By Obi Nwakanma
Last week, the Department of State Security arrested the Director of the pirate Radio called, “Radio Biafra,” Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, and sparked off a wave of street protests in the cities of the Niger, from Calabar to Port-Harcourt, to Asaba by pro-Biafran protesters and women who rallied in support of Mr. Kanu, calling for his release.
The DSS quickly released a message claiming that Mr. Kanu, who is also the leader of the Independent Peoples of Biafra, one of the factional separatist organizations calling for the secession of Biafra, had been released on bail, and is up and about, on a bail of N2 million, to be posted to the courts only by a civil servant on the grade level 16.
There have been skepticism in many quarters about the release of Mr. Kanu, especially as no one has since seen him publicly. Statements by his group, the IPOB and his lawyer, claim that Kanu is still in the custody of the Federal government. Police also reportedly arrested many pro-Biafra activists, twenty-two of them at least, we are told, in Port-Harcourt, following the street protests that erupted with Nnamdi Kanu’s arrest.
Three things are quite clear in the light of these developments: the federal government has, in arresting Nnamdi Kanu given martyr status, and validated and widened his claims to the leadership of the new Biafra movement. Kanu’s Radio Biafra is a blustery affront to professional broadcasting, or even professional propaganda, because it often mouths misinformation, and broadcasts serious libel against those perceived to be against the Biafra movement.
He broadcasts troubling hate speech in the effort to spread the idea of the kind of difference between Nigerians that makes Biafra ideal. His politics is bad and unrefined. But the Federal government cannot hold him, or prosecute him on those grounds, since there is no law yet on hate speech, otherwise, many prominent Nigerians should have been jailed. At best these individuals operate at the lunatic fringe, and need psychiatric counselling. But to arrest Kanu on account of his anti-Nigerian broadcasts, and pro-Biafran advocacy is a bad call.
It has given validity to his claim, widened his appeal in certain circles, and elevated him to the status of “Freedom Fighter.” It is the official equivalent of giving Eagle plumes to madness, by a bumbling government which seems destined to see the Biafra movement grow, both in proportion and in effect. And that is the second point of this development; that a fierce movement is growing right before our various eyes, and there are factors, both historical and immediate that are driving and widening this movement.
The first, more immediate stimulus for the current pro-Biafra sentiment is the perceived alienation of the East, particularly the Igbo from Buhari’s government.
It has seemed to be the final culmination of what the Igbo especially have been complaining about since the end of the Nigerian civil war in 1970. The Igbo, a rather vital population of the current nation feel themselves as living under a glass ceiling called Nigeria. It is a strange position to be given that between 1934 and 1960, the Igbo led the anti-colonial Nationalist movement that led to the decolonization of Nigeria.
The arrival of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe on the scene in 1935/37 ignited the phase of militant anti-colonial nationalism that finally, at the end of World War II, led to a re-interpretation of the Atlantic charter at the formation of the United Nations in 1945, and to decolonization, a fact to which the historian, Marika Sherwood in her important 1996 essay, “There is no New Deal for the Black Man in San Francisco” has given particular coverage. While the likes of Sarduana of Sokoto, Tafawa Balewa, and even Obafemi Awolowo who later emerged with the dubious titles of “Nationalist leaders” and “founding fathers” of Nigeria, were known collaborators with the British colonialists in various degrees against the goals of the nationalist movement, Zik and his associates mounted a fierce campaign for Nigerian freedom which everybody now enjoys, and paid heavily for it from the subversions they suffered in the hands of the colonialists. Azikiwe’s nationalist work was made possible by a wide network especially of a new generation of the Igbo, who spreading out of Igbo land in good number from the late 1890s, to work as artisans, traders, technicians and clerks in the new colonial economy, formed a new, vibrant metropolitan network of new Nigerians at the formation of the new nation by1914.
These urban Igbo, believing in a Nigerian imperative, in collaboration with some other Nigerians with whom they made contact in the new townships, created the vast nationalist network that fought colonialism. Many were jailed for it.
Some were killed for their defiance. Because the archives do not lie, however we manipulate them for a particular time, it will be clear to a future generation, the dimensions of the work of these men; as well as the origins of the profound skepticism about Nigeria that have led today to Igbo alienation from Nigeria.
In any case, by 1966, just six years into political independence, the Igbo, following the organized pogrom against them nation-wide, returned to the East and declared secession, and opted out of Nigeria. The civil war that followed was bitter. But the Biafrans lost, and returned to the fold of Nigeria in 1970.
Today, a lot of the Igbo, especially those who do not understand the context, despise the work of Azikiwe as a Nigerian nationalist. Why, they ask did he fight for “one Nigeria” instead of fighting, like his peers, for specific ethnic interest? It is a startling change in consciousness for a group that had always embodied the pan-Nigerian spirit. But increasingly, among a new generation, Biafra is looking like the struggle of their generation.
With the highest unemployment in Nigeria, and with the most skilled or trained unemployed of young Nigerians, the Igbo, do not feel particularly patriotic these days, especially since it feels like the official policy of the “patria” todiscriminate against them. They Igbo feel hounded in Nigeria, from Lagos t Kano, and now Akure, where the Deji of Akure has ordered their shops closed because an Igbo man chose an empty title called “Ezeigbo Akure.” They are the targets of all kinds of hate groups in Nigeria, and now, they see President Buhari embodying their historical grief and fears.
The president has not done much to dissuade this thinking either, and a key Northern intellectual, Dr. Junaid Muhammed has challenged the Igbo to secede if they can, with an undercurrent of threat. The pro-Biafra movement seems to be heeding his challenge, slowly building and organizing at the grassroots, recruiting from a young, highly educated and articulate reserve of young men and women – kids with specialized skills in physics, Chemistry, Engineering, and who are unemployed.
Match them with their peers with training in the Social sciences and the Humanities, with strategic organizational training, and you have a dangerous, and potent force, far different from any other time, who think of the possibility of Biafra as primarily a necessity of history, and a movement for freedom. Biafran Zionism is a dangerous political philosophy; crude and fascist.
But that is bound to change as a more educated, and articulate people join this movement. The new Biafra movement has so far been limited because it had in the past not attracted serious-minded Igbo and their minority associates, particularly professionally trained ones, but that trend is shifting rapidly. However, it is still possible for the Federal government to re-examine its methods. The arrest and seclusion of the likes of Nnamdi Kanu, or the use of armed agents of the state against protesters will only embolden this movement.
Read more
