MY people have a proverb which says: a person who was not present when a corpse was buried runs the risk of exhuming it from the foot end rather than the head. If you check the age profile of the pro-Biafra multitudes fuming with ballistic wrath and thronging the streets in the Igbo-speaking cities of the East and parts of South-South, you will find out that they are mostly the youth born long after the end of the Biafra-Nigeria civil war over 45 years ago. The oldies among them couldn’t have been more than teenage soldiers.
The bulk of the young men and women are teenagers and many are in their twenties: the so-called “angry generation”. Their parents and uncles must have told them about the civil war, in addition to what they must have read. They were told that the aborted struggle by Igbos and Easterners to abandon Nigeria and establish their own independent republic, Biafra, was to establish a “land of freedom” where they would be free from “internal slavery”.
That attempt was thwarted by the combined forces of pan Nigeria and foreign powers. They grew up watching the pattern of events in Nigeria in the past three decades or so. They saw how Igbo students were allotted higher cut off marks than others to gain admission to federal schools. They saw how the presidency of Nigeria has changed hands between the Igbo majority rivals: the North and West. They even saw a Southern Minority hold it for five years only for it to go back to the North with a Western vice president; which indicates where it might be heading next. Several questions boil in their minds: does it mean that Igbos do not matter? Were the Igbos forced back to Nigeria only to be kept in subjugation?
Six months of the President Muhammadu Buhari regime has made matters maddeningly worse. All the positions in the three branches of the Federal Government that matter have been handed over to Arewa Muslims with Igbos present in this government only as ministers. This is in total defiance of the constitution, which directs that, to ensure that no section of the country predominates over the rest, all positions must be distributed in such a manner as to conform to the Federal Character.
Into such a festering atmosphere storms a rabble-rousing hothead called Nnamdi Kanu, with his pirate Radio Biafra, London. Long before Kanu’s advent, there was Barrister Ralph Uwazuruike’s Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), which popped up in the middle 1990s and declared a non-violent agitation. MASSOB mustered the youth, held rallies and planted the Biafran flag, often getting into serious odds with the police and security agencies. In 2012, another activist, Barrister Ben Onwuka, came with his Biafra Zionist Movement (BZM) and staged an abortive invasion of the Enugu State Government House, the symbolic “Biafran seat of power”.
Kanu’s incendiary broadcasts have succeeded in mobilising millions of Igbo youth worldwide, who have been disturbing the peace of Nigeria embassies and officials around the world. The routine demonstrations and protests, which started long before his arrest got me worried for several reasons. This young man’s anger, rather than commonsense, is dictating his actions. He has transferred this anger to millions of his fellow young men and ladies with a romantic vision of Biafra which depicts what the ancient Hebrews or Israelites must have thought of the Promised Land when they were still in Pharaoh’s Egypt.
The difference, however, is that the Biafra these young chaps are after is not a Biblical story. It is something that, if it comes to be, will be firmly rooted in terra firma reality. I see the agitators as people who do not understand the history of the defunct Biafra. I see them as people who misapprehend the Biafra they are asking for, which they have defined with a map of the former Eastern Region and a generous slice of the former Mid-Western Region.
It is unfortunate that History and Civics as academic subjects were removed the from the curriculum of our educational system, perhaps to hide our ugly past from our children. Unlike the USA which assiduously teaches her children the American history, including that of its civil war, Nigeria decided to cover the smell of her history with sand, forgetting that it is suppurating underneath.
Nnamdi Kanu and his cohorts ought to be told how Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu had declared the former Eastern Region as the Republic of Biafra but ended up with a war that was fought between the Igbos and the rest of Nigeria, which the Igbos hopelessly lost. Kanu and his cohorts need to be told, before it is too late, that if the worst comes, the map they are brandishing as their dream Biafra will vanish, yet again, leaving the South East at the mercy of the real enemies who are eagerly looking for another opportunity to lead the rest of the country to reverse forty five years of Igbo recovery from the rubble of the civil war.
Kanu and his multitude of blind followers must be told that they are playing into the hands of their enemies and dragging millions of other unwilling Igbos along. Nnamdi Kanu was not around when the corpse of the Ojukwu-led Biafra was buried. That is why they are trying to exhume it from the foot end.
In next Monday’s edition of this column, I am going to tell them where the corpse was buried. I am going to tell them why the Igbo nation is inalienably a part and parcel of the Nigerian commonwealth; how the Igbos were in the forefront of the fight for the independence of Nigeria from the British colonial masters; how the Igbos have given more than any other group to develop this country; why Nigeria is not a zoo; who the real enemies of all Nigerians are, and why they should stop calling other Nigerians dirty names. Keep a date.
VANGUARD
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