Nigeria, Feb. 20 -- There Was a Country, lamented Chinua Achebe, Nigeria's literary icon and one of the world's greatest storytellers. Achebe's title evokes many things in the mind beyond its primary thematic concern - a journal of the author's experiences of the Biafran War, which raged between 1967 and 1970. Among other things, it raises the question: What happened to the country?

Biafra was stillborn. But what happened to Nigeria? If the groundnut pyramids were evacuated and the cotton ginneries, leather tanneries, textile factories, car assembly plants, electricity projects, steel complexes, petroleum refineries, and every state project that would have made the country were sabotaged, what happened to the people and their humanity? ...