₦airaland Forum

BIAFREXIT?
By Obi Nwakanma

Sam Omatseye’s piece in the Nation, “The Ghost of Biafra,” this past week adds to the growing discussion on the inevitable impact of the new secessionist movement in important ways. The kernel of that column is that Nigeria as a nation runs in vain from its obligation to effect closure on the Biafran experience. Omatseye, of course skirts certain issues, and fudges a few, including the important question he raises: “how could a people knowing that they did not have the arms still plunge to war against an overwhelming armed opponent?”


Members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, at St Peter’s Square Rome, during their visit to Pope Francis at theVatican.File photo
In other words, why did the leaders of the East fight, when they knew they were outgunned? The simple answer is that (a) The East fought to survive. They did not levy war against Nigeria. War was levied on the East when the federal side reneged on the terms of peace arrived at in Aburi.

The Federal Government initiated the war on July 6, 1967, by opening two fronts from the North: the Nsukka front and the Gakem front. Ojukwu evacuated Enugu, and responded with a  defensive strategy; (b) as a means of easing the pressure of attack from the North, Biafra’s Liberation Army led by Brigadier Victor Banjo and Colonel Emma Ifeajuna as his Chief of Staff opened the Midwest corridor to foreclose the attack formation already planned from Jebba by the Federal forces, through the Midwest using the Military Division already established for that purpose led by Murtala Muhammed, circumventing Benin through Auchi, moving through Agbor to the East.

The movement of the Biafran forces on August 9, into the Midwest, ruptured that plan. The Liberation Army would have arrived Ibadan and secured Lagos, and the tides of the war would have been dramatically turned, but for the extraordinary meeting between Banjo, Ifeajuna, and Mr. Bell, the Deputy British High Commissioner in Benin City as the Biafrans moved in a claw formation from Warri through Benin and through Auchi towards the West. Banjo’s dilemma, regarding the threat to bomb Lagos from the sea by the British frigate and turn the West into a theatre of war, and the threat to wipe out Banjo’s family still in Lagos left him with very little choices, other than to stymie the Liberation Army in the Midwest, order a haphazard withdrawal, and the rest is now history. As a matter of fact, one of the key actors in that event, the playwright and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, already waiting in Ibadan with a “reception party,” has written about this in two of his very important memoirs, The Man Died and You Must Set Forth at Dawn.

But Nigerians hardly read these days, except for religious tracts. But Omatseye is right: War is a messy business. The after effects linger and take doggone time and supreme effort to heal. Nigeria has not healed from the last major war. It is that war that is the ghost that haunts Nigeria. That war is also the spectre rearing up today in the self-determination movements that are now challenging the basis of Nigerian nationhood. The IPOB/MASSOB and the Niger Delta Avengers are now raising the question of a “Biafraexit” – the call for a referendum on Biafra to constitutionally determine whether Biafra should be allowed to exit Nigeria as a separate nation.

The Separatist movement has been gathering momentum since 1999, and has been recently fueled by President Buhari’s adversarial, isolationist, discriminatory and conquistadorial domestic policies. It does now seem that the greatest threat to the continued survival of Nigeria is the president of Nigeria himself who seems bent on pursuing a narrow revanchist agenda, as well as the use of coercion to stop the secessionist movement which has grown as a counter force to his revanchism. Recently, the president declared that Nigeria’s “unity” was “not negotiable.” Happily many people, including Wole Soyinka, have told him that Nigerian unity is in fact negotiable. The president of course is not talking about real “unity.” He is talking about the unity which the late Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu once described as like the relationship between Jonah and the Belly of the whale.

