By Uma Eleazu
President Muhammadu Buhari is quoted as saying that he “will do everything necessary to keep Nigeria as one political entity” (Vanguard, May 10, 2016). Further, he wondered why “some people who were not yet born then (during the Nigeria/Biafra war) are saying they want to divide the country”. He also said, “For Nigeria to divide now, it is better for all of us to jump into the sea and get drowned” (Daily Sun, May 10, 2016, page 12).
On a previous occasion (interview with Al-Jazeera), he asked in his characteristic laconic way, “What do the Ibos (sic) want?” Coming from a person of his standing, and being President of the country, these questions need to be faced and answered.
How come boys who were not yet born when we fought for Biafra and lost are now agitating for the actualisation of the dream of an independent Biafra? The name Biafra must have a certain fascination for them or represents a kind of future that they are not seeing in Nigeria. So, that being the case, Biafra must convey or conjure a virtual reality which they think is physically realisable. Why do they reject Nigeria? Before now, people of my generation who fought the war and lost had more or less decided to eat the humble pie and do whatever we can to make the Nigeria project a workable proposition. At each point, all we get is a slap in the face. And our children see it.
At the end of the civil war, we were promised Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and Reconciliation. Forty-five years down the road, it has not happened. No government at the federal level has done anything appreciable to reconstruct the dilapidated schools, devastated hospitals, roads, and lives of the people. For rehabilitation, those with bank accounts were given 20 pounds each to start life again, no matter what their bank balances were. The rest of the money was confiscated or forfeited to the state. Thanks to the Finance Minister, Obafemi Awolowo. Our houses were “captured”, declared as “abandoned property”, and confiscated. Besides, the area that was Biafra was balkanised in the name of state creation. But it was to alienate our fellow citizens of Biafra and make them hate us. They were not all deceived. The alienation of the Easterners was finally enshrined in the Constitution (1979 and 1999) which changed the nature and character of the Nigerian state we inherited from the departing colonial powers. At Independence, we inherited a federal structure whose political dynamics was based on liberal democracy. What we have now is a centralised state with power concentrated at the top and whose political dynamics is that of prebendal feudalism. As if that was not enough, the ruling oligarchy wants to turn Nigeria into a caliphate. Prebendal politics is anti-democracy and that is what is alienating not just Ndigbo but all other ethnic nationalities.
Contrast this with the Boko Haram war which is not yet over, but the federal government has already set up a North East Reconstruction Commission. Good money has been appropriated for it in the 2016 budget. In 2012, the Boko Haram jihadists ransacked and killed many people in Kano (many of them from the South East and South South). As they were leaving in droves, the Boko Haram went and bombed the buses bound for the South. Did the federal government do anything to help? No! Only platitudes were mouthed. “We will leave no stone unturned, blah blah blah”. Instead, then Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, went and donated N100 million to “victims” of the carnage. Who received the money? No compensation was paid to the bus owners or to the families that were bereaved. Who then received the CBN money? He is now Emir of Kano.
In April of the same year 2012, Ndigbo from Adazi were slaughtered in Mubi, Adamawa State. The federal government did nothing and so a group that called itself Biafra Liberation Council was formed to protect Ndigbo in Adamawa and to take care of the young widows left behind. Any time a fire burns a market, Ndigbo are usually the losers. Our children do take notice and ask questions. These are just a few examples to show that the youths of Igboland do not have to be born before the war to sense the antipathy of the Northern-dominated federal government towards the Igbo to begin to ask questions about how we found ourselves in this situation. As the atrocities against Ndigbo in recent times pile up, so is the angst against the country that is rejecting them.
The recent incarceration of Nnamdi Kanu is what has created the upsurge of agitation for not only the release of the director of Radio Biafra, London, but also the call for re-creation of Biafra. Former President General Olusegun Obasanjo was nearer the truth when he noted that it is the condition of hopelessness created by the action and inaction of the governments at federal and state levels that is fuelling the new Biafra movement. There are many Nigerians who will not want to hear the word Biafra again, but in the mind of those of us who lived through it and are witnesses of what is going on now, there is a heavy misgiving and foreboding about the project Nigeria. Some of us, who, much as we do not want to see our children made cannon fodders for the trigger-happy Nigerian army and police, are becoming sympathetic to the cause our children are now championing, even if we don’t agree on modalities. And that is to put it mildly. Somehow, the ghost of Biafra keeps coming up. It has refused to die and be buried.
So, when a sitting President says he will do everything necessary to keep Nigeria as one political entity, one hopes he knows what he is talking about and that he is not just barking out the usual saber-rattling order to the military “to go and deal decisively” with the people concerned which usually means “go and shoot them”.
Perhaps, the President needs to be reminded that he is not a military head of state, but an elected president operating under the rule of law; that the citizens have certain rights which have to be respected under the law; that he cannot declare a war against any section of the country, not even a state of emergency without the concurrence of the National Assembly. Or need we remind him that there are probably well over six million young people under 40 years of age in the area that was Biafra. How many of them will he shoot before deciding when it is time to drown the rest of the country in the sea?
Second, Biafra is not coterminous with Ala Igbo and Ndigbo are not the only group agitating for a break-up of Nigeria into its natural ethnic nationalities.
Third, there is nothing sacrosanct about Nigeria as a political entity. It was put together at a point in time and held together by duplicity and force of arms. Our forefathers acquiesced to the situation they found themselves until at another point in time when their children came up and agitated to free themselves from the yoke of colonialism and imperialism. In the process of negotiating with the British imperialists, the leaders of the various nationalities agreed to stick together under certain agreed conditions, to throw the foreign invaders out first, and then start the arduous task of forging a nation out of the various nationalities enclosed in Nigeria.
