Biafra As Nightmare And Fantasy

By Okey Ndibe

I have been distressed beyond words by what has crystallized as an agitation for Biafra’s divorce from Nigeria. I am disturbed that this agitation has become another occasion for the Nigerian state to demonstrate its disdain for the rule of law and the rights of citizens. I’m appalled by the violence spawned by the actions of the agitators and the state’s reaction. The immediate impetus for the violent turn is the continued detention of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), indeed the rabble rouser-in-chief of the neo-Biafran cause.

The government ought to release Mr. Kanu immediately, both because that’s the wisdom of the court and it’s the quickest way to defuse tension.

But Mr. Kanu’s release will not, by itself, erase the frenzied propagation of Biafra, an idea that represents a nightmare to some, and a fantasy to others. Sooner or later—sooner, one hopes, than later—Nigeria has to confront the inescapable question of what it means to be called a Nigerian.

That question (or the reluctance to engage it in any serious and sustained way) is one reason Nigeria has remained an alien and alienating idea, and susceptible to frequent acts of rejection by its ostensible citizens. Periodically, those expressions of everyday individual resentment and disaffection build into mass resistance.

It’s important to put the agitation for Biafra in the broader context of Nigerians’ longstanding disillusionment with their country. For the avoidance of doubt, this is no new phenomenon. Nigeria’s two literary giants, Wole Soyinka and the late Chinua Achebe, have wrestled with the confounding matter of Nigeria. A few years ago, Nobel laureate Soyinka asserted at a series of talks he gave at Harvard University that there was no nation yet in the space called Nigeria. Years earlier, Achebe had said to me in an interview that Nigeria had not yet been founded.

Nothing in the two writers’ claims amounted to a repudiation of Nigeria as such. No, they were making what I’d call statements of fact. The fact that Nigeria had yet to achieve a sense of national identity did not imply that such a prospect was doomed. I’d say that the two writers were warning the rest of us about what needed to be done in order to translate the abstract, ill-formed idea called Nigeria into a concrete, organic, salutary and regenerative reality.