http://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=168263


Radio Biafra’s Siren Song, By Chris Ngwodo
Premium Times July 27, 2015 Radio Biafra’s Siren Song, By Chris Ngwodo2015-07-27T05:57:00+00:00 Guest Columns, Opinion Comment (47)

The angst and alienation that fuel Radio Biafra and which it feeds, in turn, are rooted less in the distant past than in our recent history. They stem, in part, from the structural inequities of a socioeconomic order that has nurtured too many disillusioned young Nigerians in a highly unequal and polarised society. Typical of cases of alienation in plural polities, those who feel excluded are responding to and with the narratives that best conform to their socio-cultural matrixes.

A few weeks ago, I was on a trip below the Niger when I encountered Radio Biafra. It was a brief encounter in a taxi cab negotiating the streets of Enugu and the broadcast was a rambling angry monologue inveighing against enemies and calling down the wrath of the gods upon them. In the weeks since then, Radio Biafra has gained national infamy, confounded federal authorities, excited some people and alarmed others.

The question is why ‘Biafra’ continues to evidently resonate with a section of the population more than forty years after the civil war. This is all the more puzzling since Nigeria’s demographic profile suggests that 70 percent of the population was born after the war and therefore have no memories of the carnage. Secondly, Radio Biafra has been in existence for a while but has only recently entered the mainstream of national attention. Why now?

The angst and alienation that fuel Radio Biafra and which it feeds, in turn, are rooted less in the distant past than in our recent history. They stem, in part, from the structural inequities of a socioeconomic order that has nurtured too many disillusioned young Nigerians in a highly unequal and polarised society. Typical of cases of alienation in plural polities, those who feel excluded are responding to and with the narratives that best conform to their socio-cultural matrixes. In the far North, it is Boko Haram’s lethal extremist theology that rejects democracy and the nation-state as infidel contraptions; for Igbo discontents, it is Biafra.

In this vacuum of political meaning, Radio Biafra’s simplistic and incoherent message of disruption, its one-sided and one-dimensional rendition of history, its manipulation of popular myths and grievances, appeal to some, especially given the Nigerian tendency to scapegoat other groups for individual and collective shortcomings. The pirate station is tapping into a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex which is the all-purpose narrative which various groups use as leverage for demanding concessions in Nigerian politics.

Radio Biafra’s appeal is also explained by the emotional fallout of the ouster of a president, who possessed the symbolic value of being nominally the first president from the losing side of the civil war, although the Niger Delta had favoured their chances in the Nigerian federation over minority status in an Igbo-dominated secessionist state; who during electioneering emphasised his middle names “Ebele” and “Azikiwe” to signify his kinship with the Igbo. Under Jonathan, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) shrank from a national party to a regional party with its base in the South-Eastern heartland. The rhetoric promoted by President Jonathan’s camp tapped into the fears, insecurities and anxieties of that region, and while it proved a winsome strategy in the South-East and the Niger Delta, the blatant provincialism repelled so many Nigerians and ultimately cost Jonathan the presidency. His defeat in the March 28 poll has been (wrongly) interpreted as a defeat for both zones.

The suggestion in some quarters that the South-East erred in rejecting the All Progressives Congress and must now prepare to languish in oppositional irrelevance need not trouble anyone. For decades, the South-West was the base of the opposition tendency. There was neither weeping nor gnashing of teeth among its elite. Instead, new and more broadminded political leaders emerged from the zone and jettisoned the nativist irredentism of the past, built effective political machines and expanded their networks reaching across fault lines to forge new alliances and coalitions.

In contrast, the South-East has no clear political leadership that could do the same. Few politicians seem to have the stomach for opposition politics. The PDP has yet to regroup and redefine its future while the All Progressives Grand Alliance, the nominal partisan vehicle of the South-East’s regional aspirations (whatever they are) lacks leadership and direction. To be sure, a central leadership has never sat well with the Igbos’ fierce republicanism – a unique political heritage now scandalised by the emergence across the East of legions of self-proclaimed pocket satraps and monarchs of no consequence.

