The Evil we feared has occurred

IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu

IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu

By Emeka Ugwuonye
When Nnamdi Kanu took up the campaign for actualization of Biafra from his former boss, Raph Uwazurike, many reasonable and farsighted Igbo adults were worried. I was one of those who entertained fear.
The fear was that this highly vocal, but poorly informed, Igbo man was going to unleash forces and factors he will not be able to control and the Igbos will suffer badly for his miscalculations.
He was going to unleash the mythical force of Biafra as no other person had done since Ojukwu, and those forces would end up, again, consuming those it claimed to be protecting.
Ojukwu’s Biafran gambit led to the death of approximately three million Biafrans. You may now wonder what was the gain or purpose of that war if it killed 7% of the people it came to protect and held the Igbos back for 50 years.
But regret or lamentation is not the purpose of this piece. It should be more forward looking. However, we must not ignore the aphorism by the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
The ultimate purpose of history, as a field of human learning, is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
The aggressive push for Biafra by IPOB was clearly a huge failure to remember the past.
It was also a failure of situational awareness – the inability to fully appreciate your environment to be able to make optimal decisions.
The situation is that the Igbos are treated with suspicion and fear by the rest of Nigeria, and that suspicion and fear led to an effort to control and suppress the Igbos.
Are those fears and suspicion justified? Almost every Igbo man wants me to say that the suspicion and fear of the Igbos are totally unjustified.
But I would rather follow history and science than follow the wishes of my friends and brothers. Whichever way, there has been a situation of mistrust and suspicion. But despite that and despite the resultant suppression of the Igbos, the Igbos were making steady progress in Nigeria.
In 1970, at the end of the war, there was a clear policy on the part of the Government of Nigeria (a conspiracy of all the other tribes) to permanently dislodge the Igbos and make it impossible for them to rise again as a factor in Nigeria. But that did not stop the Igbos.
They progressed in commerce. They returned back to all parts of Nigeria. In Lagos, they dominated every major trading ground. In the North, they dominated entire sectors of the economy – 90% of motor spare parts trade in Katisna, Sokoto, Kano, etc. In Abuja, they own 50% of the hotels and restaurants. In Lagos, they own over 30%.
Igbos progressed faster than anyone would have expected, and they did so with little patronage from government. Also, they were doing well in national politics and we got to the point where an Igbo presidency came within reach. The Igbos showed a level or resilience that dumbfounded everyone.
But some Igbos would never forget the humiliation of the war and marginalization of the Igbos that continued after the war. For those, there could not be justice without achieving the failed secession. Hence the quest for the actualization of Biafra.
The actualization of Biafra became for them a self-justifying mission. In other words, many no longer cared to ask: “What will we really gain if we break away from Nigeria”. Any serious attempt to answer that question will show that actualization of Biafra is not worth the effort.
We have grossly exaggerated the benefit of actualizing Biafra. The main reason for wanting to actualize Biafra is just that we once tried and failed, so we must succeed in that somehow. But that is not a logical reasoning.
The real problem the Igbos have faced is not that they do not have a country of their own. Rather, the problem is that justice and equity are lacking in their country. The irony is that even if Biafra is created today, there is no guarantee of justice and equity in the Biafran State. It could be worse.
Actualization of Biafra is therefore an obsession. Otherwise, if we sit down and ask: What do you mean by actualization of Biafra? What is Biafra? Biafra is not a God-made promised land.
Biafra was the creation of a military commander who could not find better ways to settle a largely personality conflict between him and his colleagues in the Nigerian military government.
Series of miscalculations prevented Ojukwu and Gowon from reaching a workable understanding in 1967. That failure led to war. Anybody giving you any other explanation of the reason for the war is just playing with your mind. So, clearly Biafra, as something that resulted from a failure of understanding is not something created by God.
And if not created by God, why the obsession over it? Ojukwu was 33 years old and Gowon was 32 when they failed to find an alternative to war. The failure of the two “boys” to find an amicable settlement of their differences led to Biafra.
Load more