What Agubuzu’s zero hour graduate teaches about the Biafran War

From Fred Itua, Abuja
Every republic eventually confronts the question of what it owes the citizens it wounded and then asked to serve. Ambassador Lawrence Agubuzu’s autobiography, Zero Hour Graduate: A Nigerian Diplomat’s Journey Through War and Service to Triumph, poses that question with unusual force. It is a personal chronicle, but it is also a political document of some consequence. Its central proposition is that Nigeria remains a troubled country, assembled through colonial convenience and not organic consent, and that the wounds of the civil war, though buried beneath decades of subsequent history, continue to shape the life chances of those who lived through it. A nation th...