…no ethnic group is under attack in Nigeria; Nigerians are marginalised as citizens, and suffer as a result of a derelict state’s continuous failure to protect its citizenry. The villain of our national odyssey is not any one ethnic group but rather a very Pan-Nigerian and ecumenical parasitic plutocracy. The South-East is no more neglected than the North-East.

The added problem is that the days of having politicians with a guaranteed regional base of support on the basis of sectarian mobilisation are passing away – even in the South-West and in the North. Furthermore, an iron law of Nigerian politics that seems to have eluded the PDP and, which the recent polls only reinforced, is that even a guaranteed sectarian base of support cannot earn a national electoral mandate.

In this vacuum of political meaning, Radio Biafra’s simplistic and incoherent message of disruption, its one-sided and one-dimensional rendition of history, its manipulation of popular myths and grievances, appeal to some, especially given the Nigerian tendency to scapegoat other groups for individual and collective shortcomings. The pirate station is tapping into a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex which is the all-purpose narrative which various groups use as leverage for demanding concessions in Nigerian politics. However, no ethnic group is under attack in Nigeria; Nigerians are marginalised as citizens, and suffer as a result of a derelict state’s continuous failure to protect its citizenry. The villain of our national odyssey is not any one ethnic group but rather a very Pan-Nigerian and ecumenical parasitic plutocracy. The South-East is no more neglected than the North-East. The problem is that of civic insecurity which is universal in its afflictive scope.

There is no indication that Radio Biafra represents the sentiments of the majority of the Igbo and we must always resist the temptation to judge whole groups of people by their extreme lunatic fringes.

Writing in the West Africa magazine of October 1982, the former Biafran functionary, Arthur Nwankwo warned his kin against entertaining “a chronic persecution complex.”

Victimhood has never suited the Igbo particularly well being Nigeria’s most visible and ubiquitous entrepreneurs. By every measure, the Igbo are actually a Nigerian success story having recovered from the extreme adversity of the civil war to regain geo-economic ubiquity. As exemplars of entrepreneurial wanderlust, they are the main actors in the informal economy which keeps Nigeria chugging along. This economic visibility accounts for their vulnerability and disproportionate suffering in class wars disguised as sectarian upheavals that erupt periodically. Radio Biafra’s hate messages merely intensify this vulnerability.

There is no indication that Radio Biafra represents the sentiments of the majority of the Igbo and we must always resist the temptation to judge whole groups of people by their extreme lunatic fringes. Clearly, some people see the pirate station as an enterprise in creative defiance and for them listening to it is their own private act of subversion. However, it is one thing to traffic in Biafran memorabilia – currency, flags and other such items; it is quite another to traffic in venomous hate speech, sow enmity between people and incite violence. For this, Radio Biafra should be bracketed along with Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, which infamously enflamed the Rwandan genocide.

Radio Biafra is the opium of the historically illiterate, benefitting from the pervasive ignorance about Nigeria’s past that plagues the post-civil war generation. No one who actually witnessed the war or who has studied it diligently craves an encore. It is also among this generation that Biafra is apt to be romanticised beyond reason, in part, because of our society’s failure to adequately memorialise its defining tragedies and to enshrine their necessary moral lessons in the national psyche.

In a democracy, the very meaning and worthiness of the nation-state will always be questioned by the citizens and they are well within their rights to peacefully advocate alternative political arrangements of any description. But hate-mongering, incitements to violence and the adoption of violence to further those aims are absolutely unacceptable.

Radio Biafra is the opium of the historically illiterate, benefitting from the pervasive ignorance about Nigeria’s past that plagues the post-civil war generation. No one who actually witnessed the war or who has studied it diligently craves an encore. It is also among this generation that Biafra is apt to be romanticised beyond reason, in part, because of our society’s failure to adequately memorialise its defining tragedies and to enshrine their necessary moral lessons in the national psyche. There are, for instance, no national monuments to the civil war, or totems of remembrance for the lives lost in serial episodes of internecine strife and thus no memorials with which to say ‘never again.’ Where clinical historical recollection is lacking, myth, falsehood, half-truth, revisionism and prejudicial innuendo flourish.

