Probably the greatest headache the nearly six-month Buhari administration is suffering from right now is the Biafra resurgence, bar, of course the country’s sharp economic downturn arising from the collapse of the price of oil, the country’s single biggest source of public revenue.
The administration, of course, suffers from other headaches, several of them very acute, notably Boko Haram insurgency, mostly in the Northeast and violent clashes between Fulani cattle rearers and farmers in most parts of the country. None of these headaches, however, seems of recent to have received as wide a media publicity as the Biafra resurgence. None certainly is as rooted in the popular imagination – grand delusion, is the more accurate description – of a huge chunk of a section of the country’s youth as the Biafra resurgence. Consequently, it has the greatest potential for defying any quick fix among all the problems with Nigeria.
Former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, obviously thinks otherwise. “This,” he told reporters at his Abeokuta Hilltop residence late last month, “is fake agitation. You people make a mountain out of a molehill.” Obasanjo was probably right to say that those spearheading the Biafra resurgence are fake. “The people who are doing this,” he said, “are the same people in the 419 business, they are the same people you will find in drugs all over the world. To them this is another source of making money.”
I do not know about 419 and drugs, but it speaks volumes about the motives of the spearheads of the Biafra resurgence that Nnamdi Kanu, the proprietor of the London- based pirate Radio Biafra and the immediate source of the new Biafra headache, would, in effect, dismiss his erstwhile boss, the leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Ralph Uwazuruike, as a carpetbagger. (Kanu, until he became estranged from Uwazuruike, was the London coordinator of MASSOB).
In perhaps the longest news feature on the issue to date, the Saturday Sun (November 14) quoted Kanu as accusing Uwazuruike of deceit and self-enrichment. “I can tell you today,” Kanu reportedly told the newspaper “even MASSOB members are revolting now because they know that their leadership is fraudulent and decaying.” One of such fraudulence, Kanu said, was that whereas Uwazuruike printed and sold Biafran passports to his people, he always travelled abroad with his Nigerian passport.
MASSOB was founded in 1999 and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) eight years later by Kanu as a breakaway faction. Since MASSOB, among other fraudulent activities Kanu spoke at some length about in the Sun interview, had always printed and sold Biafran passports, while Uwazuruike used Nigerian passport, one must wonder why it took Kanu all the intervening years to realise that his former boss was fake. Chances are, it wasn’t any moral principle, high or not.
So, I agree with Obasanjo and many like him who believe the leadership of the Biafra resurgence is fake. Even then I disagree with him that expressing concern about the resurgence is making a mountain out of a molehill. That was what many of us thought of Boko Haram in its early days – and look where it has landed us since 2009 when we thought we could quickly despatch its headache with military sledgehammer.
Uwazuruike and Kanu, like many in the leadership of Boko Haram who denounced science and modernism, but relished in their fruits, may be fake. But then we now live in a world where “verisimilitude matters more than veracity,” to quote The Economist in an article it published in its edition of December 18, 2010 on global public relations, entitled: “Rise of the image men.” To rephrase the magazine, we live today in a world where the appearance of truth matters more than the reality of truth itself.
Uwazuruike, and even more so Kanu, are clearly good students and disciples of Edward Barnes, a nephew of the famous 19th Century German psychologist, Sigmund Freud, and widely regarded as the father of modern public relations. Barnes, like his uncle, believed people responded best to images and emotional appeals, rather than to rational arguments. Hence Uwazuruike’s and Kanu’s appeals to the effective emotion, but grand delusion, of a Biafran El Dorado that never was and is unlikely to ever be even if Biafra is to become a reality.
Their Biafran dream is obviously based on the illusion that all the so-called people of Biafra, defined by Kanu as “the Idoma people, the Igbo people, the Efik, the Ibibio, the Anang, the Ijaw, the Itsekiri, the Urhobo and the Anioma people” are the same but completely different from other Nigerians. This is clearly a false assumption. Of course, we do differ in race, beliefs and tongue. But even within each of these three categories, there are also differences, at times great.
Take, for example, the assumption that all Igbo are the same. Nothing debunks it like a lengthy interview I had with the great late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1979 at his Nsukka residence when he was the presidential candidate of the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) in that year’s general election. Responding to a question I asked him on his role in Biafra, he said he did his best to keep his Igbo people in Nigeria in spite of their misgivings about their welcome in the country. His efforts, he said, were in the end thwarted essentially because some of the advisers of the late Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu, as Biafra’s military head of state, persuaded the man that he should be wary of Zik as an Onitsha man.
These advisers, he said, told Ojukwu that Biafra was holding its own militarily and so did not need any conference to sort out his difference peacefully with General Yakubu Gowon, the Nigerian head of state. They told Ojukwu, he said, that “he should be very very careful with me as an Onitsha man because they thought that I was using him as a means to give publicity to myself internationally and that time will come when people will look more to me than himself. Well, as a young man, human, he fell for the flattery.”
The moral of Zik’s inferred contention that Biafra was not inevitable should be obvious; there are no differences, individual or group that cannot be ironed out, if only we can, as individuals, get our egos and self-interests out of the way. After all, whatever our race, belief or tongue, we are all part of God’s humanity, with more shared needs and values than differences. Related to this is the moral that there is no end to our differences if we chose to focus on them.
People like Uwazuruike and Kanu who harp on our differences and try to divert our attention away from our common humanity may be fake. But their capacity to appeal to our emotions makes them particularly dangerous and thus makes it necessary to handle them with the greatest care.
In a world in which the Internet has made image more important than substance, it is difficult to solve problems by appealing to human rationality. However, in the long run there is simply no substitute for doing exactly that. The practical implication of this is that we must address the differences the likes of Uwazuruike and Kanu seek to exploit and at the same time respect due process in bringing them to book for their attempts to exploit those differences by criminal means.
And MASSOB and IPOB, whatever their leaders and supporters think, are simply illegal, if not criminal enterprises, just like Boko Haram. Unlike Boko Haram, they may not have resorted yet to arms, but the hate speeches they spew against other Nigerians are criminal, and recognised as such by our laws and by international laws as well. In any case, given Kanu’s appeals last September to the Igbo in diaspora to support his cause with guns and bullets at the Igbo World Congress in Los Angeles, USA, it is only a matter of time before at least IPOB resorts to arms.
Perhaps it was inadvertent, but in urging all the Igbo outside the Southeast to return home, MASSOB’s National Director of Information, Mr Uchenna Madu, gave the game away when he said “MASSOB has vowed to stop kidnapping, armed robbery and other criminal tendencies in Igbo land because there is no place in Nigeria like Igbo land (Saturday Vanguard, November 21).
No doubt, there is the need to handle MASSOB and IPOB firmly as illegal enterprises. However, because they have succeeded in tapping into the popular, some of them legitimate, disaffections of a large section of the country’s youth, there is an even greater need to scrupulously respect due process in dealing with the Biafran resurgence.
