Nigeria-Biafra War E.Con.O.My Makes a Case for Reparations Over Postwar Wealth Seizures

Nigeria-Biafra War E.Con.O.My: : Reparative Justice for Stolen Wealth and the Case for National Atonement by Onwubiko Agozino

Criminologist Onwubiko Agozino examines lost savings, legal barriers, and accountability through a human-rights intervention from Eastern Nigeria’s postwar era.

NEW YORK CITY, NY, UNITED STATES, October 20, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- What happened to the savings, investments, and accumulated wealth of people in Nigeria’s former Eastern Region after the Nigeria-Biafra War? Criminologist Onwubiko Agozino takes up that enduring question in Nigeria-Biafra War E.Con.O.My: Reparative Justice for Stolen Wealth and the Case for National Atonement. The book addresses losses remembered for more than half a century, particularly among Igbo families, and argues that their consequences demand a response beyond historical remembrance.

Agozino’s connection to the subject is personal as well as professional. He recounts that his father lost his life savings to the government and international banks and subsequently had to sell land to pay his high school fees. That family experience places the issue in concrete terms: money accumulated before the war could no longer support needs that continued after it.

The wider account encompasses traders who could not rebuild businesses, civil servants whose retirement funds disappeared, and churches, cooperatives, and community organizations with unfinished development projects. Passed between generations through family memories, testimony, and community narratives, these experiences describe more than individual bank balances. They connect the loss of private wealth to interrupted livelihoods and collective projects, giving the reparations argument a scope that includes both households and institutions.

A quantitative dimension considers compound interest on estimated savings at variable rates. For readers concerned with the economic basis of reparative claims, this approach addresses how to assess losses across time rather than considering only the sums originally withheld. The calculation sits alongside a legal question: Agozino identifies an ouster clause in a military decree that, he says, barred Nigerian courts from hearing challenges to the confiscation of savings and abandoned properties.

Agozino also points to the ECOWAS Court of Justice as a forum for human-rights issues, while arguing that redress need not depend on litigation. His proposed route calls for government recognition of the decree’s nullity and payment of reparations to affected citizens as a legal obligation. He argues that such action could lead banks to follow without admitting wrongdoing. These are proposals for accountability, not accounts of reparations already secured.

Positioned as a policy intervention in support of human rights rather than an academic textbook, the book applies theories of Black Reconstruction in America, reparative justice, and racial capitalism. Its combination of economic calculation, legal constraints, and historical memory offers distinct points of engagement for historians, sociologists, economists, criminologists, legal and policy scholars, human-rights activists, policymakers, and general readers concerned with the consequences of postwar dispossession.

“This book documents the history, evidence, estimates of lost values and compound interests, and presents the case for reparative justice.”
— ONWUBIKO AGOZINO

Onwubiko Agozino is a criminologist and a childhood survivor of the 1967-1970 war in Biafra. His work on postwar reparative claims brings professional expertise to a history he experienced as a child.

Available now. Get your copy here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK2GC7CV

For review copies, interview requests, or additional information, please contact:

Onwubiko Agozino
BrightKey PR
media@brightkeypr.com