Biafra is infeasible today because the South-East is essentially landlocked, the bulk of Igbo-owned assets and investments are outside the zone, its soil is too poor to sustain demand by a large population and there is neither mainstream Igbo sympathy nor a regional elite consensus for a Biafra 2.0. In addition, like most of the rest of Nigeria, there are sufficient intra-ethnic antipathies to subvert the coherence of any potential Biafran identity construct.

Arguments for Nigeria’s disintegration are undermined by the fact that her ethnically homogenous states are among the worst-governed. Separatist sentiments are a misappropriation of sociopolitical energies that are best deployed towards holding state governments accountable. In the South-East, such a movement could mobilise state governments to develop a regional economic agenda that opens up the zone and attracts sufficient infrastructural and fiscal investment to enable it realise its potential as Nigeria’s natural industrial hub. This will benefit the South-East far more than some federal appointments for some Igbo politicians. What is patronage for the elite is often symbolic and sterile tokenism to the people they claim to represent.

Biafra is infeasible today because the South-East is essentially landlocked, the bulk of Igbo-owned assets and investments are outside the zone, its soil is too poor to sustain demand by a large population and there is neither mainstream Igbo sympathy nor a regional elite consensus for a Biafra 2.0. In addition, like most of the rest of Nigeria, there are sufficient intra-ethnic antipathies to subvert the coherence of any potential Biafran identity construct. Like other parts of Nigeria, the South-East is best served by remaining part of a larger whole and the geo-economic synergy that is Nigeria.

Radio Biafra broadcasts out of the United Kingdom where its main voice, Nnamdi Kanu, is safely ensconced in sedate environs while seeking to ignite a conflagration that will consume the unwary, the angry and the malleable which he will doubtlessly observe from his remote perch. The cynical opportunism of his enterprise is obvious.

Pro-peace elements in the Biafran establishment who favoured a negotiated settlement were marginalised or in danger of detention or execution as saboteurs. A number of such elements defected to the federal authorities or simply abandoned the doomed cause.

Biafra was a tragic exercise in quixotic futility, by turns, heroically defiant and catastrophically costly for millions. A year after its inception, a Biafra whose boundaries were coterminous with the Eastern Region had effectively ceased to exist. As Brigadier General Godwin Alabi-Isama noted in his civil war memoir, The Tragedy of Victory, by October 1968, Biafra had shrunk to less than a third of its original size and was struggling to accommodate half its population now crammed into that space with nowhere to go.

Despite Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s rebuff of a peace delegation in May 1967 with the boast that he possessed “the biggest army in Black Africa”, his vow to “wage open and total war” on the federation and turn it into a “desert”, Biafra was militarily unsustainable. Less than a year of fighting exposed these claims as delusional. Pro-peace elements in the Biafran establishment who favoured a negotiated settlement were marginalised or in danger of detention or execution as saboteurs. A number of such elements defected to the federal authorities or simply abandoned the doomed cause.

Biafra’s collapse after Ojukwu’s flight into exile suggested that the war’s protraction stemmed largely from one man’s oratorical gifts and hubristic perception of his historical self-importance, as participant-observers like Raph Uwechue and Ken Saro-Wiwa charged.

One of such defectors was the former president, Nnamdi Azikiwe who believed that Ojukwu’s intransigence would reduce Biafra to a “cemetery.” Biafrans had made their point. Their courage, resilience and the martial prowess had been proven above and beyond all rational measure and had careened into the path of collective suicide. Biafra’s collapse after Ojukwu’s flight into exile suggested that the war’s protraction stemmed largely from one man’s oratorical gifts and hubristic perception of his historical self-importance, as participant-observers like Raph Uwechue and Ken Saro-Wiwa charged.

Ojukwu returned to Nigeria after twelve years in exile, and went on to contest the senate and the presidency, served as the Abacha regime’s special envoy, and upon his death, received a state burial. His dramatic odyssey made him a success in Nigeria. The same could not be said for the many that perished during the war. That conflict was a tragically needless march of folly. It need not be re-enacted today.

