1945) is a Nigerian filmmaker and scriptwriter. He also ventured into the Nigerian music industry in 2001. Balogun, who has been making films for more than three decades, is part of the first generation of Nigerian filmmakers. Quotes I was brought up in the military tradition. Like you rightly asserted Balogun is not a name but a title. We are the generals of the Oyo empire. I was taught some things in childhood. It was transmitted by family and it is from generation to generation. Balogun was the first man who was the original general of the Oyo empire. They gave him some inoculation and it is still in our blood. So, I have some powers if it comes to war. I have been to the war front. At the Ministry of Information where I was working, during Nigeria’s civil war, we used to accompany some journalists to the war front. I can say that most of the Army officers of African countries are cowards because when they tell them to accompany us to the front, immediately they hear the boom of the gun, they go back, asking the journalists to move in front if they so wish. So, the only person who was serious during the war was Benjamin Adekunle of the Black Scorpions. He was not a British-trained general, he was an African-trained general like me. He had raw power. He was everywhere during the war and his tactics were too much for Biafran soldiers. He was the one who fought the war and won it. Some soldiers were just trying to waste time and collect money here and there just like they’re doing now with Boko Haram. They are not fighting any war with the sect except for pecuniary gains. So, the officers who went to the Nigeria Second Division Battalion in Onitsha included Muritala Muhammad who performed woefully during the war. He wasted the lives of many of our people. This is not the case they told me. I witnessed it. He wanted to cross straight from Asaba to Onitsha. And people were telling him that those Biafran soldiers were not Boys Scouts, they also had guns, he rebuffed them and insisted he was going to cross. The Biafran soldiers killed a lot of Nigerian soldiers as a result of his stubbornness. From that time, the Second Division didn’t advance one mile. They were in Onitsha till the end of the war. Muritala Muhammad got fed up, left the battle and went away. It was seen as an indiscipline for a military man. So they brought another general, Commander Ibrahim Bata Malgwi, an Owambe general. They were just partying till the war ended. Even the Biafran soldiers crossed the River Niger and entered the Midwest unnoticed. This is because the concept of Biafra was dead from the beginning. The Eastern Nigeria is not made up of Igbo people only. The riverine areas were occupied by Ijaw in Port Harcourt on one side and Efik/Ibibio on the other hand. Once General Gowon said that he was creating 12 states the Ijaw people of Rivers State got their state and Efik/ Ibibio got their state, finish! The war was over. The 12 states were created at the declaration of the war and the war was lost from that time on. Ojukwu wasted the lives of the people because Biafra could not succeed as a landlocked entity. They had no access to the sea. They killed many of the Ijaws and Efik/Ibibio because they said they were loyal to the federal soldiers. That is why after the war, Ijaw people didn’t allow the Igbo to come back to Port Harcourt. They seized their property because they literally ‘peppered’ them during the war because they were fighting on the federal side and so Biafran soldiers killed a lot of them. So it was a waste of lives and property because the Ojukwu-led Biafran war could not succeed. It so happened after the war I was an Information Officer in the Nigeria Embassy in France. I was the Number 3 man in the Nigeria Embassy in Paris. So, we discovered documents which showed the reason why Michel Dabre and Mauricheau Beaupre were supporting the Biafra war. It had nothing to do with humanitarian concerns at all. Ojukwu signed an agreement with the French government to supply them oil under the Emergency Response Action Plan (ERAP) through Total Nigeria for debt arrears. So, the Biafran insurrection was about oil. It is the same thing about the French talking about safeguarding democracy in Niger Republic. It is not about democracy but uranium. The French government came to support Biafra not because of anything humanitarian but oil, which Biafra didn’t have. That is why the French government went to court with its puppets like Houphouet Boigny and Ali Bongo Ondimba to recognize Biafra and it used Gabon to supply weapons to Ojukwu but it could only come by air because Ojukwu did not have the riverine areas. So, that war was lost, and more than 2 million people died for nothing. When I heard that Nnamdi Kalu wanted to create another Biafra, I saw it as a smack of foolery. After my first degree in France where I studied Literature And Arts and excelled as one of the best students above everyone including French students in their literature and institute, I was expected to go on for my Master’s degree programme in Literature before I fell in love with film. There was this very serious civil servant, a Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education who came to Paris for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) meeting, his name was Mr Durosinmi-Etti. Those days when Nigerian senior civil servants went abroad for conferences, they didn’t go about looking for where to shop. They would stay in their hotel room from there to the conference and back to their hotel room. They dressed very simply. So, I went to the hotel where senior civil servants were staying and asked for Etti. When he was told that a Nigerian student wanted to see him, he told them to bring me to his room. When I got into his hotel room, I told him that I was finishing my first degree in Literature and Arts as a scholarship holder of the French government through the Nigerian government and that I wanted to change to filmmaking. He asked me: “Is that what you want?” I said yes. He said, “Okay, good.” That was how I was transferred to go and study film. The calibre of civil servants of those days was far superior to what we have today. Durosinmi-Etti was a serious and receptive civil servant who received complaints from Nigerian students in France. He never drove any student who wanted to see him away. He gave everybody an audience and he didn’t go night clubbing whenever he was at a conference in France. He made a difference between civil servants then and what we have today where civil servants travel for conferences abroad and embark on shopping sprees and jamborees. Recently, the President had to forbid half of the people who wanted to go to the United Nations General Assembly because they were not going there for any purpose other than to shop. The era of Etti was different. I was lucky when I came back to Nigeria after my film studies at the old Institute of Cinematography in Paris, which is an institute for higher film studies to be employed in the Federal Ministry of Information as a scriptwriter. We were producing documentary films. Among my colleagues then was my best friend, Frank Abiodun Aig-Imoukhuede, a journalist and poet who was the father of Aigboje, the foremost banker and the first African Co-Chairman of the Global Business Coalition on Health (GBC Health). Our families were very close, and our children grew up together. So, I knew Aigboje when he was four years old, alongside his siblings: Erekpitan and Oluwakemi who married Otunba Subomi Balogun. Kemi is the youngest sister of Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede. But he is a big disappointment because he was brought up in a house full of books. His mother, Emily, was a curator at the National Museum, and his aunt, the sister of his father, was a very important novelist and writer. His uncle from his father’s side was one of the best people to head major companies in Nigeria. He was the managing director of blue chip companies and from a very sophisticated family. I later saw him hobnobbing with rich bush people. What is he doing with such kind of people who were ignorant bushmen? Just for the love of money, he followed them around. I saw that lately he went to Mr. President and claimed that he was creating a foundation that would be giving money to civil servants. That is nonsense and disappointing. I knew this man when he was a child. He came from a good home and he is not supposed to be hobnobbing with ignorant bush rich men and fraudsters.