Okey Ndibe Says Nigerians Failed to Learn Biafra's Bloody Lessons
In his two pieces, entitled Biafra, The Ostrich Mentality And Nigeria's Tragedy, and Nigeria And Biafra's Wasted Memory, Nigerian author, poet and political columnist Okey Ndibe, while analyzing what triggered the Biafra violence, discusses the effects it has had on Nigerians.
Ndibe reminds that, since its very inception by the British, Nigeria was meant to serve their interests and not her own. After all, even the British have multiple times stressed that Nigeria was not a nation but rather a "collection" of nations. When the British "removed their bodies," Nigerians – 400 odd ethnic collectivities forcibly brought together – failed to remake the space called Nigeria into a place of their own, a veritable, vital, and robust nation.
Thus, Nigerians started living in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, with little or no sense of community, as each group was eager to have its own share of the "national cake". It seemed that the Igbo were the ones committed most to the idea of "realizing" Nigeria, having settled in various parts of the country, building homes there, learning the local languages, assimilating with the locals, starting businesses or getting jobs as civil servants.
Biafra's secession, Ndibe says, was a "charter for justice, a demand by a besieged people to be left alone to arrange their lives in a separate space". Biafra marked the first time when a group has challenged the British organization of Nigeria – but the rest of the country sacrificed two million lives to return to the old order.
Continuing to compare Nigeria to a cake, Ndibe says Nigerians should all have been bakers making a grand cake of the country, working hard to ensure progress. Instead, "the defeat of Biafra" has demonstrated lack of unity and uncovered ugly sides of the people.
He calls Biafra a Nigerian "malaise" and the reason there has been little progress or development in the 54-year period since the devastating conflict ended. Moreover, he notes, Nigeria is reluctant to "confront and address" the "sore of the Biafran War," instead choosing to resort to meaningless slogans ("No victor, no vanquished," "Reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation") or be silent and forgetful, ignorant of the bloody lessons.
There would have been no violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, leaders would have detected Boko Haram's atrocities in the North sooner. Instead, we have to confront all the above problems, and cope with extra-judicial treatment of Nigerians by law enforcement agents, participate in elections with no guarantee that our votes will count, witness limitless squandering and fraud by the officials.
Few Nigerians, Ndibe maintains, could determine what it means to be called a citizen of Nigeria. He remembers the late Chinua Achebe who said the troubles Nigeria is facing now are "simply and squarely a failure of leadership," and disagrees with the renowned author, having realized that Nigerians have consistently got the leadership they deserve by failing, on their part, to demand for adequate leaders.
Ndibe says contemporary Nigeria, which comprises "at best, a collection of strange bedfellows whose elite is bound by a common—looting—interest," has no chances of surviving. Concluding, he echoes what has been said thousands of times by probably every other Nigerian: Unless all the groups within Nigeria elect to work, across ethnic, cultural and sectarian lines, to found a nation, it is going to be extraordinary hard (and costly) to maintain the lie of one destiny.
Source: Legit.ng