Chris Ngwodo is a writer, analyst and consultant.

Hmmm..nice one..I hope they listen..if not..then am sorry for them!!!

op please edit your write up it is almost a double repetition. remove the repetitions

God bless Biafra.

Chris Ngwodo this long epistle will not save you in Kano is there is a Cartoon of a Dead Arabian man in Denmark.

If you like sew your cloth with Nigeria flag, put the coat of arm on your forehead like DSTV dish, this long grammar can't stop you from lynching in Bauchi if Buhari didn't win the last election.

AnambraDota:
Chris Ngwodo this long epistle will not save you in Kano is there is a Cartoon of a Dead Arabian man in Denmark.

If you like sew your cloth with Nigeria flag, put the coat of arm on your forehead like DSTV dish, this long grammar can't stop you from lynching in Bauchi if Buhari didn't win the last election.

The man is highly irresponsible.
He deliberately equated Biafra with SE to deceive people.
Some of the fiercest Biafran soldiers of 1967 were from Anioma (SS), and some of the fiercest supporters of radio Biafra today are from Rivers and Anioma (Delta state).

The idiot married an Hausa lady, he just want to make his in-law alhaji happy.

We know everybody.

Here they go again with the same yoruba false mantra that SE is landlocked to fear monger Igbos. We have demonstrated the lunacy of that mendacity time and time again.

The writer of this article is either a yoruba imposter or a paid traitor like Igbokwe.

;DI trust my Biafran guys now........... you people will not let this slowpoke, that has the impetus to open his Chung luz za to spew trash on Biafra , land of the rising sun ...........................Mbanu!!!! ;DI trust my Biafran guys now........... you people will not let this slowpoke, that has the impetus to open his Chung luz za to spew trash on Biafra , land of the rising sun ...........................Mbanu!!!!

new2020:
Here they go again with the same yoruba false mantra that SE is landlocked to fear monger Igbos. We have demonstrated the lunacy of that mendacity time and time again.

The writer of this article is either a yoruba imposter or a paid traitor like Igbokwe.

If they like, let them write from north to South, east and west All we know is Biafra.

Biafra threads hardly exceed 2 pages these days.
Their 5minutes fame is over.

The author of this piece of trash is a deluded wannabe. I doubt if he is a true son of the soil... Maybe he has contaminated blood flowing through his veins. Biafra 2.0 will have zero tolerance for people like Chris Ngwodo or whatever aliases he chooses to peddle his falsehood with. Anyways, whatever the imp is trying to sell, WE WILL NEVER BUY!

Biafra has come to stay and we will never relent till freedom is achieved. You cannot stampede us to remain in a forced union that doesn't recognize our rights to peaceful existence, our rights to hold certain political offices in an imaginary ONE NIGERIA, our rights to worship our God in our own way, our rights to remain in any part of the country and do our businesses without being constantly reminded that we're strangers.

We're tired and we're fed up. We want out of this forced marriage that has proven time and time again unworkable.

Amazing that the quality of respondents here is almost as the writer put it. Misdirected unrealistic with no sense of history. Now the author is no longer an igbo man because he does not parrot your latest whine?
Tackle the points in the article and show some intelligence.

carnegiefan:


The man is highly irresponsible.
He deliberately equated Biafra with SE to deceive people.
Some of the fiercest Biafran soldiers of 1967 were from Anioma (SS), and some of the fiercest supporters of radio Biafra today are from Rivers and Anioma (Delta state).

All these is happening kos we've Quislings as governors here in the SE.
To correct the anomaly of 1939,we must launch an online campaign/petition to force the SE governors to unanimously declare Anioma the 6th state.

.''biafra''....... opium of the ( I chose to remove the ''historical'') illiterates.


No wonder the scream as if they're on drugs.

On my way to go hook up with my Igbo peeps tho..... the correct ones, not these online illiterates that foam at the mouth.

ba7man:
.''biafra''....... opium of the ( I chose to remove the ''historical'') illiterates.


No wonder the scream as if they're on drugs.

On my way to go hook up with my Igbo peeps tho..... the correct ones, not these online illiterates that foam at the mouth.

