Biafra this, Biafra that

Dr. Charles Soludo, Professor of the Economic Sciences, former Economic Adviser to the President of the federation, and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, very recently said at a book launch on the subject of Biafra that ignoring the new Biafra secessionist movement will be a mistake by the Buhari administration. I couldn’t agree more. Soludo just amplifies the position which this column has consistently taken in the past, and which I wish to reaffirm today. The Biafra movement is a slow-burning fire at the moment.

In a speculative survey, it is easy to assume the following scenarios: that 40% of Igbo people back the secessionist objective of the new Biafra movements, 20% are currently unconvinced, and in between is 40% of the undecided, the ambivalent, and the neutral, who could go one way or the other. In other words, only 40% of the Igbo population currently stand in the way, or constitute the difference between a secessionist movement in full force, or a merely fissiparous movement that could very easily, and strategically be demobilized if the Federal government applies civilized and strategic methods, including the “capturing of hearts and minds technique.” This flash statistics can equally be applied to the remaining population of the East and the parts of the old Midwest, now all called the “South-South” which constitute the geographical areas claimed by the Biafran secessionists.

The federal government currently treats this movement as some kind of flash-in-the pan phenomenon, inspired mostly by a reactionary impulse, by a new generation of young people, mostly those who were born after the war, and who suffer the massive unemployment that ravages the region with its vast number of the skilled and unemployed as some kind of outlet for the frustration.

The strategy has been to burst their open-air protests using military and police action, and contain them by force from street protests. This is a “dead-end” policy. It shows quite clearly that Nigeria’s national security policy is unimaginative, and geared mostly to constabulary methods. But I should not tell the federal government what to do. They ought to have, and where they do not, they should develop the kind of expertise that can be fully deployed to providing, and thinking out frameworks of action, that can manage these kinds of conflicts, so that it does not escalate into war and bloodshed, and so that the federal government may have its hat in the game of winning the argument for a sustainable and shared nation. Now, the argument for Biafra, and its increasing appeal rests squarely in the feeling particularly, of the Igbo, of political isolation, economic subjugation, mistreatment, lack of opportunity in Nigeria, and the discrimination they have suffered within the current nation, particularly since the end of the civil war in 1970.

It is true too that the Igbo have suffered all these and more, and that the there is a serious disjuncture between the rights of the Igbo as Nigerians and the conditions to which they’ve been subjected in the unspoken Carthaginian treaty at force, that subverts the treaty of “No Victor, No Vanquished” to which the Biafrans agreed as precondition for the acceptance of an end to hostilities. Let me put this in context: Biafrans have argued that the primary condition for which they agreed to end the civil war in 1970, and not to launch the Guerrilla phase of that war, or continue hostilities was on the agreements reached to reabsorb Biafrans into national life without discrimination or recrimination; the launch of the program of Rehabilitation, Reconstruction, and Reintegration, the so-called “three Rs.”

The new Biafrans claim that the Federal government reneged on this agreement since none of the Rs took place in the East. Nothing was rebuilt, including the damaged energy or power systems, public buildings, cities, roads, and so on. Dr. Alex Ekwueme has given grist to the claim that the coup of December 1983 was specifically targeted at Igbo political leadership, and particularly, the possibility that he might be president in 1987.