…And Biafra Still Alive

The last time I checked, the name ‘Osondu’ is becoming rare in Igbo roll calls and faint on our lips. I can’t recall the last time I ran into someone who goes by that name. I grew up to know about five people bearing ‘Osondu’. If my memory still serves me right, those people are all dead by now.

The gradual extinction of ‘Osondu,’ a name which literally translates ‘a run for life’ is very suggestive. The generation that fought that bitter war nicknamed ‘Nigeria/Biafra’ is winding up. Going with it too is a generation born during the war. The expected consequence is that it will be a matter of time, Biafra, a symbol of ethnic resistance against genocide committed against the Igbo race and their intelligence will be a matter of forgone issue.

Incidentally, the generation that fought the war might have gone. The generation born during the war may be going with it too. The present generation may be given various labels like ‘children of crushed rebels’ with all the stigma and marginalization that go with it. But once an idea has taken off, you may defeat those behind it in a war but that does not mean the end of the idea, so argues Wole Soyinka. Dreams never die; they change protagonists.

Come to think of the people of Israel. In 70 AD, Jerusalem was besieged, its temple looted, the city burnt and the people conquered and dispersed. But in exile, Zionist ideology had developed as a natural consequence of a subjugation of Jewish people. While the Jews lasted for several millennia in host nations, and enterprising as they have always been, the Zionist ideology never died. Every Jew longed for the day the Jews would return to the peace of Jerusalem sitting under olive trees. That never happened till 1948 when, after the Jewish Holocaust, the State of Israel was created and safe en mass return of the people guaranteed for all Jews who had wanted to return.

Coming to Biafra’s issue, Nigeria has never been a darling of its supposed citizens. Its people have always rejected it. As a race, people reject the country as can be seen in the political struggle of Arewa, Ohaneze and Oduduwa. If it is not Niger Delta people seeking resource control and self determination, it will be Muslim extremists bombing the northeast of the zone to the Stone Age. Even the least minority has learnt the secessionist politics.

Besides racial bargain, individuals generally reject the union called country when they gatecrash at embassies wanting to dump Nigeria in favour of another country for greener pasture.

At the minimum, the humble admission is that Nigeria from the moment of its British conception was neither essential nor natural. It was above all, convenient and profitable for the British. The Great Britain never pretended that Nigeria was created for administrative convenience.  This is as all the logic that formed its constitution made eminent sense finally, mostly from the prism of British interests. The aftermath of Independence and even post war time placed Nigeria on historical duty to ask the question, what does Nigeria mean? That will be to determine whether we all- the 400 odd ethnic collectivities that British bracketed inside the space called Nigeria have any common denominator. But since independence the country has annoyingly avoided national contrition.

Thirty months to forty-one years ago, Nigeria fought a war to suppress the secession of Biafra at a horrendous and horrific cost. Nigeria wasted the lives of its people in pursuit of the idea that “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done.” Though the war ended in ‘no victor no vanquished,’ since then the Igbo have always been treated as third class citizens despite forming the nucleus of Nigeria’s economic nerves.

Freedom is never given. It is fought for. Nobody can expect Nigeria to grant Biafra the freedom people demand unless it is put under pressure. Since the war, Nigeria has designed programmes to erase Biafra from people’s minds. In their myopia they had expected that with the generation that fought the war gradually sinking into oblivion, and their children being forced to lick their ass they will never dream of resurrecting the idea. To make the idea work, there has been constant reference to the horror of that war in which our own parents saw firsthand devastation, on limbs, nerves, dreams and space with more than two million people soaked in their own blood. The appeal to the carnage of war is a psychological tool which many have already bought and are now condemning Nnamdi Kanu as fanning the ember of war. They think that Biafra represents war.

Their psychological approach has not been totally ineffective. Some images appear to tell a story so directly and starkly that other description can add little to the raw power of photograph and video footages. The images of Kano pogroms against the Igbo and those of starving nursing mothers and their children during the war can cause one to appeal to Kanu Nnamdi to sheathe his sword.

Luckily, falsehood has a limit in an e-age. People have realized that Biafra can be won without a drop of blood if Nigeria is to be legally responsible. Even their psychological suasion can fuel the agitation. The scene of blood bath which the Igbo were subjected to by Nigeria and their western allies during the war can still provoke the children of the rebels to ask why their parents were so cruelly treated.

Again, agitation has acquired a new technique in an electronic age. One needs to know more about Scotland and Catalonia to understand how modern agitation for self determination is being handled in the spirit of the 21st century civility and periodically subjected to referendum.

Like wildfire I have followed the renewed agitation for the Republic of Biafra with great interest. I am amazed not just at the quality and magnitude of the agitation but the naked dance of the federal government known for impunity and immaturity in the face of law and rights of citizens. I am amazed that the agitation has exposed Nigeria as a country so naive to handle domestic troubles.

The protesters have the right to their demand as the situations that led to the civil war years ago rather than vanishing have gone from bad to worse. The Igbo have become the target of every tribe at the least provocation. While there has not been an open war, physical killings have gone on with government curious silence and careless utterances.

The Yakubu Gowon’s Rs- reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation never saw the light of day. Had they been implemented, subjecting the Igbo to spectator status in national life and politics would have been unheard of. Four decades after the war, an Igbo man has not tasted the presidency, yet they are being forced to remain in the union that does not protect them.  Specifically, the neglect and exclusion of the Igbo in national life gave birth to the immediate cause of the renewed agitation across Southeast and South-south of the country. The illegal arrest and the unlawful detention of Nnamdi Kanu, the Director of Radio Biafra and the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), has confirmed the hatred even as Boko Haram prisoners are being freed.  Unlike before, the activists are more knowledgeable to modern class struggle. University graduates, tech savvy, youthful, they have brought the Biafra to the world. With their e-approach to the struggle, it is proving an acid test for a government elected under the mantra of ‘change’.

Indeed, Kanu has pushed Nigeria into a serious dilemma. The safest for the country at the moment is to release the rabble rouser-in-chief of the neo Biafran cause. His continual detention is needless because Kanu had sent across his message before his arrest. His immediate release will respect the wisdom of the court and will be the quickest way to defuse tension.

Sad enough for Nigeria, like Okey Ndibe wrote, ‘Mr. Kanu’s release will not, by itself, erase the frenzied propagation of Biafra, an idea that represents nightmare to some, and fantasy to others. Sooner or later- sooner, one hopes, than later- Nigeria has to confront the inescapable question of what it means to be a Nigerian.”

Keep in mind that the killing of Mohammed Yusuf is the very reason Nigeria has relocated his army command control to Maiduguri and yet, soldier-victims are being buried secretly in mass graves. I hope Buhari realizes this early enough.

Nigeria’s reluctance to do the needful in the face of human rights is one reason Nigeria has remained an alien and alienating idea, susceptible to frequent act of rejection by its citizens. Nigeria ought to know that Nnamdi Kanu is a time-bomb. He has made anew what was sinking into oblivion. The rebels are back. The question of whether Biafra is an answer to the problem of Ndigbo is a theme for another day.