Your generation can never be as literate as the most illiterate Biafran. The lowest Biafran will feed your family for eons and change your father's rusty roof 10 times over. Cretinous yolobar oaf of the grandest order.

THE ZOO MUST FALL

The writer is an ediot

Biafra is here

People reserve their right to self-determination

Whether land-locked ot air locked

After all, austria, switzerland are all land-locked. And they are doing much better than the zoo as a country

ArodewilliamsT:


Your generation can never be as literate as the most illiterate Biafran. The lowest Biafran will feed your family for eons and change your father's rusty roof 10 times over. Cretinous yolobar oaf of the grandest order.

blah.... blah...... blah!!!!..... ........ here's one them now.

The high is real....

ba7man:
.''biafra''....... opium of the ( I chose to remove the ''historical'') illiterates.


No wonder the scream as if they're on drugs.

On my way to go hook up with my Igbo peeps tho..... the correct ones, not these online illiterates that foam at the mouth.

,


You are an idiot, little wonder ur type and useless Yoruba tribe are slaves to almajiris.... anuofia

These people that say that Igbo land is land locked make me laugh. I wonder if they know that Portharcourt is an Igbo city? They also say the the 5 South East States are land locked. Can someone please take a good at Oguta in Imo state and tell me if there is any size of ship that can't port there? It is not a must that you must live on the 'coast' to have access to the sea.

In this vacuum of political meaning, Radio Biafra’s simplistic and incoherent message of disruption, its one-sided and one-dimensional rendition of history, its manipulation of popular myths and grievances, appeal to some, especially given the Nigerian tendency to scapegoat other groups for individual and collective shortcomings. The pirate station is tapping into a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex which is the all-purpose narrative which various groups use as leverage for demanding concessions in Nigerian politics

Chris, in all honesty, anyone who says there is vacuum of political meaning in Nnamdi Kanu's broadcasts is as well saying there is vacuum of truth in what has become of Ndigbo in their land and political situation since 1970. It will be correct to say Chris Ngwodo is playing to the usual 'Nigeria' gallery. No fault of his.

That Nnamdi Kalu is 'disrupting' the business-as-usual attitutde of Ndi-Nigeria toward Ndigbo is a welcome development to the millions of Ndigbo minus Chris Ngwodo. I find it difficult to identify the 'myths' in the well known situation of Ndigbo. Is it the pogrom, the genocide, political exclusion and the dearth of federal presence? Which one of these is/was a myth? Then, how could any reasonable person infer that Kalu is 'manipulating' what is a well known truth

People like General Gowon, Femi Aribisala, etc. have all attested to the fact that there is a very good evidence of persecution of Ndigbo and to which the Gen. even suggested that the time has come for a president of Igbo extraction. But to the wise Igbo man, Chris Ngwodo, it is all " a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex "
The journey to any kind of political freedom is not for the lilly-livered. I'll implore those that are offended by this piece of Chris Ngwodo not to tinker with any kind of sanction against him; anything that'll put him in harms way. There will always be his types

Change2015:
http://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=168263


Radio Biafra’s Siren Song, By Chris Ngwodo
Premium Times July 27, 2015 Radio Biafra’s Siren Song, By Chris Ngwodo2015-07-27T05:57:00+00:00 Guest Columns, Opinion Comment (47)

The angst and alienation that fuel Radio Biafra and which it feeds, in turn, are rooted less in the distant past than in our recent history. They stem, in part, from the structural inequities of a socioeconomic order that has nurtured too many disillusioned young Nigerians in a highly unequal and polarised society. Typical of cases of alienation in plural polities, those who feel excluded are responding to and with the narratives that best conform to their socio-cultural matrixes.

A few weeks ago, I was on a trip below the Niger when I encountered Radio Biafra. It was a brief encounter in a taxi cab negotiating the streets of Enugu and the broadcast was a rambling angry monologue inveighing against enemies and calling down the wrath of the gods upon them. In the weeks since then, Radio Biafra has gained national infamy, confounded federal authorities, excited some people and alarmed others.

