The good thing is that Ojukwu and I reconciled before his death. He came to see me in the UK, he found out where I was, he called my home, my wife answered and she told me about it and when I came back at the weekend, I went to see him at the hotel where he was staying in London. If I was afraid of anything, what if he had somebody there to shoot me dead in the hotel?
And people would say it is an accident that happened. And I believe on that day, his friend and biographer Frederick Forsythe was there when I went there.
I can remember seeing this white man sitting quietly in one corner, seeing me as I went to see Ojukwu. And later on, I learnt he was the one. He was the one who said all sorts of things about me and even wrote a book about me, making me look so small. But for me, it doesn’t matter.
Going back to my roots, my father was a very religious man who converted from his traditional religion to Christianity. He was a great believer in God and in the words of the Lord. He tried to bring us up in way of the Lord. There is always something we take from our parents.
And of course, there is the mission where my father in the end worked and we grew up in Wusasa, Zaria. The people that brought us up, that taught us at school were teachers from various parts of the country. We had Ibo teachers, we had Yoruba teachers, we had Hausa teachers and other teachers all bringing us up in the proper and true Christian way of how to behave.
Then later on came my military training which certainly didn’t teach me to be big-headed, to be haughty and naughty, but I can assure you that I am trained to be a soldier. If I have to fight, I will fight. I will not be afraid. This is a joke. I am told that Ojukwu told people at one time when this crisis was going on that he knows that Jack (my nickname) will not fight. That Jack is most of the times going on courses. He has not commanded a unit or a battalion as some of them have done or as he has done. The first thing Jack carries in his suitcase, his only weapon, is the Bible. So with that one they thought I will not fight, but I can assure you that the strategies that we used in order to contain Ojukwu were the strategies I learnt at the various Staff Colleges—one of them which Ojukwu also went to. I was just coming back from the Joint Services Staff College with all the knowledge of how to employ all the services—the army, the navy, the air force in an operation.
And the opportunity came and I gave a directive on how all these things should be done, irrespective of the command of Obasanjo.