This Neo-Biafra Arms Struggle By Semiu A. Akanmu

This Neo-Biafra Arms Struggle

It is high time we discussed this Neo-Biafra arms struggle. Rationalizing Nnamdi Kanu’s treasonable utterances and comical ethnic irredentism, under whatever disguise, pandering to the blackmail of his cyber-based Neo-Biafra “intelligentsia”, are outright misplacements. 

 

Kanu and his co-travellers should be placed in their deserved place in history. We are writing this to commit our responses to this crudity into internet memory. So that,  as we are reading the pre and post 1967 – 1970 historical account of Nigeria-Biafra civil war, generations yet unborn would read about an emerging new order –Neo-Biafra –which does not only represent the opposite of the historic but unfortunate 1967 self-determination struggle, but also lacks solid justification. 

First, do not let the “Neo” used in characterizing the present thuggery of Kanus’ arms struggle be lost on us. It is charitable to distinguish the 1967 Biafra struggle from Kanu’s 2015 madness –garbed in freedom advocacy. To mention late Odimegwu Ojukwu and Nnamdi Kanu in the same breath and place them on the same lever of heroism is an ill-mannered historical revisionism, an insult on public consciousness and a disservice to the pro-Ndigbo intellectual institutions built by Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, to mention just but a few. 

Both in context and in concept, the arm struggle led by the late Ikemba should never be compared with this unnecessary crisis and misdirected frustration that the Kanus are leading. Let us examine the context that premised the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, as related by Chinua Achebe in his personal history of Biafra: There Was a Country.

“Beginning with January 15, 1966, coup d’état, through the counter-coup (staged mainly by Northern Nigerian officers, who murdered 185 Igbo officers) and the massacre of thirty thousand Igbos and Easterners in pogroms that started in May 1966 and occurred over four months –the events of those months left millions of other future Biafrans and me terrified in different parts of Nigeria, we saw ourselves as victims. When we noticed that the federal government of Nigeria did not respond to our call to end pogroms, we concluded that a government that failed to safeguard the lives of its citizens has no claim to their allegiance and must be ready to accept that victims deserve the right to seek their safety in order ways –including secession.”

 That was a horrifying and breath-taking account that precipitated to the civil war. Even if we debate the causalities-prospect analysis of the war and its niceties, as emotional as humans are, going to war to defend your honour cannot be downplayed. No one, in his right senses and frame of mind, would rationalize killing of innocent millions because of action of few misguided Igbo Army officers.

Now, this is 2015, not 1967. This is democracy, not military rule that is notorious for barbarism and high handedness. In this age and time, the Igbos are well represented in federal national assembly and house of representative; their states are beneficiaries of federal-sponsored projects; their governors are not only collecting their states’ dues in the name of federal allocations, they are also benefiting from the largesse dubbed “security votes.” These states, just as others, are generating revenue internally, and the federal composition of the Nigeria state, despite all its imperfections, empowers them with a reasonable degree of autonomy. No blockade of water and social amenities, no state-institutionalized persecution of the Igbos. What exactly is the legitimacy and rationality in Kanu’s solicitation for funds to prosecute war, to kill Hausas and Yorubas?

This is why I said Kanu is a mad man. But as valid for all mad men, he will certainly pull crowd of docile and unproductive cheer fans to applaud, and to participate in his show of madness. 

Secondly, the concept of the then Biafra that saw Cyprian Ekwensi, Gabriel Okata, and Chinua Achebe as international diplomats criss-crossing the length and breadth of the globe to market the Igbo nation cannot be compared with the uninspiring, shallow, tantrum-laden speeches and talks of Nnamdi Kanu. Listen to Ikempa, and listen to Kanu: The grasp of social and political dynamics of self-determination, the burning embers of ethnic patriotism yet courteous discharge of advocacy separates them miles apart. These negationists should stop insulting Igbo intellectual fronts. 

But by and large, hypothetically, if Kanus are accurate representatives of the interest of the Igbos, and are extremely disgusted with the living with people of disparate religious and cultural formation, and hence want a separation, the political and civil instruments should be extensively explored and employed. This will be the theme of my next intervention.

And to Kanu and his cheer followers, let me end this with Wole Soyinka’s admonition to Ojukwu:  “Do not take bullets for boldness.”