The question is why ‘Biafra’ continues to evidently resonate with a section of the population more than forty years after the civil war. This is all the more puzzling since Nigeria’s demographic profile suggests that 70 percent of the population was born after the war and therefore have no memories of the carnage. Secondly, Radio Biafra has been in existence for a while but has only recently entered the mainstream of national attention. Why now?

The angst and alienation that fuel Radio Biafra and which it feeds, in turn, are rooted less in the distant past than in our recent history. They stem, in part, from the structural inequities of a socioeconomic order that has nurtured too many disillusioned young Nigerians in a highly unequal and polarised society. Typical of cases of alienation in plural polities, those who feel excluded are responding to and with the narratives that best conform to their socio-cultural matrixes. In the far North, it is Boko Haram’s lethal extremist theology that rejects democracy and the nation-state as infidel contraptions; for Igbo discontents, it is Biafra.

In this vacuum of political meaning, Radio Biafra’s simplistic and incoherent message of disruption, its one-sided and one-dimensional rendition of history, its manipulation of popular myths and grievances, appeal to some, especially given the Nigerian tendency to scapegoat other groups for individual and collective shortcomings. The pirate station is tapping into a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex which is the all-purpose narrative which various groups use as leverage for demanding concessions in Nigerian politics.

Radio Biafra’s appeal is also explained by the emotional fallout of the ouster of a president, who possessed the symbolic value of being nominally the first president from the losing side of the civil war, although the Niger Delta had favoured their chances in the Nigerian federation over minority status in an Igbo-dominated secessionist state; who during electioneering emphasised his middle names “Ebele” and “Azikiwe” to signify his kinship with the Igbo. Under Jonathan, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) shrank from a national party to a regional party with its base in the South-Eastern heartland. The rhetoric promoted by President Jonathan’s camp tapped into the fears, insecurities and anxieties of that region, and while it proved a winsome strategy in the South-East and the Niger Delta, the blatant provincialism repelled so many Nigerians and ultimately cost Jonathan the presidency. His defeat in the March 28 poll has been (wrongly) interpreted as a defeat for both zones.

The suggestion in some quarters that the South-East erred in rejecting the All Progressives Congress and must now prepare to languish in oppositional irrelevance need not trouble anyone. For decades, the South-West was the base of the opposition tendency. There was neither weeping nor gnashing of teeth among its elite. Instead, new and more broadminded political leaders emerged from the zone and jettisoned the nativist irredentism of the past, built effective political machines and expanded their networks reaching across fault lines to forge new alliances and coalitions.

In contrast, the South-East has no clear political leadership that could do the same. Few politicians seem to have the stomach for opposition politics. The PDP has yet to regroup and redefine its future while the All Progressives Grand Alliance, the nominal partisan vehicle of the South-East’s regional aspirations (whatever they are) lacks leadership and direction. To be sure, a central leadership has never sat well with the Igbos’ fierce republicanism – a unique political heritage now scandalised by the emergence across the East of legions of self-proclaimed pocket satraps and monarchs of no consequence.

…no ethnic group is under attack in Nigeria; Nigerians are marginalised as citizens, and suffer as a result of a derelict state’s continuous failure to protect its citizenry. The villain of our national odyssey is not any one ethnic group but rather a very Pan-Nigerian and ecumenical parasitic plutocracy. The South-East is no more neglected than the North-East.

The added problem is that the days of having politicians with a guaranteed regional base of support on the basis of sectarian mobilisation are passing away – even in the South-West and in the North. Furthermore, an iron law of Nigerian politics that seems to have eluded the PDP and, which the recent polls only reinforced, is that even a guaranteed sectarian base of support cannot earn a national electoral mandate.

