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There are a number of oddities for which Nigeria will perhaps forever remember Professor Humphrey Nwosu, the nation's chief electoral umpire between 1989 and 1993. Verbosity is surely one of them. Coming after Prof. Eme Awa distinguished by a patriarchal sobriety, the relatively younger tutor of Political Science from University of Nsukka easily captured the imagination of the nation with his omni-scient loquacity made even more remarkable by a penchant for dramatic gesticulations. Before political reporters in those halcyon days, Nwosu's words were accompanied habitually by either a sleight of hand or an outright jab at the sky.

Indeed, before the Babangida regime invented Social Democratic Party (SDP) and National Republican Convention (NRC) in 1990, Nwosu had subjected groups earlier wishing to be registered as political parties to a tiring novelty of having to turn in trailer-load of documents individually. Cartons of files containing negligible details like maybe the shoe size of members. Made to go through such nasty ordeal of having to disembowel the trucks, hierarchs of the aspring parties often had to clutch their sweat-crumpled "agbada" in their arm-pits afterwards like rain-beaten chicks while the inspection of Nwosu's mandarins at the NEC's secretariat lasted.

To most Nigerians, the memory of the fore-going must have been awakened rudely Tuesday by the spectacle of cartons and cartons of reports trucked to International Conference Centre, Abuja by the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (HRVIC). The flotilla of document consists of 30,000-page transcripts of what transpired during the months that the Oputa Panel sat to hear cases of human rights abuses in Nigeria between 1965 and 1999.

But, to be sure, the long-awaited report of the Oputa Panel is not a laughing matter. Rather, it surely represents a substantial part of the saga of tears, blood and sorrow that attended Nigeria's long march to nationhood to date. But it is not the number of pages that counts now. The issue is what the nation intends to make of them. Naturally, this question is bound to spark off a heated debate in the times ahead. A telling sign can perhaps be seen already in the sharp disagreement between President Olusegun Obasanjo and Justice Oputa on the way forward.

During the submission of the executive summary of the report last week, Oputa, true to forecasts, had, among other things, recommended monetary compensations for victims of rights abuses. But Obasanjo, himself a victim as well as an accused (over the Kalakuta Republic affair), had a different view. Money, he said, is not enough. He had posed a rhetorical question: "How much can you pay a man whose father was killed?" Instead, Obasanjo advocated forgiveness. Wednesday, the president went ahead to formally say "sorry" to all the victims of abuses.

But I believe the president and Oputa are both missing the real issue. At best, they are being reductionistic. There is a mortal danger in confusing the ceremony of reconciliation with its substance. Before we get drowned by this argument over gold and silver, I think we still need to answer one critical question: what manner of reconciliation do we want? Or, better still, what kind of reconciliation do we deserve?

This a dilemma to be viewed from both the practical as well as the philosophical dimensions. Reconciliation could be seen as a form of psycho-analytic therapy applied to repair a wounded psyche. Maladjustment, as psycho-analysts would say, results from repressed feelings of hate or hurt. The task before the psychologist, therefore, is to apply clinical test batteries to break into the dark recesses of the mind of the afflicted. But from the social science perspective, "reconciliation" presupposes that the harmony and balance of the community has been distorted on account of acts of aggression by the mighty against the weak. The rite of reconciliation is, therefore, supposed to restore the balance, acts as a catharsis of sorts for the hurt feelings. But forgiveness does not happen in a vacuum. Remission is predicated only on an admission of guilt by the aggressor.

Conceptually, the Oputa Panel was no doubt intended to serve as Nigeria's equivalent of the Truth Commission inaugurated in the post-Apatheid South Africa to help healed the land of the epidemic of hate. For recognising this historic necessity, the Obasanjo administration surely deserves some commendation. Even more commendable is the fact that Obasanjo subjected himself to the panel. On the first occasion, he appeared as a petitioner over the wrong allegedly done to him by the Abacha regime over the phantom coup of 1995. Later, he appeared as a "defendant" in the petition brought by the Kuti family over the burning of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's "Kalakuta Republic" in 1977. A worthy example indeed compared to three other former heads of state who refused to face the public purgatory, hiding behind legal pillars.

