-
Biafra Agitation: Any Justification
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 7]
Page 2 of 7
-
-
-
The federation of Nigeria as it exists today has never really been one
homogenous country, for its widely differing peoples and tribes are yet
to find any basis for true unity. This unfortunate yet obvious fact
notwithstanding, the former colonial master had to keep the country one,
in order to effectively control his vital economic interest
concentrated in the more advanced and “politically unreliable†South.2
Despite all these, there have never been any serious efforts by either
the British themselves or the Nigerian government afterward to find a
basis under which there would be true unity, to bring these peoples
together. The colonial master would not allow that to happen for such a
move would be a great threat to their economic interest for which the
disunity was deliberately created. They would rather go on to introduce
more measures of ‘divide and rule’ policy which would always go further
to widen the gap between the different ethnic nationalities.3 What this
is saying is that contrary to our belief, Nigeria as a country does not
exist. What we rather see is a mere shadow whose real existence is in
the British economic world, in the manner of Plato’s world of forms.
Thus, it is only the peoples identified with this name that exist.
My conclusions may sound superfluous, or frivolous, or even sentimental
to some ears. To such people I would demand to see the following with
me. What should be the case in a country? Is it not supposed to be a
place where all citizens are equal in everything as the case may be? A
place where all citizens live safely in every part of the territory
without molestation by fellow citizens? A place where every citizen has
equal civil rights and can hold any political office in any place within
the territory? A place where citizens are recruited to government
institutions based on qualification and not on ethnic or religious
identity? Is it not supposed to be a place where all citizens are first
class citizens and see the whole territorial landmass as fatherland? The
questions can go on infinitely. But what has been the case in Nigeria
from the time of colonialism to date?
The case has been extremely
opposite in Nigeria. In the first place, there are as many territories
as there are ethnic groups in Nigeria. An Igbo who finds himself in
Hausa land is totally an unsafe stranger who can be attacked and killed
any moment by the citizens of the land. An Hausa who is in Yoruba land
is in turn a stranger, and the case continues on. All these are products
of the British ‘divide and rule’ policy which they carefully and
consistently created and maintained in their successive administrative
constitutions. They emphasized what divide the peoples than what unite
them, and rather than treating them as a people, they projected them as
Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Christians, Muslims, etc, among themselves and as
enemies. They went further and polarized the so-called country into
Hausa-Fulani dominated North and, Yoruba and Igbo dominated South, with
the North having the seventy five percent of the total landmass and the
purported sixty percent of the total population.4 Yet some of the
Hausa-Fulani dominated minorities in the North have more affinity with
the South than with the North. The South was further divided into Igbo
dominated East and Yoruba dominated West and the later extraction of the
Mid-West. This calculated unbalanced polarization did not go without
protests from the leaders of the two sides of the South, yet it was
imposed on them and meant to be the platform for political activities
from that moment on.
As one would expect, based on the fact that this
unbalanced division into regions was meant to be the platform for
political activities, the federal government automatically became
dominated by the North who had at least fifty percent of the total seats
in the Federal House of Representatives. This became the climax of
events that injected instability into the bloodstream of Nigeria’s
polity. How can a section of Nigeria dominate the rest put together and
always dictate to them what would be done? This single act destroyed
every aspect of Nigeria’s life as a political entity, starting from
politics, which is the life wire of a society, to civil service, economy
and so on. Worse still the dictating North was far behind the South
intellectually that it became a case of the blind leading the sighted.
What would one expect from this other than a constant revolt by the
sighted who would always see the leading blind dangerously taking him to
a pit? The situation is even far from being better in the military as
the ethnic quota system of recruitment introduced shortly before the
independence offered a compulsory sixty percent recruitment to the
North, fifteen to West and East each and ten to Mid-West in any
recruitment at all in the Army.5 The sum total outcome of this would be
nothing short of sacrificing merit, competence, excellence,
productivity, etc, on the alter of ethnic politics. Yet it is always
imposed on me to say that Nigeria is a country. But I know that in a
country every citizen is as important as the other and everything is
therefore done on the basis of the most competent whether or not they
all come from one section or even a family, provided they do it for the
general good.
At this juncture I would like us to think a bit. Do the
above events appear coincidental? Emphatically no! All the above
happenings during the foundation laying stone of the Nigeria’s permanent
political structures were done for certain ends, not for the people
called Nigerians, but for the people that masterminded them. They were
permanently laying the foundation for the inter-ethnic rivalry,
conflicts, suspicion and hatred that has always made it extremely
difficulty for Nigeria to be a real country, besides laying the
foundation for today’s Nigeria’s steady movement away from development
instead of the other way round. If one is in doubt I would suggest that
one casts one’s mind through the history and study more closely the
developments of events to date.
CHAPTER ONE -- [Total Page(s) 7]
Page 2 of 7
-