In this vacuum of political meaning, Radio Biafra’s simplistic and incoherent message of disruption, its one-sided and one-dimensional rendition of history, its manipulation of popular myths and grievances, appeal to some, especially given the Nigerian tendency to scapegoat other groups for individual and collective shortcomings. The pirate station is tapping into a sense of victimhood and the persecution complex which is the all-purpose narrative which various groups use as leverage for demanding concessions in Nigerian politics. However, no ethnic group is under attack in Nigeria; Nigerians are marginalised as citizens, and suffer as a result of a derelict state’s continuous failure to protect its citizenry. The villain of our national odyssey is not any one ethnic group but rather a very Pan-Nigerian and ecumenical parasitic plutocracy. The South-East is no more neglected than the North-East. The problem is that of civic insecurity which is universal in its afflictive scope.

There is no indication that Radio Biafra represents the sentiments of the majority of the Igbo and we must always resist the temptation to judge whole groups of people by their extreme lunatic fringes.

Writing in the West Africa magazine of October 1982, the former Biafran functionary, Arthur Nwankwo warned his kin against entertaining “a chronic persecution complex.”

Victimhood has never suited the Igbo particularly well being Nigeria’s most visible and ubiquitous entrepreneurs. By every measure, the Igbo are actually a Nigerian success story having recovered from the extreme adversity of the civil war to regain geo-economic ubiquity. As exemplars of entrepreneurial wanderlust, they are the main actors in the informal economy which keeps Nigeria chugging along. This economic visibility accounts for their vulnerability and disproportionate suffering in class wars disguised as sectarian upheavals that erupt periodically. Radio Biafra’s hate messages merely intensify this vulnerability.

There is no indication that Radio Biafra represents the sentiments of the majority of the Igbo and we must always resist the temptation to judge whole groups of people by their extreme lunatic fringes. Clearly, some people see the pirate station as an enterprise in creative defiance and for them listening to it is their own private act of subversion. However, it is one thing to traffic in Biafran memorabilia – currency, flags and other such items; it is quite another to traffic in venomous hate speech, sow enmity between people and incite violence. For this, Radio Biafra should be bracketed along with Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, which infamously enflamed the Rwandan genocide.

Radio Biafra is the opium of the historically illiterate, benefitting from the pervasive ignorance about Nigeria’s past that plagues the post-civil war generation. No one who actually witnessed the war or who has studied it diligently craves an encore. It is also among this generation that Biafra is apt to be romanticised beyond reason, in part, because of our society’s failure to adequately memorialise its defining tragedies and to enshrine their necessary moral lessons in the national psyche.

In a democracy, the very meaning and worthiness of the nation-state will always be questioned by the citizens and they are well within their rights to peacefully advocate alternative political arrangements of any description. But hate-mongering, incitements to violence and the adoption of violence to further those aims are absolutely unacceptable.

Radio Biafra is the opium of the historically illiterate, benefitting from the pervasive ignorance about Nigeria’s past that plagues the post-civil war generation. No one who actually witnessed the war or who has studied it diligently craves an encore. It is also among this generation that Biafra is apt to be romanticised beyond reason, in part, because of our society’s failure to adequately memorialise its defining tragedies and to enshrine their necessary moral lessons in the national psyche. There are, for instance, no national monuments to the civil war, or totems of remembrance for the lives lost in serial episodes of internecine strife and thus no memorials with which to say ‘never again.’ Where clinical historical recollection is lacking, myth, falsehood, half-truth, revisionism and prejudicial innuendo flourish.

Biafra is infeasible today because the South-East is essentially landlocked, the bulk of Igbo-owned assets and investments are outside the zone, its soil is too poor to sustain demand by a large population and there is neither mainstream Igbo sympathy nor a regional elite consensus for a Biafra 2.0. In addition, like most of the rest of Nigeria, there are sufficient intra-ethnic antipathies to subvert the coherence of any potential Biafran identity construct.

Arguments for Nigeria’s disintegration are undermined by the fact that her ethnically homogenous states are among the worst-governed. Separatist sentiments are a misappropriation of sociopolitical energies that are best deployed towards holding state governments accountable. In the South-East, such a movement could mobilise state governments to develop a regional economic agenda that opens up the zone and attracts sufficient infrastructural and fiscal investment to enable it realise its potential as Nigeria’s natural industrial hub. This will benefit the South-East far more than some federal appointments for some Igbo politicians. What is patronage for the elite is often symbolic and sterile tokenism to the people they claim to represent.

