Forty Years after Biafra (1)
BROKEN BONDS OF BROTHERHOOD
M. O. ENE
Friday, January 15, 2010
The traumatic bitterness of the war is rich with lessons for toleration and understanding.
~ Arthur A. Nwankwo (1970)
PREAMBLE
Nigeria-Biafra
War came to an end officially on January 15, 1970, exactly four years after the
military coup that triggered the horrific events that led to the war. The big
boys of multinationals were waiting. They scavenged and harvested baskets of
precious nuts from rotten fruits and smiled all the way to Switzerland.
Nigerian counterparts smiled too—at their nakedness and narcissism. General
Gowon and his cohorts went on international spending sprees, as if greenbacks
grew on trees. The mostly Igbo of Biafra waited for the spirit of
no-victor-no-vanquished to shine on the “3-R”: reconciliation,
rehabilitation, and reconstruction. With their famed antenna of resourcefulness
already at full alert, ex-Biafrans began the arduous crawl back to
sociopolitical and economic relevance, notwithstanding the stumbling blocks by a
vindictive junta.
By the time Colonel Joe Garba kicked out Gowon, the poisonous postwar policies had irreversibly scared the Igbo psyche. Hard work, humility, and honesty—the hallmarks of ethical entrepreneurship and Igbo industry—had become paths to perdition. “Fast boys” frozen out of the system strived to get rich quickly and easily. Fraudulent schemes were hatched and executed with ruthless efficiency. Armed with fax machines and later the Internet, the fiscal schemes became a global pandemic.
The Second Republic provided more avenues for wealth without work. The playing field was leveling a bit but, as is to this day, still steeped against the Igbo. Decency and discipline were expunged from the national vocabulary. Before the presidential democracy experiment was over on December 30, 1983, a healthy national treasury lay in ruins. Months later, there was a change of guards. The game continued with embezzlement galore. Ten-percent handshakes doubled to minimally 20%. Education and basic amenities became non-issues.
The Third Republic loomed. Those who had accumulated immense wealth bought plump positions and prepared to plunder some more. Then the market crashed. The military marched back to the center. They tried to clean house and encouraged the same “investors” to salivate over controlling whatever would be left in the treasury. It was downhill from here until 1999, when the present Fourth Republic was hurriedly hoisted on “we the people.” The stealing soared to unforeseen levels of uncut criminality and open looting of Nigeria’s common wealth accompanied by crude killings and heinous power-grab in the name of governance.
BROKEN BONDS OF BROTHERHOOD
How did Nigeria get to this point of being so rich, yet dirt poor? The beginning is rooted in Biafra: events before and events after the collapse of the revolutionary republic. The legacy of Biafra was left to rot. A good opportunity had presented another look at the soiled scramble for and subsequent separation of African natural nations. Nigerians broke the mirror in an unnecessary bloodletting savagery. No one learned from the mistakes. The fractured foundation was not fixed. Instead Nigerian leaders buried their heads in the sand and pursued parochial interests.
Biafra is no more, no matter how much we try to ravage or romanticize the tragedy. Biafra lives on in our hearts: its lessons, its legacy, its legalities, and its illegalities. Biafra is no more—the secession and the war—no matter the feelings of those who felt and or feels the pain. There will never be a closure to the Biafra phenomenon, to its legacy in all its beautiful, bad, good, and ugly ramifications. As Lewis Obi succinctly put it in an early 1990s piece in now defunct Concord, “The power of Biafra remains that, as an idea against political oppression, it can never die.”
The lasting legacy of Biafra is a self-evident truth: Human beings are largely territorial ethnic creatures; no ethnic entity on earth, no matter how small and socioeconomically sophisticated, should be savagely subjugated to persistent persecution without a rebellious reaction. This is the lasting lesson of Biafras before Biafra, the lesson of many more Biafras after Biafra, and a lesson that must be mastered and honored beyond Biafra. I call this truth “Biafranism.” Ethnicity is a fact of life, and Africa’s brand is no worse than European entrenched ethnic enmities, with which Europe still grapples—from Belfast to Berlin and from Vienna to Vladivostok.
