Amongthe flurry of reactions in various quarters which have trailed the spirited pro Biafra agitation,, the opportunity offered the country to address the complement of contradictions and paradoxes in the Nigerian political space remains a significant dividend. At least, just as it was in the late 1960’s when the first agitation for Biafra commenced, was mismanaged and eventually dragged the country into a 30 month wasteful civil war, so the new crusade has also jolted the country in a shock therapy, as if that is what is required to draw attention to some age-long weaknesses that have facilitated the syndrome of arrested development of the country.
The difference is that this time around, the ultimate outcome does not have to be another civil war. Yet that will be if the ongoing crusade for actualization of Biafra enjoys attention, not just because of the self-serving territorial agenda of its sponsors. Rather the utility of the crusade should rightly be seen in the context of a metaphorthat captures the patent contradictions and paradoxes, which are strewn as booby traps not only on the Biafra campaign trail, but the wider political space of the Nigerian nation.
These contradictions and paradoxes become self-manifest if only the Biafra agitators and indeed the entire country would allow for a fuller process of dialectical revisit of not only the Biafra issue, but the entire context of Nigeria’s unity in diversity – a cliché which provides an ideological platform of convenience, on which the co-existence of the disparate ethnic groups in the country find common ground. It is significant that the ongoing agitation has placed the merits and otherwise of this platform on the front burner.
From a historical perspective, the agitation for Biafra is not a new one nor is it intrinsically odious, or even the first time any of the over 350 disparate groups that make up the Nigeria of today has indicated their desire to opt out of the union. In fact but for the fact that it will take another war to split this country, many groups would have left long ago. Even the Ken SaroWiwa led bid to remove the Ogonis from the federation enjoys higher merit that the Biafran cause, since unlike the Ibos the Ogonis never had a treaty with anybody to join Nigeria.
Meanwhile for some Nigerians, especially the minority communities in the eastern part of the country, it is significant that the agitators for Biafra areof Ibo stock, who constitute one of the three majority groups in the country, with elements that are readily accused of aggrandizing themselves at the expense ofneighbouring minority ethnic groups. It is hoped that the ongoing pro Biafra crusade does not whip up better forgotten grievances of the people of Abonnema, Bakana, Buguma, Ogu, Tombia and several other communities in present day Rivers State, whose parents and relations were forcefully evacuated during the civil war, by rampaging Biafran soldiers of fortune, and relocated to the Ibo hinterland where they were abandoned to the elements and perished in their numbers, while their tormentors looted and ravaged theirabandoned homes.
This is just as it will not serve the interest of the country that the Biafran agitation stimulates a reminiscences of the criminal diversion in the 1950s, of the sum of six million pounds of public funds that was designated by the colonial administration for the development of the eastern minorities as recommended by the Willink Commission, to his privately owned African Continental Bank Limited by its owner and then premier of the Eastern Region late Ibo leader Dr NnamdiAzikiwe. Available records indicate that the funds so diverted were loaned out exclusively to undeserving Ibos migrant traders in Port Harcourt, to the exclusion of the legitimate indigenous beneficiaries, for the express purpose of appropriating the area to themselves. Given the policy of the bank to accept only buildings as collateral there ensued a scramble for acquiring any structure including junk houses for the purpose of providing collateral for loan; a situation which ended up as the subject of the post-civil war ‘abandoned property’ saga. It is instructive that a commission of inquiry by the Federal government actually indicted the late Azikiwe over the issue.
Against such historical facts and others which space will not allow to be raised here, the agitators for Biafra need to be more discreet in their enterprise. For just as the African proverb has it that when one points an accusing finger at another, three other fingers are directed at the accuser, while the thumb points upwards, as if inviting heaven to serve as witness.
Yet the foregoing does not vitiate the conundrum which the crusade presents to the country as it highlights the need for addressing with urgency, the unresolved weaknesses in Nigeria’s unity project, which have cumulatively restrictedthe enterprise to the status of a perpetual work in progress, 55 years after independence. While it may be fashionable to argue that the process of nation building cannot be exhausted in a generation, the situation where the same sentiments, strategies and procedures supposedly intended for moving a nation forwardturn out to stagnate it, is hardly helpful. Just as time changes everything including the country’s demography, so it is that whatever sentiments and values that may have appealed to Nigerians in the 1960’s may not fit the show in 2015.
It has been a general lament that what drives the tempo of public discourse and politics in Nigeria today is hardly much more than recycled leadership perspectives, clichés and values from a past era, which are intended to foster the same predatory and parasitic disposition of the powered class over the rest of society. For instance is it a wonder that virtually all the foot soldiers of the various groups that are agitating for attention such as the Biafra movement, the Niger Delta militants, the O’dua Peoples Congress, and the misguided as well as mindlessly murderous Boko Haram elements share a common characteristics of pronounced economic emasculation and associated privations. Yet this sad commentary remains the standard feature of media reportage and literary treatises on the social conditions of the Nigerian masses, all through the decades of the country’s independence’.
Meanwhile the country’s huge endowments in human and material resources remain exploited for the exclusive use of the several generations of leaders without commensurate commitment to the provision of an egalitarian social framework for the citizens, especially the most vulnerable among them: especially the unemployed youth, widows, pensioners, physically challenged, to name a few. The Biafra saga demonstrates the dangers inherent in the eventual onset of an avalanche of restiveness by the very youth who instead of being mentoredto drive the country to a higher ground in future, are being instigated to canibalise it today for transient reliefs.
As for the agitators for Biafra, nobody can deny them or any other group the right of expressing strong ethnic identity. It is however lamentable that in the frenzied agitation many of such youth are oblivious of the legion of contradictions driving their enterprise. Just as elements in the mainstream Nigerian leadership may have thrived in indoctrinating their followers to pursue self-serving agenda that are intended to assuage the former, so the crusading pro-Biafra youthmay have been denied theappropriate insights that should have enlightened them to shun their misguided venture.
One of the grand contradictions and most dubious features of the crusade remains the association with and even inclusion in the map of the proposed Biafra, present day states of Rivers, Bayelsa, AkwaIbom, Cross River and even Delta to the home states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo. Needless to state categorically that these areas are not Biafra. In fact these communities deserve unreserved apology It is instructive that the Nigerian Civil War was actually a liberation war which General Yakubu Gowon waged to liberate these communities from the clutches of the expansionist, secessionist regime of Colonel OdumegwuOjukwu.
In the light of the virulence of the ongoing crusade for the Biafra pie in the sky by starry eyed youth, the Ibo leadership cannot afford to lose their voice at this time. A pan-Ibo economic summit that will address the economic fortunes of these otherwise active youth and return them to a path of reason and reconciliation with the rest of the country, remains a most welcome, out of the box thinking for Ibo leaders in the present circumstances.
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