Biafra is infeasible today because the South-East is essentially landlocked, the bulk of Igbo-owned assets and investments are outside the zone, its soil is too poor to sustain demand by a large population and there is neither mainstream Igbo sympathy nor a regional elite consensus for a Biafra 2.0. In addition, like most of the rest of Nigeria, there are sufficient intra-ethnic antipathies to subvert the coherence of any potential Biafran identity construct. Like other parts of Nigeria, the South-East is best served by remaining part of a larger whole and the geo-economic synergy that is Nigeria.

Radio Biafra broadcasts out of the United Kingdom where its main voice, Nnamdi Kanu, is safely ensconced in sedate environs while seeking to ignite a conflagration that will consume the unwary, the angry and the malleable which he will doubtlessly observe from his remote perch. The cynical opportunism of his enterprise is obvious.

Pro-peace elements in the Biafran establishment who favoured a negotiated settlement were marginalised or in danger of detention or execution as saboteurs. A number of such elements defected to the federal authorities or simply abandoned the doomed cause.

Biafra was a tragic exercise in quixotic futility, by turns, heroically defiant and catastrophically costly for millions. A year after its inception, a Biafra whose boundaries were coterminous with the Eastern Region had effectively ceased to exist. As Brigadier General Godwin Alabi-Isama noted in his civil war memoir, The Tragedy of Victory, by October 1968, Biafra had shrunk to less than a third of its original size and was struggling to accommodate half its population now crammed into that space with nowhere to go.

Despite Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s rebuff of a peace delegation in May 1967 with the boast that he possessed “the biggest army in Black Africa”, his vow to “wage open and total war” on the federation and turn it into a “desert”, Biafra was militarily unsustainable. Less than a year of fighting exposed these claims as delusional. Pro-peace elements in the Biafran establishment who favoured a negotiated settlement were marginalised or in danger of detention or execution as saboteurs. A number of such elements defected to the federal authorities or simply abandoned the doomed cause.

Biafra’s collapse after Ojukwu’s flight into exile suggested that the war’s protraction stemmed largely from one man’s oratorical gifts and hubristic perception of his historical self-importance, as participant-observers like Raph Uwechue and Ken Saro-Wiwa charged.

One of such defectors was the former president, Nnamdi Azikiwe who believed that Ojukwu’s intransigence would reduce Biafra to a “cemetery.” Biafrans had made their point. Their courage, resilience and the martial prowess had been proven above and beyond all rational measure and had careened into the path of collective suicide. Biafra’s collapse after Ojukwu’s flight into exile suggested that the war’s protraction stemmed largely from one man’s oratorical gifts and hubristic perception of his historical self-importance, as participant-observers like Raph Uwechue and Ken Saro-Wiwa charged.

Ojukwu returned to Nigeria after twelve years in exile, and went on to contest the senate and the presidency, served as the Abacha regime’s special envoy, and upon his death, received a state burial. His dramatic odyssey made him a success in Nigeria. The same could not be said for the many that perished during the war. That conflict was a tragically needless march of folly. It need not be re-enacted today.

Chris Ngwodo is a writer, analyst and consultant.

S waste.

There is clear evidence of exclusion of SE in fedral presence. We dnt kia abt ojukwu or whoever, all we kia abt is wat is hapening ryt b4 our eyes nw

willow0802:
,


You are an idiot, little wonder ur type and useless Yoruba tribe are slaves to almajiris.... anuofia

so much fun hanging with my igbo peeps.

Not the illiterate ones like you. Funny how they they try to speak Yoruba language.

You truly need to get rich so that you don't foam in the mouth online.

ba7man:
so much fun hanging with my igbo peeps.

Not the illiterate ones like you. Funny how they they try to speak Yoruba language.

You truly need to get rich so that you don't foam in the mouth online.

Lol, get rich? If only you knew.

willow0802:



Lol, get rich? If only you knew.

You're broke jooor. ......... Don't hide online to claim false life.

ba7man:
You're broke jooor. ......... Don't hide online to claim false life.

Lol, doubt all u can.