by Edmund Obilo
Nigeria is fifty-seven but, the crises of nationhood holding it down is linked to its failure to resolve its epidemic scourge of ethnic suspicion.
The Igbo question in this regards remains one of the most destabilizing character of the Nigerian state. There is also the Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani and the Niger Delta questions. Genuine answers are needed if the state is to transcend the ills that continue to drag it in the direction of disunity.

The fundamental definers of the Igbo question are issues at the heart of the demand of the Igbos in the Nigerian state. They stem from the dislocation of the people from their guiding philosophy of a loose and organized community relationship and the foisting upon them a political system that dictates from outside their destiny.

At the height of the Nigerian Civil War, the leader of Biafra Col. Odumekwu Ojukwu, on June 1, 1969, in a speech to further rally his people around the idea of Biafra, delivered the Ahiara declaration. The declaration was written by the National Guidance Committee of Biafra chaired by the eminent scholar Chinua Achebe. Achebe in his 2012 book “There Was a Country” opines that their business was “to write a kind of constitution for Biafra – a promulgation of the fundamental principles upon which the government and people of Biafra would operate”.

Delivered in the Biafran town of Ahiara, the declaration remains one of the most progressive national philosophies in Africa and was modeled on Tanzanian’s President, Julius Nyerere’s 1967 Arusha Declaration. It is radical in intent and philosophically revolutionary. A critical analysis of the declaration shows the drawback of the Nigerian system owing to the social formation and logic imposed on it by the colonial system of government.

The document is a deep reflection on the journey of Igbo people from the period of violence and massacres of the Igbos in northern Nigeria that degenerated into the bloody Nigerian Civil War. Its principles are hinged on the pre-colonial concept of Igbo society and ideas behind the current agitation of the Igbo within Nigeria. It marked an epoch of idealism that took stock of the social and political movements of the Biafran nation from the date Ojukwu declared a sovereign nation out of the burdened Nigerian state. In it, is the future aspiration of the Igbo borne out of a bloody experience. The goal of the writers of the document was to create a hopeful, prosperous, just and happy society achieved through a struggle against the forces of religion, injustice, racism, colonialism, corruption and oppression. It envisaged a state with a new character and structure.

The outlook of Igbo people as explained in the introductory part of the declaration is such that defines colour as a parameter for expressing human feelings of love and hate. In this case, the colour black representing the Biafran humanity, failed to attract the sympathy of western civilizations represented by Britain and other western powers accused of supporting the “Nigerian crime of genocide” against Igbo people. Ndigbo note that despite fighting “in the highest traditions of Christian civilization”, western powers “the very custodians of this civilization” joined forces with the Muslim Hausa-Fulani oligarchy to decimate the people and land of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war.

In this protestation is the question of religion, a factor fundamental to the understanding of the Igbo notion of Nigeria. It finds its eminent embellishment in the Igbo opposition to the dominance of the Nigerian state by the Muslim north that controlled political power. Here, the Igbo insist on being immune from the Islamic contagion championed

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all this grammar just to ask question that will not bring money
Anyway FTC but I doubt if this will make frontpage