Unity cannot be legislated. Unity is the product of a felt sense of shared destiny and values. And this is the point that the Biafran secessionists are making. I’d like to say this: every Nigerian must support the right of the Biafrans to seek self-determination through the plebiscitory process. The Biafrans must have their referendum, as permitted in International Law, on the question of “Biafrexit.” In 1964, the founding father of the modern Nigerian nation, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, wrote in the US Foreign Policy magazine, warning that though he preferred an organic nation, it might yet be better for the leaders of Nigeria to meet, and sit, and negotiate how “we will all go our separate ways peacefully” rather than push Nigeria, then lurching towards a bloodfest, to the ultimate evil of a civil war that would claim millions of Nigerian lives. Azikiwe was prescient in 1964, and I stand with the great Zik on this. It is important to settle this question of Biafra’s secession once and for all by peaceful means through a referendum. To that end, I think that those calling for secession should do the right thing: they should collect the required signatures and write the National Assembly to initiate the referendum, with a copy forwarded to the United Nations. Thereafter they should campaign for support. Here is what the Biafrans are arguing: they are arguing for a restructuring of Nigeria because Nigeria in its current formation is oppressive to their interest and survival; if Nigeria does not want to restructure constitutionally, they are arguing for peaceful exit through referendum. They are arguing that the federal government failed to meet its own obligation under the truce called “No Victor, No vanquished” by not fulfilling the promised three R’s in the old East, and by launching policies that have discriminated against, and isolated the East, especially the Igbo people, since the end of the war. They have argued that the Federal government has repeatedly failed to protect Igbo lives and property from the indiscriminate attack nation-wide, and therefore they no longer trust the government of Nigeria to secure their lives.

They have argued that as republican people, they have nothing in common, culturally, with the rest of Nigeria, and that they reserve the right to pursue their separate destiny, and redeem their society from underdevelopment and poverty using their talents and energy freed from the inherent draw-backs of a Nigeria with feudal and monarchical traditions and tendencies that squelches the Igbo spirit, and the spirit of their Biafran neighbors with long, cherished republican and democratic traditions. And they have also argued about the criminal exploitation and expropriation of resources from their oil rich region which has left the region very impoverished and ecologically devastated and they want the right of self-determination in order to have the power to restore the ecological balance of the delta. These are very powerful arguments, and I am quit.... http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/07/biafrexit/

Biafrexit seems to be the topic on every lip?

Majority of those agitating for the Biafra are those who dont even know what the Biafra entails...

Igbos who are thinking an ijaw, ukwani, uhrobo, itshekiri, ilaje man will join their struggle are just daydreamers.

The Biafra nation to me is as impossible as man living in the mecury.

I pity the Biafra agitators. Even if you are successful at it..... What lies beaneath your struggle is very enormous.

Ranging from Language barrier to differences in culture and traditions to the fact of who will lead.... You should all think about this.




Anyways


DrabeeyWasHere

Drabeey:
Majority of those agitating for the Biafra are those who dont even know what the Biafra entails...

Igbos who are thinking an ijaw, ukwani, uhrobo, itshekiri, ilaje man will join their struggle are just daydreamers.

The Biafra nation to me is as impossible as man living in the mecury.

I pity the Biafra agitators. Even if you are successful at it..... What lies beaneath your struggle is very enormous.

Ranging from Language barrier to differences in culture and traditions to the fact of who will lead.... You should all think about this.




Anyways


DrabeeyWasHere

Thanks for the challenges that you are noiticing in advance due to your 'spiritual eyes' to code futuristic events but NO THANKS