But beyond the ceremony of appearance, it does appear that we forgot that the South African experience was dissimilar to ours. In the former, for instance, aggression was an experience mutually suffered by the whites and the blacks as well. Just as the offspring of Verwoed, the fiery apostle of Apatheid, routinely opened gun-fire on black marchers in Soweto, so did ANC freedom-fighters hatch series of terrorists strikes against white targets while the epoch of hatred lasted. So, in that circumstance, it was much easier for every-one to come out in the open post-1994 to confess to the sins of the past. In that circumstance, you can then begin to talk of forgiveness based on the formula of balance of terror or shared hurt.

But the Nigerian experience was different. What we had in most cases was the Big Man trampling cruelly on the weak. So, in this instance, the first step towards reconciliation should be admission of guilt by the predator.

But a honest review of what transpired while Oputa Panel lasted does not justifiably fit into this mould. At best, what we had were spates of denials even in the face of overwhelming facts.

The "witnesses of (un)truth" could not have done otherwise, any way. The Oputa Panel, as it were, functioned in a constitutional vacuum. At some point, some even went to court to secure injunction restraining the panel from summoning them to answer charges of perfidy. In many instances, we had those who were indeed standing trial in regular courts being subpoenaed by the Oputa Panel to answer charges that had bearing with what they were being accused of in the courts. Naturally, such "witnesses of (un)truth" had to keep denying the obvious truth.

Indeed, Obasanjo has since said "sorry" to all whose rights were abridged. But, of course, the prerogative of the president to offer apology does not in any way include the compulsion that that apology be accepted. In a way, such proclamation is surely reminiscent of Gowon's "No Victor, No Vanguished" doctrine after the Civil War. But that only achieved the objective of symbolism rather than substance. For, we all know how far that Gowon's proclamation has taken the nation today. The truth is that the feelings of hurt among Igbo, the vanguished, still run deep today. The government had announced the "4Rs" (Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, Reconciliation and Reintegration). But it is debatable if that policy has been effective. The truth is that the government threw the door ajar for the Igbo to return to the Nigerian family but failed woefully in creating the material condition for the Igbo to be relieved of the trauma of that war. If we are observant enough, we would realize that it is those repressed feelings of hurt that manifest today in what is now commonly referred to as the "persecution complex" of the Igbo. This, in turn, is what has given rise to the neo-Biafran rhetorics of today among a section of the Igbo political establishment.

Perhaps, the nation should have raised a war tribunal after that war to hear out cases of hurt at the end of which a blanket amnesty would be given every-body. Just as there are clear cases of atrocities on the federal side against the ill-kitted Biafran fighters, so are reports of inhumanities of the supremos within the Biafran enclave against the ethnic minorities. When this writer visited Uyo some years back, for instance, there were lamentations by some natives who claimed they were inhumanly treated by the Biafran over-lords in Umuahia while the war lasted even though they were supposed to be part of the secessionist bid, geographically speaking.

So, while the Igbo who survived Biafra licked their wounds silently today, there are a number of ethnic minorities in the now defunct Eastern Region who, on the other hand, do not wish them well as well. This, I believe, is the enduring challenge the Civil War poses to the nation. That is the truth. The pain lingers because we have chosen not to talk it over or pretend as if it does not exist. And truth buried to the earth, Shakespeare reminds us, shall rise again. No one should minimize the power of talk-cure.

So, by and large, I believe what the Oputa Panel represents so far is mere symbolism. But if nothing at all, we still have the panel to thank for demystifying the Nigerian military. Through the panel, the people got to know the stuff their generals were off. The roguery of the army was exposed. The impotence of our generals was revealed. Through of the theatre of Oputa, we now know that what often inspired what is described in military parlance as "security reports" was often not more than imaginations of desperadoes of power. Thanks to Oputa, we now know how a general literally defaecated on himself when confronted with proofs of his complicity in a coup plot. After Oputa, it is doubtful if the military will ever recover its ego in the nearest future.

There are speculations that the panel may have recommended that the government re-open some of the landmark cases heard while the commission sat. These include the Dele Giwa murder case, Bagauda Kalto case and the MKO Abiola mysterious death. Obasanjo has promised that the government would read and digest the executive summary of the reports and act thereafter in the best interest of the nation. The symbolism earlier demonstrated, I believe, could be converted to substance depending on what the government comes out with. Indeed, it may be materially impossible for the government to hand cheques to all those who had been wronged in one way or the other. Also, it may be too cumbersome for the government to formally prosecute all the cases of abuses cited in the report. In fact, it may take centuries to hear all the cases in the regular court. But pursuing the landmark ones like the Giwa, Kalto and Abiola cases to their logical conclusion could very well acts as the cure-all therapy for the nation's yet unrelieved trauma.