By ALOY EJIMAKOR

Over half a century after the repudiation of #Aburi plunged the rest of Nigeria into an unnecessary war against the East, the script has flipped in painful ways for Nigeria as a whole, especially in the Christian Middle Belt.

In Plateau State, communities in Gowon’s home region have seen hundreds of thousands displaced by sheer terror, with reports of villages renamed and religious sites altered. Even America, a foreign power, is alarmed enough to weigh-in with muscular military intervention.

In Taraba, Danjuma, who was involved in the 1966 coup against General Ironsi, has publicly urged his people to defend themselves, describing the killings as genocide and accusing elements of the Nigerian military - that he once led - of complicity.

Danjuma’s ominous warning: “If you depend on the Armed Forces to protect you, you will all die”, reflects the deep frustrations (or even regrets) of a man who had fought against Aburi. And his sentiments and fears reflect what had propelled Ojukwu’s stance on Aburi, but he was roundly demonized as a secessionist and baited into a war of attrition against the East. As a digression, it is the same demonizing that watered the ground for the infamous life imprisonment of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.

The deeper lesson of today’s harsh verdict of history is structural and stark. A centralized federal security architecture, when captured by narrow interests or weakened by vicious ethnic politics, often fails to protect vulnerable communities. This was most self-evident during the Buhari regime, with its vestiges still remaining to this day. The State-actor complicity Danjuma lamented mirrors the 1966 massacres that had traumatized the East in 1967. Today, groups like the Berom, Angas, Jukun and other North Central Christian minorities are at the receiving end and it is not letting up.

Had the Aburi Accord been fully implemented, regions might have had the constitutional tools to secure their people. Instead, the resort to a utopian unity has produced a State where violence once directed against the East in 1967 has now spread to the very people that had fought against Aburi. Ironic.

The violence has even reached parts of the Southwest with an alarming upsurge that prompted figures like Sunday Igboho to start demanding the formation of a regional security network to defend the Southwest. This is precisely what Aburi offered in 1967, even before Igboho was borne.

The ghost of Aburi confirms the saying that history’s harsh verdict grows clearer with time: Aburi was not an act of secession, but a pragmatic attempt to manage deep divisions through decentralization. Therefore, rejecting it did not strengthen Nigeria; it entrenched the very pathologies that now threaten every region, mostly in the North which did the most to reject Aburi.

As it stands today, it is not open to argument that Nigeria did not become a better or safer nation by rejecting the Aburi Accord. It did not even achieve the vaunted unity that cost millions of lives. It simply became a country where the very ethnic-driven violence Ojukwu had tried to forestall eventually came for everyone else, now affecting to the greatest degree those that had fought tenaciously against Aburi.

So, all considered, history has rendered its verdict, and that is: Aburi was right and beyond reproach. And Ojukwu was the Nostradamus that saw the tomorrow of Nigeria, and that tomorrow is here.