The Biafran ghost
by Sam Omatseye,
Like Banquo’s ghost, the past haunts us today, again. Forty nine years after the civil war, we are still fighting the war. Some think the war is over. They are wrong. The war is with us because we are a nation of self-deceit. We lie to and at ourselves. We say peace whereas tribulation lurks and detonates everywhere.
That is why Boko Haram harangues us in the North. It explains the resurgence of the IPOB and MASSOB and the rumblings of the Niger Delta Avengers and the barbarous entitlement of herdsmen. Even before the past few years, when bombs were literally quiet, tongues exploded between tribes. Rhetoric rattled rhetoric. Tribes and tongues differed by saying tribes and tongues differed. The June 12 excitement was a rebirth of the divisions of the 1960’s.
We did not solve the problem when it confronted us. When Gowon exploited his name as an acronym of unity, GO ON WITH ONE NIGERIA turned out to be an empty epithet, a feel-good delusion from a victor. Nothing concrete was resolved other than fell the enemy in battle.
Did we resolve the issue of abandoned properties? Leading up to the war, pogrom lit up the North in incandescent murders. Not only Igbo were killed as many tendentious literature say. Even Adichie’s Half Of The Yellow Sun, for all its strengths, portrayed the single story that the author has campaigned against. The slaughter up North targeted anyone who was not Yoruba, and that included the sweep of minorities in the today’s Niger Delta. Urhobo, Itsekiri, Edo, Efik, Ogoni, etc were mincemeat in the cauldron of death.
Now, did we have any enquiries into that sanguinary chapter? The northern elite, including political, feudal and military leaders, reportedly encouraged the barbarities. Has anyone been punished or even been officially reprimanded? We have not even officially investigated. We know too that Nzeogwu’s coup was seen as tendentious, and it inspired some Igbo to provoke northerners with their proprietary swagger, boasting that they had taken over the country. Have we looked at that, too? If the swagger was bad, the killings were never justified. But even at that, have we addressed them as a people? Ironsi enacted Decree 34, and some analysts said it was naïve because he did not intend to introduce a unitary system to impose Igbo hegemony. If that act was naïve, what of the second act? He did not want to try the coup plotters. That, according to critics, gave him away as an Igbo jingoist.
Have we revisited the Aburi meeting, and its aftermath, and how that confab either ossified or laid bare the fissures of our inter-ethnic relations? Were there blames? Where there acts of overreach on both sides? Was the war avoidable? Did the pogrom make war inevitable? How come a region that knew it was tactically and materially inferior to its opponent take the plunge into war?
So, we also had the war atrocities. We saw what Ojukwu’s army did in the Midwest when Biafra invaded, and the resentment overshadows conversation up till today. We know of the killings of the Igbo in Asaba and how Murtala’s Second Division teased out trusting locals to welcome them and killed them like animals. Gowon, who could not rein in his generals, only had an apology over 40 years after. The apology, however heartfelt, never brought closure.
So, when hostilities ended, Gowon declared that there was no victor and no vanquished. We know that was as vacuous as GOWON. We just wanted to move on, like a child who walks into a party from a bathroom without cleaning up. The smell and mess linger.
The ghost has followed us ever since. In education, over whether we should have catchment areas or not. In the Orkar coup. In Saro Wiwa’s murder. In the Matatsine imbroglio. In the meltdown of Fulani and indigenes relations in the plateau. In the June 12 logjam. In the choice of Jonathan as president. In the choice of Buhari as counter president. The list is endless.
So, when many, including the self-serving Atiku, called for restructuring, it was because the civil war and ghosts of the many dead are still with us, walking the Nigeria earth, apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Developed nations understand the merits of closure. Last week, Britain unveiled the Chilcot report and picked to pieces all the facts of that ignoble chapter of the Iraq War. Tony Blair was exposed, as well as some of the intelligence community and the parliament. The nation looked itself in the mirror, and mea culpa replaced a sense of righteousness.
On the Iraq war, the New York Times issued a lengthy apology for allowing the emotion of the day sway its professional duties. Next time, both England and United States will think deeper before throwing innocents at the teeth of battle. The crisis of the Balkans is still lapping up its culprits today. Enquiries have dredged up the bad guys and they are subjected to the rule of law. The Hutus and Tutsis have also had theirs and those who inflamed the land to butchery have been exposed and punished. Apartheid in South Africa had its Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Second World War could not be concluded without a clear resolution through the Nuremberg trials. The First World War was concluded without such an enquiry. The victors simply punished Germany and isolated it. The result: a resurgent Germany with the Hitler of hate.
A people must always learn not to take its injustice for granted. During the Peloponnesian War, Athens fell because it merely slaughtered its best generals who did not pick up its dead at sea as was the custom. The parliament did not reason. The absence of its best brood of soldiers allowed Sparta to crush it.
So, when Buhari stands accused as nepotist and regionalist in his appointments, it is because he has not transcended the hubris of the civil war. He invokes GOWON but he denies it when his pen signs an appointment. When does a chief of staff to a president become a board member of Nigeria’s choicest corporation? How do we call a truce with the Avengers when the NNPC board is lopsided and has only one name from the oil producing areas?
The civil war haunts because the hostilities have never really ended. Unnerved on his throne, Macbeth could not exorcise Banquo’s ghost. He said, “Avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee, thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.”
The Biafran ghost still spills cold blood. We may deny it and say our nation is not negotiable, but the past keeps growling and badgering. The more we claim we are together, the more apart we get.
http://thenationonlineng.net/the-biafran-ghost/

What does Nnamdi Kanu mean when he says that Biafra-land enemies bury live snakes in and around Biafra?? What does burying live snakes do??

https://stream1.gifsoup.com/view5/1945643/katt-williams-hustlin-o.gif

Free Nnamdi Kanu!!