MARSHALL PLAN TO END BIAFRA AGITATION
Primarily, this is for the swirling speculation in the popular media that some overzealous and unpatriotic Presidency officials had in the last few days convinced the Acting President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, to order the re-arrest of the Director of Radio Biafra and the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Mr. Nnamdi Kanu. This question becomes more imperative and urgent given that this same presidency stood by, did practically nothing by way of law enforcement whilst a bunch of unruly youth under the aegis of Arewa Youth Forum were busy dishing out illegal quit notices to Igbo to exit the 19 Northern states or face the consequences of forced removal by October 1, 2017.
Why are the aides of the acting president urging him to go for another illegal arrest and detention of Nnamdi Kanu only because he exercised his constitutional freedom of expression by asking his supporters to boycott the Anambra governorship poll?
In the light of the above emerging information that filtered into the media recently, it became even much more difficult for patriotic writers to formulate workable panacea to the ongoing heightened state of agitations with specific reference to the peaceful agitations championed by over 35 million registered members of the Nnamdi Kanu-led Indigenous People of Biafra Worldwide for self-determination.
That notwithstanding, whilst advising the president to go for constructive dialogue and avoid the temptation of unduly stoking another serial street protests that could elicit the brutal crackdown by the military- the type that led to the extra-legal executions of over 500 peaceful IPOB demonstrators last year as documented by the London- based Amnesty International and several other local human rights groups. The rumoured order or plots to clip the wings of Nnamdi Kanu is a toxic idea that is dead on arrival unless the government is programmed to instigate extra-legal killings because the fanatical and die-hard supporters of Kanu will surely embark on sustained mass actions which are bound to create instability in the system. If the government heeded the so-called security reports given to it by the pro-north security hierarchies not to pick up the bellicose northern youth who ordered for the eviction of Igbo from the 19 Northern states why then is it tinkering with the time bomb of arresting Kanu who is simply exercising his constitutional right to free speech and peaceful assembly?
However, this writer thinks that one among the panaceas towards reducing the severity of the agitations is for the Nigerian state to introduce a Marshall Plan for the former Eastern region so as to fix the broken and devastated public and private assets which characterised the 30-month bombardments by the then federal forces.
This is aside the urgent need to balance the systemic imbalances in the governance style of the current government which are adversarial to the South East of Nigeria. It is a well-known post-war reality that rebuilding and reconstruction process are integral aspects of ending any civil war.
But in the case of the Nigeria/ Biafra War, the region which suffered almost 98% of the destruction was left without reconstruction. Was it no longer a civil war or was it a war of conquest? The deliberate failure of the then General Yakubu Gowon-led dictatorship to rebuild the Eastern region after so much damage amounts to a war crime.
A critical look at the history of warfare globally shows that warravaged entities have always received special reconstruction projects from both within the polity and the international community. The examples of Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan suffice to demonstrate the validity of the aforementioned claim. Cory Doctorow wrote that the government of the United States of America has spent more in rebuilding Afghanistan than it spent rebuilding Europe under the Marshall plan.
Coming closer home, the North East of Nigeria has in the last five years faced unrelenting bombing campaign by the home-bred Islamic terror group known as Boko Haram.
In the devastation that has followed this needless war, both the indigenous communities and persons from the South resident in those places have lost their entire assets. The federal government has however championed the advocacy for the comprehensive reconstruction of the devastated North East. There is however no mention of any compensation packages for Southerners displaced from their settlements in the North East of Nigeria by armed Boko Haram terrorists. However, the central government is going ahead with the rebuilding agenda for North East.
So with the reduction of attacks and the seeming victory or so we are told, of government over the terrorists, the Nigerian government has only just rolled out a Marshall plan to rebuild that region.
The question to ask is why was the old Eastern region which suffered a worst fate with over a million fatalities criminally neglected? Emmanuel Onwubiko, www.emmanuelonwubiko.com