On Biafra and true federalism

This is a season of hate vending and programmed hysteria in the name of pathfinding. It is 50 years since the civil war. The occasion was not marked with sober reflection but with bile and hate and name-calling and inter-tribal insults. Nigerians are on the march again in their mongoose and cobra pastime as if […]

This is a season of hate vending and programmed hysteria in the name of pathfinding. It is 50 years since the civil war. The occasion was not marked with sober reflection but with bile and hate and name-calling and inter-tribal insults. Nigerians are on the march again in their mongoose and cobra pastime as if it is not possible to reflect on the lessons of the civil war and the quest for true federalism without demonising one another and opening fresh wounds.

If you monitored the social media assiduously as I did within the last fortnight, you would think there was an imminent war or that the nation Nigeria was populated by all kinds of demons competing for space.  

In the midst of the din, a few voices of moderation came through. Uzo Onyemaechi acknowledged the root causes of the problem that started with the January 15, 1966 coup which took the lives of key politicians from the Northern and Western axis of the country without a single casualty from the East. The situation was made more suspicious because the coup was masterminded by mainly Igbo officers. (I was privileged to interview Adewale Ademoyega, the Yoruba officer among the coupists, who tried to downplay the ethnic colouration of that coup without success because the facts were simply stark.) 

Onyemaechi who was a student in Lagos at the time, wrote:  “We were to learn of the deaths of the Prime Minister (Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa), Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of the Western Region (Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola), and some senior military officers (most of whom were from the Northern and Western Regions) ….The coup d’état left a bad taste in the mouths of some sections of the country due to the lopsidedness of the ethnicities of the dead. You could sense trouble brewing and lots of military movement at night….”

That was where the rain started beating us – that first coup. If it hadn’t happened, it is unlikely that the revenge coup of July 15, 1966, the anti-igbo pogrom that followed, and civil war would have ensued. 

The war was unfortunate. Many people across the divide, but more in the Eastern parts that bore the full brunt of that war, are still living with the scars, the horrors, the mind-bending remembrances of living by the day, scampering from one hole to the next without any assurance that there would ever be a tomorrow. Some of us had relatives in the East and they regaled us with stories of lost humanity and sheer bestiality. No war is pretty; that is why we are all well advised to think twice before igniting the embers of another season of hate.

We can talk about Biafra. We can address true federalism. We can do both in civilised discourse.

Biafra reminds me of a road taken that should not have been taken. One must also say in fairness to all Igbos who were not consulted by the coup plotters that the inexorable descent into anarchy was thrust upon them without their permission. It is therefore unfair to lump all Igbos together as if the elimination of the Northern and Western leaders and military officers was decided at a village assembly somewhere across the Niger.

We must be man enough to take responsibility for our past failures. Demonisation of other ethnic groups did not work 50 years ago and will not work in the next 50 years because it is based on irredeemable fallacies. Some mothers do have them. To every tribe its own idiots. I must return to Onyemaechi again for the lessons of the civil war and the challenges at hand: “…Every participant should accept their role in the war and the events that led to it – the genocide, the pogrom, the trumped up charges that led to the execution of some Biafran officers, the blockade, the after-war effects such as the Indigenisation Decree, the twenty (20) pounds policy, … abandoned property (how someone’s property can be considered abandoned in his own country beats me)!”

The Holy Book advocates that we should do unto others as we want them to do unto us. If we follow that simple rule, we would be less judgemental towards others and appreciate that with different folks it could be different strokes. South-South elements like one Ken Henshaw are reportedly not amused at all by the Biafran hoopla: “How dare you sit in your home or offices and draw your Biafra map and include places like Rivers, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, etc as part of your empire? Did you consult them? Did you seek their opinions? …Do you not realise that you are doing to those people the same thing you accuse the British and Nigeria of doing to you?”

And to add another dimension to the saga, some ‘cyberwarriors’ have been distributing hate statements portraying Yemi Osinbajo, the Acting President, as a tribalist, opportunist and political schemer bent on expanding the ‘Yoruba empire’. They have not given up in their determination to dredge a gulf between President Buhari and his loyal deputy. They will fail!

Now instead of discussing how Nigeria can achieve true federalism as against this sorry unitary state which glorifies mediocrity and federalises corruption, some arch-tribalists are bickering like disoriented children deceived into ingesting alpha-methylphenethylamine under the guise of chocolate candies. Disgusting!