₦airaland Forum

Another member of the elite opens his mouth to talk and it’s all irrelevant to everything. That shows you why Nigeria is getting nowhere. French is a declining language.

Who told you one Nigeria makes no sense. America is made up of thousands of groups and everyone wants to go there, incluiding maybe 99% of Nigerians. I’m sure if you go back far enough in history you’ll see that what we call Igbos were probably formed by all kinds of groups gradually assimilating into an Igbo speaking population.
It’s dictators like Ojukwu and an entire class of Igbo officers who realized that with the countercoup of 1966 they had no more realistic carreer opportunites as military officers in Nigeria who started Biafra and kept it going. Baifra was suicide from the start. That people followed ojukwu shows their illiteracy and ignorance of military affairs. Let me say it again. In war, the side with the greater firepower wins.
Go fight another one and another ten million will die.

They say Nigeria is an artificial creation. Well, Biafra was as well. We might note that none of the artificial nations the Europeans created in Africa has broken up. The one African country that has stopped functioning as a state is Somalia, which is practically 100% ethnically homogenous.
Go fight another hopeless war. You’ll lose again.

Biafra is dead. It will not return. It died the moment Gowon split up the old Eastern region into three states. If he had done that six months earlier, or if the inept Ironsi had, there would have been no war. Ironsi would have lived a little longer too.

I must note that I’m of Igbo descent, for those of you who will scream that I’m a tribalist.
Get a life, people. Biafra failed because it had no weapons, no modern arms industry, and no food, and because the Igbo ethnic area, which contained the only people willing to die for it, is landlocked. Most Biafra soldiers fought with rifles of World War I vintage, that is, for the inevitably historically illiterate readers I’m dealing with, rifles from 1914. To have been able to win the war, Biafra would have had to be as technologically advanced as a European country, with the ability to make every type of weapon. The Igbo, who did not see the wheel until the 1870s, are not that kind of culture. Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison weren’t Igbo.
Meanwhile, nobody supports secession because every country in this world has ethnic minorities or a region that would like to secede from it. If the country supports secession overseas it will appear hypocritical to its local secessionists.
This nonsense about tribe reflects Nigeria’s traditionalist mentality more than anything else. Countries where everybody speaks the same language have also fought civil wars: The United States, Spain, Korea, Vietnam. Nigerians should advance beyond tribalism. We are more similar than we are different. The Igbos didn’t even know they were one people until the 1930s. Igbo nationalism is therefore a recent, manufactured concept.

So, these fantasists who want another Biafra, how geographically illiterate can you guys get? You forget that Baifra worked because the consistutional machinery of Nigeria had already defiend the Eastern Region, which Ojukwu simply pulled out of the country. The Eastern region is history now. To do another Biafra you would somehow have to get the Ogoni and Ijaw and Itsekiri and Efik and Akwa Ibom to your side. I lived in Port Harcourt for two years. Ogoni people don’t particularly love Igbos. Why should they trade domination by northerners for domination by Igbo?

There was no genocide plan. A couple of riots in the North isn't genocide. War is war, unfortunately. Ojukwu exposed his people to the full fury of a wartime Nigerian state when he pulled out of the Federation.