Beyond Biafra, Beyond Buhari
M. O. ENE
Friday, October 30, 2015
Year 2015 is come but not gone!
The adviser to President Muhammadu on Boko
Haram and miscellaneous militants must be having a rough time. This is the time
to think outside the box before his boss takes Nigeria down the road of
no-return. We must learn from history and allow cool heads to carry the day. In
a mad rush to squash squirrels with a sledgehammer, Buhari may bring down the
house that is still standing on a fundamentally flawed foundation. It’s time we
stopped widening the convoluted cracks of ethnoreligious encumbrances; rather,
we should be working to bridge the gaping gaps in economic opportunities, infrastructural
development, and partisan politicking.
Biafra is back on front pages. Many Nigerians thought that it had gone away long before many of the current champions were born. It has not. Forty-five years ago, General Yakubu (Jack) Gowon “killed” Biafra with federal fiats; Bight of Biafra became Bight of Bonny.Nigeria-Biafra War was “civil disturbance”! When the media dared to use Biafra, they put it in quotes, like it was some foreign expression—which it is in origin: Portuguese; but so is Lagos. He bungled the 3-R program designed to reconcile and rehabilitate a people traumatized by a genocidal war. Alas, war is an open wound; it takes time and correct care to heal well.
In 1997, I instituted the
Nigeria-Biafra War Memorial with the theme: “Let the Healing Begin.” Nigerians
had been in deep denial for far too long. I foresaw that the worsening
marginalization of ex-Biafrans (mostly the Igbo) would give vent to a
resurgence of the romance with the Biafran revolution. Despite the seething
scarcity of basic needs and the daily deaths from Gowon’s use of starvation as
a weapon of war and carpet-bombing of civilian targets, Biafra was better
organized, and it made major scientific and indigenous technological
breakthroughs—some of which Nigeria is yet to attain in 45 years of relative
peace and crude-oil boom.
Gowon won the war. Unfortunately, he
lost the insincere “no victor, no vanquished” peace. He made sure the
vanquished never forgot the victor was in charge. The ‘Lord of Lagos’ and
‘Dictator of Dodan Barracks,’ sat back to reign, vomiting inanities about
Biafra’s General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu deceiving the Igbo, about being an
officer and a gentleman, a Christian, and a conqueror ‘“gowoning” on with one Nigeria.’
God gave Gowon long life to revisit his
retch. Hear
him: “With Biafra it is finished” (Vanguard, October 24, 2015). If it is finished, why are we revisiting Biafra 45
years later; why would Gowon now utter the name he supposedly buried in 1970?
From the blood splashes
Of
every human species On sacred Earth’s grass
The Sun shall again rise.
Biafra is not finished; the Sun is rising again—as predicted. Here is why: “...Biafra still lives; it is a living testimony of political wickedness which time will not heal because it is both physical and psychological. .... And the power of Biafra remains that, as an idea against political oppression, it can never die” (Lewis Obi, African Concord, July 7, 1997)
Biafra lives! It will NEVER “finish”—not
in Gowon’s lifetime. It is gaining a new generation of acolytes born after 1970!
Whether re-actualized physically as-was (very doubtful) or in spirit
(desirable), for as long as the Igbo remain a people anyplace on planet earth,
Biafra will continue to live as a testimony of the good and bad about peoples
and places and power; it is a legacy of life, a harrowing human heritage, and a
hauteur of history.
Gowon further stated, “Nigeria should deal with [the
problem of Biafra resurrection] in matured way.” Hallelujah! The ‘boys-scout general’
has finally matured. Gowon failed in his major task: to keep Nigeria intact. Bakassi
was lost to the Cameroons, and fellow citizens were sold in a deal he allegedly
made with Ahmadu Ahidjo to blockade Biafra. Major Gideon Okar’s coup, in which
Gowon was implicated and never exonerated in any court of law with competent
jurisdiction, excised Arewa (northwest), albeit briefly. Boko Haram seized Kanem-Bornu
(northeast), and the Nigerian army is yet to dislodge the bloody ISIS-sister
terrorists in seven years; as in Biafra, without fortified foreign assistance,
it won’t!
The children of Oduduwa (southwest) who set the ball of
civil crises rolling in 1960s remain restless, threatening to drown “disobedient”
non-natives. The creek militants of Niger-Delta (south-south) shook the foundation
of Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy, until their head honchos were “settled”
with millions of dollars. The Tiv nation and Gowon’s Plateau people (northcentral)
still sweat blood under the menace of Fulani herdsmen; women, infants, and
children are butchered in their sleep like unwholesome Christmas chickens, and
no one stops them as they match on southwards.
And here comes Biafra resurgence in the supposedly subjugated southeast.
