Biafra, Biafra…Where is Biafra?

By convention, the most distinguishing feature of any nation is its physical territory, which defines its location under the sun. This consideration justifies the primacy accorded by countries to the protection of their territorial integrity. By the same token, just as the clamour for the actualisation of secession from the Nigerian federation by the pro-Biafra activists intensifies and ascends to a crescendo, one of the questions that qualifies for consideration borders on what portion of the Nigerian federation shall actually belong to Biafra; that is if it eventually materialises. Put succinctly, where shall the boundaries of Biafra be?

It is not likely that the leadership of the Nnamdi Kanu led self styled Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) and the mainstream of their followership see this matter as essentially a yet to be settled one; just as to them, Biafra remains an unfinished business. Even as their enterprise has met with mixed fortunes exemplified by the relative successes they gained with the sitat-home order issued by them to all Biafra sympathisers to boycott work and business on Wednesday May 30th 2017, being the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the republic of Biafra, by then Colonel Chukwemeka Ojukwu.

According to media reports there was significant compliance by many traders, and other mostly self employed sympathisers in the Biafra hot-bed Ibo cities of Aba, Onitsha, Enugu to name a few, as well as in some other non Ibo speaking parts of the country with a sizeable population of Ibos. This is even as in several cases of compliance with the sit-at-home order, many Ibo traders especially the older ones now in their 60’s, and who witnessed the Nigerian Civil War along with its ravages, complied not out of conviction over the merit of the campaign, but fear of reprisals from over-zealous enforcers of the order. Hence such locked their shops half way and conducted normal business from the comfort of the burglary proof grating in front of such shops. It is all in the spirit of supporting Biafra!

Even at that the Biafra conundrum thickened over the sit-at-home order with reports that a group called the South East Peoples Assembly (SEPA) has written to the Federal High Court in Abuja which granted Kanu bail on health grounds to revoke such favour, and recall him to prison. The group’s grouse is based on the serial breach of the bail conditions by the IPOB leader since his release on February 25th 2017 on health grounds. More significantly SEPA’s action portrays the weaknesses in Kanu’s claims of total support of his adventure by the cross section of the Ibo speaking Nigerians.

However the foregoing notwithstanding, beyond the question of territory, no other consideration on Biafra today demands more urgency, given its potrayal in graphic terms, the signs of things to come whenever the country and in particular the pro-Biafrans, come to terms with the wider implications of their secessionist agenda. A pointer to the foregoing remains the appearance in books, posters and the internet of maps of and jingles on the proposed ‘Biafra Republic’ which include the South-South states of Rivers in particular as well as Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa,Cross River and Delta. It is not surprising that the inclusion of these patently anti-secession states in such media on the proposed Biafra republic was largely inspired by the claim by the late Ojukwu as leader of the failed Biafra rebellion of 1967 to 1970, in his secession speech of May 30th 1967. He had delineated by fiat the Biafran territory at that time to include whatever portion of Nigeria’s continental shelf as bordered the Niger Delta states, and which by any stretch of the imagination falls outside any portion of Ibo land. Hence the ordinary thinking of the uninformed may be that the proposed Biafra actually extends beyond the five South East states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo, to include the earlier mentioned five South-South states.

Yet hardly can any anything be further from the truth than the foregoing assumption. And that is where the twist in the Biafra agitation rests, just as the need for caution by the agitators in their enterprise of seeking the actualisation of what many Nigerians are seeing as an ‘Ibo first’ agenda, remains an imperative.

Against the backdrop of the tapestry of inexcusable contradictions and incontinences in the Nigerian political space, nobody in all fairness, can or should deny the Ibos their inalienable rights to protest over their grievances. But for anyone - especially the advocates of Biafra, to surreptitiously inveigh the unsolicited acquiescence to and complicity in the Biafra project by the four South-South states, is to engage in a classic misadventure of more than comical dimensions. It constitutes an affront driven by sheer intention to foment patent mischief, and therefore qualifies to be discredited in the most definitive manner as possible. That is why the ‘co-opted’ South-South states need to rise to the occasion by countering the growing perception that they are in league with Kanu and his co-travellers.

In his world acclaimed classic novel ‘Things Fall Apart’ the late Ibo novelist Chinua Achebe observed that the Ibos by tradition do not fight a ‘blame war’. Put simply his advisory points to the expectation that the traditional Ibo society consensus driven as they are, hardly engages in any fight they cannot justify in all ramifications. By the same consideration, it is easy to see that in the light of contemporary circumstances of heightened tension across the country over the pro-Biafra campaign and which has claimed several innocent lives, there can be no better time than now that the Ibo Leaders of Thought - (borrowing from late Odumegwu Ojukwu in his days as the Biafra leader), who comprise the political class, traditional rulers, academics and all other adequately disposed persons, to come together and sound out a common voice for the rest of the country. Such a forum should fashion a common position by them on whether indeed, the ongoing context and modalities of the campaign for Biafra as led by Kanu’s IPOB is in their collective interests, and not the narrow, selfserving agenda of a few individuals who are set to exploit the ethnic sentiments of one of Africa’s most endowed peoples, in achieving parochial political ends.