OF BIAFRA & BIAFRANISM
Biafra is much more than the 30-month war. Many nations fought civil wars and lived in peace to tell the story. Biafra transcends many dimensions, from socioeconomic status quo ante through evolving nationalism and nation-state to geopolitical gerrymandering. Many who thought Biafra was an Igbo affair have had their own mini “Biafra”: Bolokiri Butchery; Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto, and Zaria religious riots; Zango-Kataf crises; Bauchi Burnings—Boko Haram, Kala Kato; Lagos post-June 12 riots; Ogoni agony (internationalized by the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa); Jukun-Tiv frays; Chamba-Jukun war with the Tiv, Odi Ordeal, Niger Delta militancy, brain drain; exile of the elite; and the plight of faceless nameless masses.
To some degree, the Biafran blight that the Igbo endured is a sacrifice for modern mini Biafras. The conflicts have so far been relatively less bloody and of shorter persistent periods. Things no longer have to fall apart and reach primitive proportions of brutality before Nigerians speak up and federal forces march into town and raze the moveable and unmovable back to ground zero. Nigeria is yet to learn how to control the boiling pot before it boils over; act, not react. The unfolding crisis surrounding an absentee president is a good example. Before long, if the simple situation is not resolved amicably, all hell could be let loose. Nigeria is not alone in this knee-jerk making of mountains out of anthills.
Many African countries perch on the precipice of social, political, and economic abyss. The earlier the leaders look inwards, the earlier the countries crawl back from the edge. No amount of foreign-aid infusion is going to help. Food aid and charity missions are like flying a bottle of water once every year to a cut-off community in the middle of Kalahari Desert. The African community has to figure out where it all went wrong. In a haste to forget the past, Africans falsify the present and produce a false future. A good understanding of where it went wrong and brought all to this point in history is a good pointer to sustainable solutions. Building on a false foundation guarantees frustrating failures of immense magnitude. Africa can no longer afford unending political crises rooted in one factor: ethnicity. Ethnicity must be embraced addressed by accepting the legacy of Biafra, which could be termed “Biafranism” as aforementioned.
CONSTRUCTIVE COEXISTENCE
In a paper presented to Nigerian students at Essex County College, Newark, NJ, [Constructive Coexistence: The Solution to Nigeria’s Perennial Political Problems, 1996], I said that no matter what becomes of the sociopolitical and economic entity that evolved from a colonial contraption named after the River Niger, the people of that region and beyond must continue to coexist. The various peoples must coexist in some constructive arrangement, if they are to maximize their resources and potentials in the face of dwindling and hostile global economic environment. The issue to address is how this arrangement is going to sit with the various ethnic groups.
A blacksmith who does not know how to forge a metal gong should look at the tail of a kite. Examples abound in Eastern Europe, Far East, and Indian subcontinent. No modern European nation emerged as-is from the conquest of Anglo-Saxons, Huns, or the colonialism of Romans. Most European nations, small and big, evolved from ethnic entities that largely maintain their ancestral heritage. The later-day evolution of democracy is a direct result of modern ideas incorporating old traditions in a system that somehow satisfies the yearning of indigenous majority.
Often gelled societies unravel at the seams without prompting. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a good example. The Scots are spirited about meeting England at the European Community in Brussels, Belgium, not in London. The Welsh can’t wait to mind their business in Cardiff; and the Irish will eventually embrace their Catholic brethren in Dublin. Ironically, this is the land of colonists who cobbled disparate nations together and decreed that these African nations figure our how to coexist. The Soviet Union unraveled with the collapse of communist capo de tutti capi (boss of bosses) in Moscow. Yugoslavia resisted the disentanglement of its many ethnoreligious nations, but it eventually yielded and dismantled on bloody battlefields.
Therefore, in any sociopolitical shift or political permutation, whatever becomes of Nigeria, its people must inevitably continue to coexist, either constructively or in constant crises. In a mindless murderous mayhem or a in merry marriage of some sort, the choice will be theirs and theirs alone, not the latest hybrid imports from across the seas. How the nations coexist will be defined by what they remember of unpleasant past political and social intercourse, not by the desires of defenders of a nurtured nation-state by day and defrauders of the state treasury by night. The simple solution is credible elections that will generate popular mandates from an enlightened electorate.
CONCLUDED:::>
BIAFRA BETRAYED