Nigeria has known no peace since 1960s. Gowon is tormented by his terrible treachery. If he had only been an officer and a gentleman, half as faithful as Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the eventual implementation or even renegotiation of Aburi Accord could have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars. Nigeria could have escaped endless eruptions of violence, religious rancor, ethnoreligious enmities engineered by politicians soaked in crass corruption, perennial political paralyses, and sociocultural calamities.
Gowon should stop speaking
about Biafra; he should retire and write a memoir and get a review of his many lies.
Sir, you got a PhD after crashing a cowardly comeback coup d’état; put the
doctorate to some use, Jack, and stop peddling pathetic prayers when you can’t
speak against the atrocious and continued ethnoreligious cleansing of your
Plateau people by AK47-wielding Fulani cattle-herding nomads.
About the Indigenous People of Biafra
(IPoB), it is important to note that Nnamdi Kanu-led IPoB is not the only group
agitating for Biafra. There are others: Ralph Uwazuruike’s Movement for
Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Benjamin Onwuka-led
Biafra Zionist Federation (BZF), Biafra Liberation Council (BLC), Biafra
Liberation In Exile (BILIE), and factions within. In most parts, these groups
are nonviolent and, like the Arewa and Oduduwa separatist groups, they have
identifiable leaders.
IPoB has emerged on top, but not
without some crabs-in-the-bucket pullback from MASSOB. IPoB has an identifiable
leader, the feisty if not yet fiery Kanu;
that’s the good news. The bad news for Nigeria is that the State Security
Service is unwittingly raising Kanu’s profile to high heavens among his
followers and bringing global attention to his movement. Not even Donald Trump
could have pulled off such a fearless publicity exploit with just a handset and
flight fare from London to Lagos. The worst thing Nigeria can do is to take out
Kanu extra-judiciously; the last time that was done to Muhammed Yusufu, we got
Boko Haram. An equally bad but better outcome would be to give Kanu the Mandela
platform to denounce Nigeria as a “zoo” and further raise his profile in a
court of law.
So what to do… besides invade and occupy Bakassi to distract everyone from current crises of dwindling oil revenue, high unemployment rates, lack of basic social amenities, poor education and medical services, partisan political problems, and heated-up polity? That is the issue to address “in a matured way.” The solution is not whistling in the wind; it is squarely in the hands of President Muhammadu Buhari. Still, he needs some help: Power concedes nothing without a demand; without a struggle, success seldom surfaces. In that sense, the demonstrations denouncing the detention of Kanu should encourage the government to let Kanu go and hope that the judicial process will weaken the “zoo” appellation.
Biafra is back; it “remains … an idea against political oppression”! This is the reality. Take out the obvious oppressions, and Biafra could return to the realm of romance and, if appropriate amends are made, may retire to the silos of stories. This is where the opposition party comes in: The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) must take its role seriously both for peace and progress in Nigeria and for its own survival as a political enterprise. Beyond pushing back on the alleged judicial blitzkrieg, the party must step up and front all reasonable groups agitating for reparation and greater autonomy. For 16 years, the party turned its back to the southeast; it has the opportunity to front a redress.
Here is how: Deputy Senate Speaker Ike Ekweremadu should secure
some solace from his support of Senate President Olubukola Saraki. Piggybacking
on the Niger-Delta bills and on the marshal plan for Boko Haram country, even when the terrorist secessionists are still
killing and maiming Nigerians, he should prepare, present, and pass a
comprehensive development package for the southeast (Aladimma) to include but
not limited to: airports, bridges, industrial loans, roads, schools, and
seaports. Once passed, as it should by wide a margin, Buhari will only veto it if
he is indeed “President of the North.”
The other option in this age of Cyberspace is unthinkable:
status quo. Buhari may not grasp the Internet very well, but he understands the
outcome of refusing to budge, as he had predicted in 2012: “the dog and the
baboon would all be soaked in blood” and the entire ECOWAS region may be
permanently destabilized. So, if the situation worsens and the current crises
are mishandled, nonviolent approaches could metastasize into violent struggles on
further fronts. Nigeria could return to the battlefields for the sacrament of
Extreme Unction, the Last Rites, under the leadership of a man who had pleaded
that Nigerians had no other country but Nigeria… until Chinua Achebe reminded
us in 2012 that “There was a Country,” another country called Biafra.
Those who make peaceful changes impossible know too well
that they make violent changes plausible. Buhari knows this too well. It was
the failure of President Shehu Shagari to make peaceful changes that brought
Buhari’s military coup in 1983. It was Buhari’s failure to yield on very basic changes
that brought in General Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) as a military messiah. And
Nigeria is yet to emerge from the consequences of these violent interventions. Buhari
must not forget these experiences. Unlike Gowon, God has given Buhari a second
chance to make amends. Genuine efforts almost always succeeds; failure, on the
other hand, will be of Armageddon magnitudes. Let us not delude ourselves: Nothing
is impossible. As Nelson Mandela philosophized: “It always seems impossible
until it’s done.”
Yes, 2015 is come but not gone.
(c) MOE, 2015
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