Nigeria: State Failure and the Biafran Problem (2)

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State failure is a major syndrome of tribal conclaves of Africa immersed in Islamic barbarism and violent struggles for domination over some perceived ‘Westernised’ others.

How Fascism in Nigeria bred Biafra Separatism

(Part 2)
by Chin Ce Africa Forum

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WITH `One Nigeria` the sing-song among beneficiaries of its fascist religious structures, sustained by conniving component units of the British amalgamation, so did the members of its 8th legislative assembly in their most heinous action of 2017 reject the restructuring of their failed state.

Their reason was not far fetched.

It was their knowledge that enough oil still flowed from the Niger-Delta to sustain their hordes feeding fat on a bulbous, corrupted form of federalism.

As of fact, the politics of oil, the continued exploitation of the oil rich delta, and wanton desecration of the environment of oil producing regions, were powered and sustained by universal cynicism toward the Nigerian project from the moment of its contraption even well before 1914.

We could start with the British masters who bequeathed Nigeria’s northern oligarchical players their age-long politics of divide-and-conquer.

They had sought willing allies all through the colony in their bid to rule by proxy. Never forgiving the players from eastern and western regions who had dared to hound them with early independence, it was convenient to play out these educated and intractable leaders from the power game to ensure that dominant control remained firmly with malleable northern region, which feudal-class system had been advantageous to their Indirect rule in the heydays of the empire.

This cynical attitude towards the overall good of its colonies had provided the backdrop for the sickening pandemic of civil wars and ethnic violence that immediately pervaded African nations that gained independence from their erstwhile masters be they French, English, Portuguese or Belgian. The Western colonialist design on Africa was quite irreparable in the damage intended for a perpetually balkanised and disunited continent.

Unfortunately what the emerging new nations failed to do was break from the grasp of the monolithic empires and treat their manipulative past masters with deserved distrust. Rather, lured by the trappings of a ‘commonwealth‘, succeeding English (and French) speaking African governments retained the same exploitative structures that had seen the rape of their continent for several generations.

Why is this background necessary for our examination of Nigeria’s failures with the attendant problem of Biafran separatist agitation that refused to end since fifty years of rearing in the hearts and minds of citizens from the eastern region?

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Playing the religion card

Nigeria’s failure is one of a major syndrome of several tribal conclaves of Africa immersed in Islamic barbarism and violent struggles for domination over some perceived ‘Western’ others. Not inclusiveness but separatism and otherness have been the hallmarks of Africa’s bloody history since Islam and its contact with Western Christian civilisation. This perpetual disunity emerged from playing the religious card in every social, economic and political life of the new nations.

Historically, few West Africa’s leaders save Nkrumah of Ghana and Macaulay-Azikiwe of Nigeria, perhaps, had embodied the unity consciousness that was so important for the grooming Africa’s liberational potentiality against imperial slavery. For Nigeria’s leadership after the initial efforts of the liberationists, the rule of inordinate frauds, looters, tribalists, fanatics and barbarians became its own new world order.

The classic exemplars of this medieval rulership have ranged from the Gowon and Murtala tragedies through the murderous Buhari, Babangida, and Abacha gulags. Ironically these inglorious regimes had severally masqueraded as patriotic historical necessities.

The regime of Ibrahim Babangida will never be forgiven by Africans of the hemisphere for reversing a millennial declaration of cross-ethnic, cross-religious unification among Nigerian citizens in the June 12 1993 elections.

It was northern military impunity and sheer political arrogance that ensured the annulment of the only free and fair election that the country ever had in progressive reformation. That action brought into government a stark-illiterate product of the north in the person of Abacha, a ‘general’, who could not even write a simple condolence message in coherent English as officer and head of Nigeria’s army 1987 at the time of one of their founding fathers’ (Obafemi Awolowo) death.

Horrendous ethnic cleansing and elevation of northern mediocrity to top echelons began as soon as these entities climbed to power and position. It was their serial failures, given their polarising of the country along ethnicist religious fascism, that saw the rise in the agitation for self determination by restive youths of the Niger delta. The youths had reasoned, rightly or wrongly, that the degradation of their lands and annihilation of generations was clearly fait accompli with draco reptilian buccaneers heading the ship of state.

Even as democratic president in 2017, it was predictable that Buhari’s failure to govern Nigeria fairly and justly, rather preferring the pull of nepotism and authoritarian Islamic politics, would further worsen the heated polity.

Playing the ostrich with restructuring of the federation, it was Buhari and his paranoid breed of northern irredentists at DSS (Department of State Security) that created heroes out of hitherto unemployed youths from Imo and Abia states who, with the help of junk media, effectively challenged the festering decay with an even sicker brand of bigotry.

The promise of anarchy resultant with the neurosis that convulsed the hearts and minds of thousands of MASSOB and IPOB youths was the direct creation of Nigerian religious fascism. Here, among the Uwazurike-Kanu of Massob-IPOB, we must not forget to include their second cousins in a Rochas of Imo, an El-Rufai of Kaduna, and a lying information minister called Lai Mohammed in general Buhari’s political regime. Their revolting historical antecedents confirm that such dregs of humanity can never provide any intelligent, alternative good from their various caves of operation. Adding the hosts of senators and assemblymen, ministers and heads of administration, Nigerians seem doomed to walk the common plank they share in their lack of purpose and direction for their overall African humanity.

Till date every leadership product is still cut from the same tribalist religious conniving mindset that ensured the inured dreams of promising generations who could have so reshaped the fortunes of this country as to evolve a nation every citizen could be proud to play a useful part.

Mending a fraudulent structure

The political governance as conceived by the British and preserved by local cabals perennially empowering intellectual mediocrities will never work toward national cohesion. It begs to be mended. Only by subordinating the predatory design of the Nigerian constitution to an overarching freedom of the regional spirit in a collective motivation to restructure the edifice, allowing for constituent parts and their inalienable rights to determine their destinies, can we have the renaissance that Africa sorely requires of the Nigerian federation.

Follow the first part of ‘How Fascism in Nigeria bred Biafra Separatism’ here

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