Perhaps our brothers in the defunct East African Federation were wiser in rejecting federalism before independence. What is now Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda were once one political entity. Similarly, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe were in one political entity called Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It did not work. Instead of going to drown themselves in the Indian Ocean, they went their separate ways and they are not the worse for it. The case of Malaysia is almost like ours. Singapore was pushed out of the Malaysian Federation just about the same time that Eastern Region of Nigeria was forced out of the Nigerian Federation and under similar circumstances. The rest of Malaya did not go for “police action” to bring them back as Gowon did in the case of Nigeria. Before we knew it, what was called “police action” turned into a full scale civil war. Let us not forget that. Look at where Singapore and Malaysia are today. Sometimes, separation may be a win-win situation.
If the powers-that-be in Nigeria are not delivering on their promises, people will like to go their separate ways and to hell with one Nigeria. Mr. President, nobody is happy with this contraption called Nigeria except perhaps all those who have been or are feeding fat on our common patrimony. Gen. Yakubu Gowon is probably the only person in Pankshin who loves one Nigeria. Gen. Theophilus Danjuma is probably the only happy man from Jukun, Taraba State. The Tivs have for long rejected Islamism and they are not happy being dominated by a few cattle-rearers who now want to take over their land. Similarly, the Itsekiri and Urhobo are not happy either. Neither are the Yoruba happy. Are Edo people happy to have their ancient kingdom be subjected to another Kingdom? Berom, Gwari, Jukun are being treated as serfs in their own country. The Efik-Ibibio nation is not happy either; not to talk of Ogoni and Ijaw whose land has been devastated by rampant, exploitative capitalism. When their sons protested about the degradation of their farmland, they were rounded up by gen. Sani Abacha and hanged. People are not happy because Nigeria is suffocating them. People want to be free to live their lives and be in control of their own affairs. Not everyone will take up arms to back their cause as Boko Haram is doing.
Since 1979, Nigeria has been standing on a deeply-flawed foundation and a house built on a weak foundation cannot stand. The 1999 Constitution is a fraud foisted on the Nigerian peoples by agents of those who want to impose on Nigeria an Islamic hegemony as opposed to the liberal democratic constitutions which the founding fathers of modern Nigeria negotiated for between 1954 and 1960. Since July 1966, this ruling oligarchy has steadily eroded the basis of unity of the country. There are today two contending ideologies in Nigeria – liberal democracy and Islamic theocracy. In so far as these two contending ideologies are fighting for supremacy, there will always be debilitating instability in the system. The 1999 Constitution does not meet the aspirations of various segments of the country. All kinds of insurgency and militancy have arisen to challenge the status quo.
The first major challenge was in 2001 when 12 Northern states declared themselves as Sharia states. That in itself was a flagrant unconstitutional act. The governors were allowed to get away with it. Even Buhari pledged in a speech to the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria (August 2001), “I will continue to show openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is sweeping all over Nigeria … And God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the country.”
The sharia movement culminated in Maitatsine, Boko Haram, and the Shi’ite Islamic Movement and these are all armed insurrection.
On the other hand, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Biafra Liberation Council (BLC), Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) and lately Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) all have arisen because the Constitution has been bastardised and cannot hold the disparate nationalities and ethno-religious groups together. To the best of my knowledge, the Biafran movement is not an armed insurrection. Why are some people so bent on killing it? It is high time someone summoned up courage and called a conference of ethnic nationalities in Nigeria to discuss the conditions for staying together as a nation.
If the President really wants to do something positive to keep Nigeria as one political entity, he should call for and read the report of the national dialogue called by his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, especially the section entitled The Nigerian charter of National Reconciliation and Integration.
Towards the end of that report, the conferees attached what I consider to be the main achievement of the conference in that they tackled some of the fundamental issues plaguing the country. Issues of citizenship rights, federating units, ethnic nationalities, the root cause of conflicts, and various fissiparous tendencies in the body politic of Nigeria. They therefore produced and appended what they called “The Nigerian Charter for National Reconciliation and Integration”
Two sentences in the preamble struck me as worthy of being at the root of any reconciliation:
“Conscious of the fact that these historical grievances have produced resentment, nurtured bitterness and sustained distrust amongst Nigerians, against one another and against the Nigerian State…
“Determined to heal the wounds of the past, to forgive past sectional wrongs, to let go of the past sectional grievances, to close the book on our troubled past, to open up vistas of greatness and to embrace our future…
“Now, therefore, we the people of Nigeria proclaim this charter for national reconciliation and integration as the basis of our union.”
Are we ready to do that? If not, every tinkering with the constitution is a waste of time. The house will not stand.
It is important and instructive to note that acceptance of this charter is considered to be a pre-condition for negotiating a new constitution. The President should therefore get his own small committee to study the whole report and recommend how to implement this aspect of national charter in the report. He should not just throw away the baby with the bath water simply because it came from the past administration. This is where the mantra of change should begin. We need to go back to the foundation and change the constitution. Every other thing should flow from that.
It will be a worthy legacy for the President and the All Progressives Congress (APC) to produce for us a people’s constitution before the end of Buhari’s first term in office. What will hold this country together is not the force of arms but love for one another, peace, unity of purpose and good governance based on the rule of law.
