Onoh calls for Gowon to apologize to the Igbo over the civil war.

Former Enugu State House of Assembly member and former South‑East spokesperson for President Bola Tinubu, Denge Onoh, has called for former Head of State Yakubu Gowon to issue an apology to the Igbo people.

Onoh condemned Gowon’s recent remarks about civilian casualties in the Nigerian Civil War, calling the comments a dangerous minimisation of the conflict’s human tragedy.

During an interview on Arise Television, Gowon said that after visiting former Biafran territories following the war, he noticed black spots on palm trees and was told they were bullet marks. He inferred that most bullets fired by the Nigerian army had struck palm trees rather than people.

In a statement, Onoh said the claim contradicted historical accounts, eyewitness testimonies and international reports on the civil war. He argued that the remarks failed to reflect the true scale of suffering experienced during the conflict.

The war, fought between 1967 and 1970, is estimated to have claimed three million lives, most of them through starvation and disease linked to the federal blockade, as well as civilian casualties caused by combat operations, bombings and reprisals.

“Reducing these horrors to bullets harmlessly striking palm trees does not withstand basic scrutiny,” Onoh said. “It ignores the well‑documented humanitarian crisis, including widespread kwashiorkor among children, mass displacement and the devastating human cost of prolonged fighting across the South‑East.”