Christian Onoh

Christian Onoh governed Anambra State and spent his life on the wrong side of Odumegwu Ojukwu, who ended up marrying his daughter. He was an Igbo politician from Enugu who had been in politics since the First Republic, and his career runs through every phase of Nigerian government: civilian rule, secession, military rule, the Second Republic and the annulled transition of the 1990s. During the Biafran war he did not follow Ojukwu, which in Igbo politics afterwards was either treachery or realism depending on who was speaking, and it defined how he was seen for the rest of his life. He became governor of Anambra State in 1983 on the ruling party's ticket, in elections widely held to have been rigged, and was in office for barely three months before the military took power on the last day of that year and removed every elected official in the country. Winning Anambra for that party was the surprising part. The National Party of Nigeria was the northern-based governing party, and the Igbo south-east had voted overwhelmingly for its own regional party in 1979. A result reversing that was always going to be read as bought rather than won, and the disputed governorships of 1983 - Anambra among the loudest - are the specific grievance the soldiers cited when they took power in December. The coup is the point of his governorship rather than anything he did in it: Nigeria's Second Republic lasted four years, ended over the conduct of the 1983 elections, and returned the country to soldiers for another sixteen. He opposed his daughter Bianca's marriage to Ojukwu in 1994 - his political enemy, thirty-five years older than she was - and the two families were publicly at odds over it. He died in 1999, the year Nigeria returned to civilian government, having spent forty years in a politics that was interrupted by soldiers for more than half of them.

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