Peaceful protests by unarmed pro-Biafra agitators turned bloody on Wednesday, December 2. One policeman and eight protesters reportedly died in Onitsha.
Whether the dead were members or sympathisers of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) or Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) is irrelevant.
The irony is that those who died might have been traders who did not even believe in the Biafran cause, but lent their support to bolster the believers.
To the dead, it is a lost cause. Whatever difference they could have made to achieve the dream, whatever post-humous honours their groups confer on them – all are gone.
Media reports said as many as 40,000 protesters blocked the only gateway to the South East, the Niger Bridge in Onitsha.
Some left when their leaders ended their songs and dance in celebration of their conquest of the bridge and blockage of all movement in and out of Onitsha.
Pleas by soldiers to make one lane available to motorists were rejected. Some protesters boasted they would hold the bridge for three days. That was when their leaders’ tactics went wrong.
Uchenna Madu claimed that blocking the bridge was MASSOB’s strategy to show Biafrans they could defend Biafra State if it seceded.
The reality is that no government anywhere in the world would allow peaceful citizens to provoke law abiding ones by deliberate obstruction of expressways. Or, in this case, total blockade of the only artery to the South East and South South.
Force invites counter force.
The shooting and the deaths occurred in the obscurity of the night at 1.30am. The time renders the accuracy of the reports nebulous. But daylight confirmed the nine deaths and charred vehicles.
Now is the time to stop all the protests.
It is also high time the government and its agents exercised maximum restraint in the use of lethal weapons to quell civilian protests.
In other parts of the world the police use water cannons to disperse mobs without killing anyone. They also use rubber bullets.
Or best of all, this is the time to engage the youth with their idealistic hot-headedness in intelligent discussion. They think their Biafran dream, blissful with full employment for graduates who are yet to get their first job after a decade, is real.
Roads in the South East are a sordid mess. Their reconstruction will generate jobs and incomes and get the idle youths off the streets.
Such contracts should be awarded to high quality performance companies, not to contractors who collect what they can and leave the roads worse than they met them.
Governors should partner with the federal government to create jobs for the youth, create educational opportunities and apprenticeships as well as facilitate self-employment.
IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, is their irreducible minimum for the agitation to end. He should be freed.
Nigeria has too many problems with the economy belly-up. This is no time to open up another insurgency in the South East with the havoc Boko Haram has done in the North East.
We heard a lot of grandstanding about crushing Boko Haram in the North East. Six years on, with at least 17,000 dead, everyone has his fingers crossed that the armed forces could end it this month.
May we remind the youthful agitators that there is nothing in history like peaceful protests which end in secession. And two sovereign states cannot cohabit in the same territory.
MASSOB and IPOB leaders should go back to the drawing board and restrategise.
The street protests must stop now. It is time to devise an effective, intelligent exit strategy.
