NEW BIAFRANS AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY

Ike Okonta writes that in spite of the painful past, majority of the Igbo people are more interested in building their lives in a united Nigeria

“We cannot escape our history.”
-President Abraham Lincoln

I am from Asaba, an Igbo town in Delta State. I was only four years old when the Biafran war began. Although we were living in our hometown then, I was born in Funtua, present Katsina State. My father was a businessman in the town, running a chain of petrol-filling stations. It was the massacre of Igbos and other easterners in May and September 1966 that forced my father to gather his young family together and flee back to Asaba, abandoning his business and all his property. He had to begin life all over again.

My family had not recovered from the trauma of the massacre of Igbos in the north in 1966 when the civil war broke over our heads like a thunderstorm. My father had learnt his lesson from what had happened to us in the north. He knew what he had to do. He gathered his family once again and crossed the River Niger bridge into the Biafra heartland. Barely a few weeks after we fled Asaba, Federal troops of the Second Division under the command of Brigadier Murtala Muhammed entered the town, rounded up all the adult males they found and machine-gunned them to death. Had my father not fled Asaba before the Federal troops arrived, he too would have died a grisly death.
As the civil war raged and Federal troops took Biafran town after town, my father took his family and retreated together with retreating Biafran troops. We were refugees in Biafra. The only clothes we had were the clothes on our backs. We were homeless. We made do with staying in open school halls and church yards. When the rain fell it fell on us. There was no food. The Red Cross and Caritas tried to feed us with food they managed to get into Biafra in spite of the food blockade imposed by the Nigerian government on Biafra but it was never enough. We foraged for lizards for meat and ate cassava leaves. Millions of children died of Kwashiokor and other malnutrition-related diseases. It was terrible. It was an unending nightmare.

The war finally ended in January 1970 and my family returned to Asaba, broken and impoverished. Asaba itself was in ruins. Federal troops, not content with murdering an estimated one thousand adult males in cold blood in a single day, had ravished the women folk and looted property. Asaba in 1970 was a sad and broken town. My father had some money in the bank when the war broke out and he fled with us into Biafra. With the war over, he thought he could re-start his business with this money. When he went to the bank to cash it, he was told that the Federal Government had ordered that all the money former Biafrans had in the bank be forfeited and that they be given only twenty pounds no matter how much they had in their accounts previously. My father was shocked; he was broken. He gave up his hope of beginning again as a businessman. It took several years before he dusted up his school certificate and began all over as a teacher.

I write all these things because I believe firmly that the personal is the political. What happens to us during our life’s journey informs our political choices. It is however significant that my father did not consciously set out to bring I and my siblings up as embittered Nigerians after the end of the civil war. Until he died in 1995 he did not utter a single word in lament of what had happened to us in Biafra and criticizing the Nigeria which we had been forced to re-embrace following Biafra’s defeat in 1970. My siblings and I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s as fully-integrated Nigerians. We read about Biafra and what had happened to the Igbo, but we did so as a matter of intellectual exercise. When I began my working life as a journalist in 1989 I did so as an ardent Nigerian, praising and criticizing my country when the need arose.

The resurgent demand for the return of Biafra that emerged with the birth of the Movement For the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in 1999 led by Raph Uwazurike was not born because the conditions that birthed the first Biafra in 1967 had re-emerged. No. MASSOB was born because young Igbos in their twenties and thirties were frustrated that Nigeria was not living up to its promise and giving them jobs and security. They were frustrated that life in Nigeria had become nasty and short. The corrupt and visionless governments of General Babangida and General Abacha had drummed home this fact. These new Biafrans wanted to begin all over again by returning to an imagined country where life would be better. That imagined country was Biafra. The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) that split from MASSOB is powered by the same politics of frustration and bitterness against a failed Nigeria.

However, it is important to state that the overwhelming majority of the Igbo do not want to return to Biafra and indeed see IPOB as a nuisance. The Igbo still remember what Nigerians had done to them during the civil war with anger but are more interested in building their lives in a united Nigeria no matter how flawed and battered that Nigeria might be. When the governors of the South-Eastern States and Ohaneze Ndigbo gathered in Enugu two weeks ago and re-asserted that all Igbo were ardent Nigerians they said what was in the heart of most Igbo. It was President Muhammadu Buhari that made it appear that IPOB and Nnamdi Kanu had substantial support in the southeast when he proscribed what was really an insignificant secessionist organization and jailed its leader. Nnamdi Kanu may have a loud mouth but the majority of the Igbo do not take him seriously.

Nigeria is presently a failed state and that is why the Nnamdi Kanus and Sunday Igbohos have gained prominence. The situation is not helped by an incompetent President Buhari who sees every little molehill as a threatening mountain to be conquered. Hence his intemperate language directed against IPOB and the Igbo generally three weeks ago. Biafra is bitter history for the Igbo. But so far they have managed this bitter history with wisdom and pragmatism by re-embracing Nigeria. May that wisdom and pragmatism survive Buhari.