Nigeria: State Failure and the Biafran Problem (1)

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Nigeria’s fascist statecraft is compounded by growing demands for the restoration of the defunct Biafra republic.

How Fascism in Nigeria has bred Biafra Separatism

by Chin Ce Africa Forum

Still operating the most fascist constitution in the whole of Africa, in its poor mimicry of the American Deep state, Nigeria’s failure of statecraft is compounded by growing demands for the restoration of the defunct Biafra republic.

But the problem with Biafra itself is legion.

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Problems before

The problem with socio engineering a sovereign nation of Biafra, just like the Nigerian problem, is the lack of studied intellectual platforms for the harnessing of ideas necessary to inspire wide following from the general component formations that would ensure stability and faith in new nationhood.

The historical necessity that gave rise to the brief thirty months of Biafra’s existence under a military government was not followed through with diligent and rigorous intellectual and consultative approach to nationhood prospects. Writ large, the maximum leader of the new nation, Emeka Ojukwu, squandered the opportunity with his militaristic disposition, ignoring reasonable suggestions by the brighter minds of the firmament to avoid a head on collision with ‘federal might.’

While Zik, the great Africanist of the time, had advised the necessity to follow through with diplomacy, Ojukwu had opted for braggaddacio. A nation that had yet to come to international acceptance began to announce through its spokesman that no force on earth could stop the coming of the new world power in Africa. His neo socialist utopian document called Ahiara Declaration failed in local impact by turning off the capitalist, land and property grabbing generals of Biafra, while the unimpressed Soviets simply looked away.

Such dauntless confidence, clearly outmatching the oligarchy of the murderous Gowon military regime, proved a fiasco for Biafra’s world recognition or assistance, and for the realisation of Ojukwu’s dream nation.

The question till date still stands about why a hated people yet to find some degree of sympathy to their genocidal experience could shock the world with their premature and arrogant declaration of messianic destiny in world dominion. The new nation had taken off on a wrong footing, imitating Jewish and Arabic posturing with their calamitous religions. But the black leaders forgot that this was Africa and that the racism from East and West that blighted the planet and assured its descension in darkness had, since pristine times, been pitched against Africans in spite of their adherence to  imported fanatical religions. In fact it has been the European, nay, world policy, that Africa remains poor, servile, and the under developed dump of the Earth long before Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Yet given Gowon’s northern educational backwardness, it is difficult to reason that men of Ojukwu’s intellectual attainment from within the conclave of the new Biafra then, could dream the delusion of replicating the Middle East scenario of Israeli American- and-British-backed Zionism versus morbid Palestinian irredentism in a war of religious supremacy and political dominance. Even if such were possible, a Christian-Muslim religious warfare could never have spelt the remotest positivity for any emergent nation of already volatile Africa.

It was clear that Biafra was sacrificed by the powers that be in order for Nigeria, by the elusive gradients of its atomistic composition, to remain perennially in internal straits, hardly proving a powerful force to reckon against European grand designs for continued exploitation of Africa’s resources. The world powers understood, as much as the British had purposed, that a bulbous, multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation was only going to end up so fragmented, so perpetually divided, as never to provide the rallying stream for the liberation of the continent from her complicated economic servitude to the West.

Thus if truly the warlord and his war-mongering following had remembered this basic condition of Africa with the rest of the world, perhaps they could have listened to the Africanist vision of the time in favour of diplomatic resolutions within the African Union, then, OAUThe admirable Biafran leader ought not have squared up to the fight,  which the blood-thirsty Northern Islamists virtually led by Murtala Mohammed, had sorely wished. Indeed the more pragmatic counsel of Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu to tackle the federalists via guerilla wars should have prevailed. But without arms, with mere cutlasses and sticks, Ojukwu’s hubris preferred a standing army with all the epaulettes of Commander on Chief!

And two million lives of Biafran men, women and children were wasted.
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Problems later

Fifty years later, the lessons have yet to be learned and applied by a predictable  young breed of haters of Nigeria’s exercise in fascism, ala MASSOB and IPOB. The mouthy propaganda, their appeal to anarchism and insanity, are emblematic of past and present fascist syndromes in Nigeria,  and the separatism that is bred in the minds and hearts of the constituent parts through lack of faith.

It is not in doubt to even the most casual onlooker that the Nigerian state, as presently constituted, will remain an albatross according to colonial intent and local military designs. Smaller nation states around it have shown contempt and disdain for the corrupt and inefficient giant,  dominated by a parasitic feudalist horde, and barely condoned by more than four hundred its many other ethnicities. So far in history,  only the Igbo of the eastern extraction have drawn the courage to ask -and also war – for their own nation, consistently challenging the rot and depredation which the British deliberately foisted upon a country which, by spurious geographical politics of northern domination, perrennially teeters to the verge, while beneficiaries of state capture in the armed forces, senate, ministries, and departments continue to chant ‘One Nigeria’ in mindlessness to their deterministic landmine of ultimate perdition.

Follow the second part of ‘How Fascism in Nigeria has bred Biafra Separatism’ here

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