From the communiqué’s chilly symbolism, of date and place of issue, it was clear: history was about repeating itself, but this time as grand farce.
On 15 January 1970, the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) formally ended, though actual fighting did on January 13. In Port Harcourt, to this day, the vexed issue of Civil War Igbo “abandoned property” remains a sore point. Yet, from the same Port Harcourt came, on 15 January 2012, the communiqué.
A nationwide Occupy Nigeria protest, over oil subsidy removal, had paralysed the country. But from Annkio Briggs, a Niger Delta environmental activist who signed in as president, Agape Birthrights and convener, Niger Delta Occupy Niger Delta Resources (NDONDR), came the ringing declaration.
It was a clear defiance of, if not outright cynical pun on, the Occupy Nigeria demonstrations.
“We call on all our Niger Delta peoples, for the sake of our future,” it read in part, “to look to our nearest neighbours, the Igbos, for immediate and strong alliance to enable the Niger Delta nations and the Igbo nation to face the obvious change that will come to Nigeria, in strength, justice, brotherhood and truth.”
And the rather sinister threat: “If Jonathan, a Niger Delta son is not good enough to govern Nigeria, the oil in his Niger Delta is not good enough for Nigeria.”
It was the beginning of the end, though most did not see it then. A newly elected president just lost his legitimacy. A pan-Nigeria mandate, barely nine months from the 16 April 2011 presidential election, just doomed itself with fatal ethnic posturing. Some three years later, after the full plot had played out, a president finally lost his presidency.
On 15 January 2012 (42 years exactly after the Civil War ended), Ms. Briggs’s new presumption was baiting an old one.
In 1967, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and other Eastern war-time leaders presumed an Igbo secession from Nigeria was sure to resonate with the other Eastern minorities. That appeared to have driven the old Biafra campaign — after all, a strip of sea, off the Eastern Nigeria coast, is called Bight of Biafra.
In 2012, it came reversed: NDONDR’s communiqué presumed a putative Niger Delta (read Ms Briggs’s Ijaw) secession should be a sure hit with the majority Igbo! And the sabre-rattling from a section of the Ijaw, threatening war and destruction should Goodluck Jonathan fail re-election, nicely keyed into that gung ho narrative, which certainly was not without sympathy in the South East.
With Jonathan’s loss, is that driving the new Biafra campaign? Are a section of the Ndigbo, electoral confederates at the 2015 presidential defeat, harkening the call of Ms Briggs to firm up some political confederacy, that might just ruffle some Nigeria feathers?
Will it work this time round? Or would it be yet another costly — and fatal — presumption?
Over the old and new Biafra campaigns, the sound bites bear eerie similarities.
No power in Africa, boasted Ojukwu at the height of the mass hysteria in 1966/1967, could vanquish Biafra.
In Ireland alone, Nnamdi Kanu brags in 2016, Biafra scientists in the Diaspora could forge enough war heads, much more lethal than the crude Ogbunigwe that gave the Nigerians a bloody nose in the last ill-fated campaign, even as his Radio Biafra belt out bigoted and hate messages.
No wonder then: as the excitable, if not the outright gullible, back then serenaded Ojukwu and his leadership, a mob on Biafra streets is swooning to Kanu’s message of hate and boast.
So, why would two generations of a people, with less than 50 years interval, approach a failed gambit anew, almost exactly the way they had approached the original? Wasn’t any lesson learned down the age?
But Ripples must enter this caveat. The Yoruba, Hausa, Tiv or Igbo have a right to choose where they want to belong. That is trite in law and in human rights.
Besides Nigeria, though a legal territory, is no god that must, willy-nilly, be worshipped. To earn legitimacy, it must deliver justice and equity to everyone within its confines.
Still, there is a clear difference between agitating for legal rights — of association and determination — and baiting war. The flock of demonstrators in some South East and South-South cities, who call themselves the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), would insist theirs are peaceful rallies. That is not untrue.
But what of Kanu’s explosively emotive broadcasts? Are they peaceful rallies too? Yet, both have a common nexus: Biafra, with one feeding the other. Should push get to shove, and things do turn messy, are both set of actors ready for the grim consequences?
By the way, did Kanu ever hear of Rwanda’s Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), the Hutu hate organ that led Rwanda to perdition, on the genocide road to Kigali? If his hate radio leads the romantic Biafra to stark misery, Kanu would have his day in the International Criminal Court (ICC), just as the Rwanda RTLMC sponsors.
But isn’t it high time Igbo elders, particularly the class that saw war in 1967-1970, intervened and pulled their people back, from needless demagoguery courting avoidable tragedy?
Back in 1970, a boy called Azubike joined some other boys in primary five, at St. David’s Anglican Primary School, Okesuna, in the Lafiaji area of Lagos Island. Azubike’s eyes shot out like a frog’s — and always riveted at some imaginary but constant objects. It was a grim and telling testimony: this boy had seen the horrors of war!
And still talking war: if the old Biafrans felt justified to war because of the pogroms in the North, resulting from the first coup of 15 January 1966, what would they say is driving this present excitement: that their favoured lost in an election?
Nigeria, as Ripples knows, is a canvass for equal-opportunity injustice, where no one can claim any modicum of innocence. Indeed, often component parts band together to force down brazen injustice on the extant victim.
1966/67: the northern pogroms and the resulting war. Yet, every other part, even the Biafra minorities, banded together to unhorse the Igbo secessionists. The emotive war cry: to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done!
1993: MKO Abiola, a Yoruba by birth but pan-Nigerian by temper, won the freest ever pan-Nigeria presidential mandate. Yet, when the IBB junta annulled it, about everyone else conspired to sustain that criminality — not the least the Igbo political elite. Why, the late Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Eze gburugburu Ndigbo, even openly boasted his Abacha-era constitutional conference “mandate”, was superior to Abiola’s!
2011: Despite Umaru Yar’Adua’s death in office, and Jonathan succession, via a doctrine of necessity, the North by the PDP zoning arrangement, should have produced a candidate to complete its zoned quota of eight years. Yet, “zoning is undemocratic” and allied cant rented the air — and the South East was not especially quiet in the row. Even former President Olusegun Obasanjo, first beneficiary of zoning, was loudest in declaiming that political reality.
Nigeria is a huge canvass of injustice. What it needs is robust determination to end these injustices; not some romantic escapism into Biafra, which itself forebodes needless danger.
ref: http://thenationonlineng.net/to-you-biafra-romantic/
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