If anything, contemporary developments in the country dictate that the Ibo Leaders of Thought owe other Nigerians the fraternal duty of providing more than their present subdued response - at least beyond the loud silence that is coming from them. It is rather unhelpful to the Ibo cause nor the wider national interest, that beyond the vigorous street demonstrations by zealous Biafra inspired Ibo youth, along with a splattering of the not-so-youthful persons in various Nigerian towns and villages, as well as the high visibility of the campaign on the social media including the sporadic demonstrations of Ibos in diaspora at the country’s foreign missions in some countries, not much coordinated response is coming from such Leaders of Thought. Particularly curious is the silence of the duly elected officials such as governors and members of the Houses of Assembly of the five core Biafra homeland states, the 15 Senators and the dozens of members of the House of Representatives who represent the zone in the National Assembly.

After all, political history teaches with real life examples that nations are not held together by sheer force of arms but the subtle efficacy of shared values and consensus. This is just as the boundaries of any county are never sacrosanct and inviolable, except the constituent parts decide so. Whoever is in doubt should simply refer to the stories of the defunct Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Somalia, India and even Nigeria where the southern oil-rich Bakassi region has been excised from the country and ceded to Cameroon in recent times.

In a world where only a few modern states enjoy homogeneity in ethnic extraction of their citizenry, the rest of the countries with hybrid ethnic bases easily find the opportunity to share values as affording the component parts advantages of collaborating to move their countries forward. This is the present challenge facing Nigeria’s over three hundred ethnic components groups. Interestingly the protesting Ibos are among the largest three of the ethnic groups that make up the country, and therefore call the shots on any national issue.

An immediate cause for deeper introspection into the Biafra issue by the Ibo Leaders of Thought derives from a likely backlash from the inherent fraud in the inclusion of the four South-South states being minorities of the eastern part of the country into the proposed Biafra enclave, even without the consent of the affected states. This tacit conscription of these states into Biafra as proposed, provides a throwback to 1967 when acting in his capacity as the military governor of the Eastern Region, Ojukwu railroaded these same minorities into his Biafra agenda, literally at gun-point.

The history of a rather uneasy state of political cohabitation between the majority and minority ethnic groups in Nigeria, of which the Biafra debacle constitutes an apogee, is replete with instances of stark denigration and predatory marginalisation of the latter by the former. And the relationship between the Ibos and their minority neighbours provides graphic illustration of same. It is easy to recall that before the emergence of Biafra the minorities of the east had serially lamented over the oppressive sway of the majority Ibos over them, courtesy of the advent of ethnic based politics as was introduced by the 1951 McPherson’s Constitution. The Ibos who were and still remain the majority group in the east simply used the advantage of larger numbers to overrun every aspect of public life of the region, to the painful exclusion of the minorities.

In acknowledgment of the circumstances of the minorities the colonial government set up the Henry Willink Commission, which served between 1957 and 1958 to “Enquire Into The Fears Of Minorities And The Means Of Allaying Them”. The far reaching recommendations of that committee were largely implemented in breach by the Enugu-based, Ibo controlled Eastern Nigerian government. This situation intensified the campaign for insulation of such minorities from the oppressive rule of the Enugu based Ibo majority government, and formed a primary cause for the creation of the first twelve states by General Yakubu Gowon on May 27th 1967, ostensibly to liberate the affected minorities from the suffocating grip of their Ibo oppressors. Hence the Nigerian Civil War is romantically referred to as the Liberation War, all through the Niger Delta.

It is also interesting that the same Gowon aggregated the Ibos into a single state - the East Central state to preserve their homogeneity. That is today a constellation of that may form the territory of Biafra. It of interest that hardcore irredentists of the Biafra cause often argue that the aggregated size of their enclave cannot be a problem given the wide spread of Ibos across the world and their propensity to remember as well as develop their homeland. For any Biafra protagonist to enjoy a sense of succour from such a dispensation may be living on a dream.

Still on the question of territorial boundaries for ‘Biafraland’ as Kanu and his co-travellers refer to their dream republic, there is the need to juxtapose the antecedents of Ojukwu’s Biafra and the IPOB of Kanu. This consideration is informed by the reality of paradigm change over the 50 years between 1967 and 2017. At the time of Ojukwu’s adventurism in 1967 he had at his disposal a single region on which he could foist any political dispensation of his fancy. Today such liberties are inconceivable, leaving any prospects for the peaceful actualisation of Biafra to be through the extant statutory processes. So far Kanu is not playing that script, and therefore needs to reflect on the Ibo proverb that if the first child does not crawl the following one may not run.

Having enjoyed the unfettered penetration into and fraternal bonds with the rest of the peoples of this beautiful country Nigeria, it remains unimaginable that the beloved Ibo should be confined to a homeland of just five states. As is clear, Kanu’s secessionist agenda may be tolerable for some like -minded people. But if it also aspires to indulge in the expansionist tendency of linking the South-South states to its ambit, then he may be dragging the Ibo nation into another liberation war with the rest of Nigeria, with consequences that definitely out weigh whatever benefit he is, or will ever offer to his homeland. The best value he can offer the Ibo nation is captured in the Ibo parable of the proverbial oil stained finger that spread the mess to the other fingers.

And that is why the Ibo nation should call him to order. Ndi beanyi biko, Ozeoemena. Let it not happen again, please.